Being a Happy Hermit

I never heard of ADHD until I was 30, when my dad was diagnosed with the disorder. Immediately, the whole rest of the family recognized ourselves in the same diagnosis, and some of us (myself included) went out and got diagnosed, too. Still, although I am now 53, I have a very superficial understanding of ADHD and how it has affected my life. Back when I was first diagnosed, science was only just beginning to see ADHD beyond hyperactive boy children, so the diagnosis didn't really provide me, a spacey (that is, "primarily inattentive type") grown woman, with a lot of guidance. Then again, I could never tolerate the stimulant medication that is typically prescribed for ADHD at anything like a useful dose. So basically, I have been untreated and uncounselled for ADHD all my life.  This past week, I got intensely frustrated with one of the ways this brain-kink manifests in my life, which is something I call "stuckness" or "an excess of inertia." I just ca

  "I really care about how humans smell smells in the environment and how insects smell smells in the environment, and how they smell humans."  -- Dr. Leslie Vosshall, a molecular neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, as heard on the Nature  podcast . I got to do one of my favorite things in the world over the past few weeks: dress up in heavy chest waders and slog through sticky, stinky marsh muck, craning to see the next plot marker over head-high thorny vines and occasional poison ivy, during a humid Mid-Atlantic heat wave, carrying a heavy backpack, a clipboard and pencil, for the biennial emergent vegetation survey. Ah, what bliss! My ecologist friend thanked me profusely and repeatedly, and I just kept on assuring her that I love  this!  But she says -- and maybe this won't surprise anyone but me -- she can't get anyone else to go out more than once on this project. To me it is almost as hard to grasp that most people would pay money NOT to have to lie down