He kicked the trash basket and added to the mess on the floor. So what else is new? Why should this job be any different? Great ideas, no follow-through. If it doesn't come out right, I'll look stupid, probably get fired. All the ideas were detailed on the various scraps of paper that dotted the floor of his room.īut all Jim could do was pace. Efficiency would go up and morale would definitely improve. The office needed a new computer system, and the men and women out front needed more authority so they could make decisions on the spot so everybody's time wouldn't be wasted in unnecessary meetings. He'd known for months what he wanted to say. His boss had also added a remark about how he hoped Jim would have enough "follow-through" to actually get something done this time. His boss had said fine, come up with a written proposal and we'll see how it looks. He'd been thinking about it for weeks, ever since he told his boss that he had a plan that would increase productivity, as well as morale, in the office. There were seventeen items, the final one circled several times in black ink and marked with exclamation points: "Reorganization proposal due Tues., 3/19!!!" This was Mon., 3/18. Jim looked up at the TO DO list that was tacked to the corkboard above his desk. Books, papers, odd socks, old letters, a few half-smoked packages of Marlboros, and other loose ends lay scattered about, much like the bits and pieces of cognition that were strewn about in his mind. The room looked as if the contents of a bag lady's shopping cart had been dumped into it. He looked around the room and took in the disorder. Now approaching the halfway point of life, Jim was getting desperate. This was where he often found himself at night: alone, pacing, trying to get things together. It was eleven o'clock at night and Jim Finnegan was up pacing in his study. As their stories unfold, a definition of ADD emerges. In the cases that follow, and in the many case illustrations that appear in this book, one can witness the struggles individuals faced to break through inaccurate labels and unfair judgments.
The best way to understand what ADD is-and what it is not-is to see how it affects the lives of people who have it. Many of the symptoms of ADD are so common to us all that for the term ADD to have specific meaning, rather than just be a scientific-sounding label for the complex lives we lead, we need to define the syndrome carefully. You may even recognize some of the symptoms in your own behavior. People you used to think of as disorganized or manic or hyper or creative but unpredictable, people who you know could do more if they could just "get it together," people who have bounced around in school or in their professional lives, people who have made it to the top but who still feel driven or disorganized, these may be people who in fact have attention deficit disorder. Once you catch on to what this syndrome is all about, you'll see it everywhere.
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