Brain so bonkers, Willy Wonkers

I didn’t believe I had ADHD ‘till I got on the meds. 

36 mg of Concerta, take after meals. 

The bottle of pills sat unopened on my desk for two weeks. 

This was my Pandora’s box. Opening it meant acknowledging something. And I refused to do that, to let whatever was inside that box spill out. 

Pills. 

When I did take them, it was for my mum. She was sitting cross-legged on my bed, with a bowl of fruit. Apples. Peeled and sliced. With a little fork. For me. 

That’s the thing with ADHD. It hurts the people around you. It isn’t self-contained. What the media portrays as a fun, distracted, TikTok-length, attention span isn’t that at all. It’s the toddler who just can’t sleep. The little girl who spends half of kindergarten in time-outs. The fourth-grader who wins an essay competition for high-schoolers. The 12-year-old who gets so sad she throws up. The freshman who gets straight A’s without studying. And now, the teenager who lashes out at her only friend—her mum. And Mum has a list, too. She paid for the piano lessons, the tennis lessons, the baking lessons, the painting lessons, the paintbrushes, the paint. She saw the paint princess, the baker’s knife, the suicidal anguish. 

Those slights, that quicksilver fluidity.  

How nothing ever holds. 

She wants her daughter to write that philosophy essay for school. Her daughter also wants to write that philosophy essay for school. You’ll do such a good job, you just have to do it, the mother says. I know, the daughter agrees. 

I know.  

But she doesn’t write the essay. Can’t. 

Two hours later, two women sit in the room, two pairs of reddened eyes. The mother is hugging the daughter. Both are wondering where they failed. How everything goes so wrong all the time. How there’s never a dull moment. How there’s never a bright moment. 

How the apple is now browning. 

Take after meals, the prescription said. 

I ate the apple. 

I took the Concerta. 

One minute passed. I felt normal.

Two minutes. I needed to go drink water—crying makes you thirsty.

Three minutes—I peeled my new FKA Twigs stickers off the sheet and stuck them to my laptop. Epicurus and FKA Twigs would make a good couple, I think. 

Five minutes—I didn’t think it was going to work. I should just start my essay anyway. 

seven hours later—complete essay, complete math homework, clean room.

Um. 

People want to know what having ADHD is really like. “What isn’t it like?” is my witty response, because I don’t really have an answer, because this is life, how it has been, how it will be in whatever time there is to come. When I’m on Concerta, I have linear, chronological thoughts. That’s what the ‘normal’ brain should do, I guess. Not operate on jump ropes. But that feels like I’m somebody else, like that one Wizards of Waverly Place episode where Alex got Harper’s brain. I don’t like Concerta. It gets stuff done, but it makes the brain rigid. Less creative. 

That’s the ADHD paradox: forced fluidity. You can go anywhere, think of anything, be anything; you just don’t get to decide what happens when. You’re nebulous, narcissistic, narcotic. You’re the nicest girl he’s ever met. But he doesn’t quite get you, and you don’t know how to tell him that you don’t quite get yourself, because there’s nothing to get. 

Are you sure you aren’t bipolar, he says. 

Yes. 

Then I don’t know what to do with you. 

And I don’t know either. I don’t have autonomy. Even on my best days, I don’t have autonomy. I will never get to pick what my brain decides to do. 

It’s like roulette. 

And roulette can be exciting, too. 

I can sit alone for hours on end with a funny electricity churning out psychedelic poetry. 

I have a riveting graveyard of eight-day hobbies I can unleash at any point. 

Roulette is exciting, funny, thrilling, darling, even. 

Until it isn’t. 

Until the assignments and dishes and unanswered calls and unwished birthdays start piling up. 

I wish I had never taken Concerta because it showed me what ‘normal’ was. A mirror, telling me what life should be like. Smooth and cool and calm.

Pandora’s box was never hers to open.

Living in India, it was a monolith of a privilege to get diagnosed. Very few do. In school, I was ‘too smart’ to have ADHD. In friend groups, there was the ‘hahaha even I probably have ADHD lol, I can never get off Instagram.” In my dad’s car, “Doctors diagnose you with all kinds of shit so they make more money.”

It’s always interesting to me, to see what society chooses to accept. Percy Jackson can have ADHD. John Mulaney can have ADHD. Emma Watson ‘doesn’t seem like’ she has ADHD. Geetanjali Kapre ‘doesn’t seem like’ she has ADHD. 

The question of gender is inevitable when you talk about neurological diversity. Most psychological studies are based on monkeys and men. Very little psychiatric research about women exists. Autism and ADHD are brutally underdiagnosed in women because we don’t experience what society expects to see. Not all of us are loud boisterous jocks who fail algebra and don’t care that they failed algebra. We don’t think it’s funny, being late to a cousin’s wedding. 

We don’t think it’s funny, making your mother cry. 

But people don’t see that. 

Society wants to control disorder. Put palmistry on paper. Snap and tinker and plate and play ‘till everyone is the same. It’s quite funny if you think about it. It always happens like this with fluidity. Society wants to be progressive, wants people to be themselves, but only some people, and only when it’s chic and cool. Harry Styles can wear a dress. Fluidity is en vogue. But Montero is ‘too gay and sexual.’ Spot the difference. Booyah. 

Race, gender, money. 

All because of one failing neurotransmitter. 

The ADHD diagnosis is life-changing, but it doesn’t really change your life, not in the beginning, anyway. Having a lustrous label for liability changes the way people perceive and respond to your life. It changes how your family plans their future. It changes how Mum has to defend your intelligence at parent-teacher conferences. Eventually, it changes how you see your future, your past, everything in between. It changes your thoughts on your career: you can’t work a nine-to-five desk job now, can you? It changes your thoughts on love: you can’t keep a husband now, can you? 

You aren’t the wild horse, you’re the rider.

The question of controlling water. 

And you don’t have the reins. 

How is that fluidity? 

After finally accepting my ADHD diagnosis, I sunk into a long philosophical journey of narcissistic self-evaluation. I worshipped that methylphenidate mirror. 

Not smart. 

I had to take a month off school. My days roughly looked like this: wake up, Diet Coke, Jim Morrison fan fiction, bowl of cherries, more fan fiction, perhaps some chicken nuggets, then a movie, end chapter. 

Critics (my psychiatrist) will tell you that this depressive episode ended when I started taking depression medication, but intellectuals (me) can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to embrace my brain: when my little brother came and told me I looked like Willy Wonka. 

Um. 

Not flattered. 

I think I told my brother something along the lines of “and you look like Augustus Gloop.” 

Not my best work. 

But then I thought about it for a bit. Willy Wonka, I mean. And not him being reclusive, or psychologically abusing children to find an ‘heir’—but his weird haircut, terminal entrenchment in that mauve trench coat, and, despite all, his OK-ness being himself.  

Having ADHD means having to be okay with tidal waves. Okay with uncertainty. Okay with the fact that I probably would never get my driver’s licence because I’m highly distractible and should never be behind the wheel. Okay with the fact that friendships and relationships will never be easy. 

Okay with fluidity. 

The question of controlling water.

Never a bright moment. Never a dull one. 

That quicksilver fluidity. 

Let it pass, let it go, let it flow. 

You’re still the little girl from the time-out chair. The winner of the essay competition, the honour-roll student. The little girl Mum fights so hard to protect. 

It’s a neurotransmitter babel up there, but the world is still your oyster.

And even flimsy fluid floundering floating oysters have pearls. 

(don’t fact-check the science on that)