Chemicals askew...

One expects certain behaviors from professional peers. Mistakenly apparently, but I thought I had reasonable expectations. I don't know what I was thinking. I make no secret of having ADD. It's a fact. It is part and parcel of who I am. It goes a long way to informing others as to why I think in the slightly askew manner I do. Which often times catches me off guard that other do not indeed think the way I do. Mostly I notice this when some one else and I say the same thing the same way at the same time followed immediately by a look of stunned horror slamming across their countenance only to be peeled away as they attempt to find humor in this.

Or so it seems to me. I may be interpreting the event a bit askew.

In regard to my ADD and a less than ideally structured work environment and how I struggle to manage all the paperwork details, minutia about which what goes where when and for whom... none of which was ever adequately explained (anyone ever heard of an Employee Handbook? I hear they're all the rage ever since these guys came up with the concept of desktop publishing)So, me and ADD, anyhow, I had a coworker say to me "I know just how you feel."

Uh huh... reeeeaally?

Those words are forbidden in my profession. See, I do NOT emphatically DO not KNOW how you, or anyone else for that matter, feel about anything... eh-nee-thing. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

I know how I might feel in similar circumstances, but it is all conjecture and supposition. It is the difference between sympathy and empathy. A person may be going through a difficult time. A difficulty of their own design and thus are merely getting their come-uppance. Do I sympathize? Nope. However, they are having a difficulty. I have had difficulties. I can empathize with how that sucks, is demoralizing... etc etc etc [insert counselor blather here].

My coworker does not have ADD. She does not know what it is like for me in my head when the day's demands have dragged the last vestiges of a coherent train of thought out into the parking lot and kicked the living daylights out of it and handed me back as spinning, foggy, dazed pre-frontal cortex that wants nothing more than to become blissfully unconscious for 15 to 20 minutes. My brain just wants to reboot.

It would be like me saying I know just what my mother, sister, wife and daughter went/go through with their period merely because I've been around them my entire life. Not friggin likely. All I know is I want some of them to take The Pill so they are not homicidal and I want another to stay away from it for the exact same reason.

Point... I know I had one. If this daffy bint is going to say to another professional something patently wrong wrong wrongitty WRONG... what is she saying to her clients? I shudder to think.

Language... it's all about language. I listen to the words people utter about their loved ones... about themselves... about hateful things done to or by them... about humanity in its chaotic manifestations... I listen to words said by a mother to a daughter that cuts deeper than anything she has done to herself... memories of fathers years missing... of wondering why what was done was done... words uttered in attempts to make sense of acts insensible.

I do not know what it is to feel these things they feel. But I know what it is to hurt. I can listen and witness. I have seen it make enough of a difference to know it is not wasted.

Does it play a role in my own struggle against depression? I'm sure to some degree. At times, it also helps. It provides perspective. Helps me remember it is just chemicals in my head... chemicals that are slightly askew. Only in this case, not in a good way. And there's the difficulty; finding the edge where one bleeds into the other and stepping back... I find I have wandered far beyond the edge and into a landscape I had left behind years ago. Familiar and desolate... comfortable and discomfiting...

Chemicals askew... "Oh bother," said Pooh as he worked to hide Piglet's mangled corpse.