Greetings friends! If you came to this editorial note this week hoping to read the latest update from our dear friend, OT, in Nicaragua, you’ll most likely have to wait until the next issue, given our longtime friend and colleague, Kathy Ellison, has so kindly offered to write this week’s wonderful ed note! Kathy not only gives us an excerpt from her 2010 book, “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention,” she also gives us a snapshot of her life. We are incredibly grateful to Kathy for her years of commitment to The Beat Within workshops in the Marin County Juvenile Hall. For those of you who do not know her, we hope this ed note will give you a taste of goodness from this amazing friend and colleague. Allow us to pass the keyboard over to Kathy…
A slightly adapted excerpt from “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention” 2010 Hyperion Voice
WHOOSH.
Oh, no!
WHOOSH.
Ding!
WHOOSH.
Dammit!
WHOOSH. WHOOSH.
It’s a cold October morning, midway through the first month of this special year I’m devoting to paying attention to attention. I’m alone in a small, dark room, at a Buddhist retreat center high in the Colorado Rockies. A rubber cap studded with electrodes is stretched over my scalp to track my brain waves as I take a “response inhibition” test to gauge my ability to pay sustained attention. My task is to mouse-click whenever I see a line a few pixels shorter than the line I saw when the test began.
WHOOSH is the sound the computer makes when I get it wrong, an airy strikeout pitch. My reward for getting it right is a melodic Ding!
But I’m not hearing many Dings! Mostly I’m hearing WHOOSH.
This test was first developed during World War II to assess the vigilance of radar operators. It is so utterly beyond me that it feels as if an evil puppeteer has taken over my hands, while all the blood in my body is whooshing toward my head.
WHOOSH.
Ding!
WHOOSH.
Someone is screwing up here, but it can’t be me. I’m too smart for that. Or so I’ve been told, whenever I’ve screwed up in the past.
Of course, this is just a simple neurological test. I’m not getting graded. The trick is not to get ruffled. Easy!
WHOOSH.
Damn!
“I’m done!”
Before I’ve consciously decided to quit, I’ve ripped off my cap and scurried back to the nice, light control room. I was supposed to stay in the dark room with the cap on for half an hour. I see by the clock it has been less than five minutes.
Waiting for me in the control room is Cliff Saron, a tall, bearded neuroscientist based at the University of California at Davis. It was his idea that I take this stupid test. Saron is leading a major research project on the impact of meditation on attention, and I’ve traveled to meet him at this windy, remote refuge, ostensibly to write a magazine story but really to find out whether meditation can help me collect my scattered wits.
After I confessed this to Saron, he suggested his attention test would show if I were exaggerating my problem.
Well…nope.
“How’d she do, Tony?” he’s asking Anthony Zanesco, his lab tech.
Tony is nice. Tony is my ally. Tony wonders if I need contact lenses, and do I have them in today? Tony observes that lots of people get frustrated with this particular test.
“She just walked out of there?” Saron asks, grinning.
I actually liked Cliff Saron when I first met him, a few months ago. While interviewing him for another story, I ended up telling him about my troubles with attention. I don’t usually complain about my personal problems with professional sources, but at the time I was rattled.
“You just have to be calm,” he’d told me then.
And somehow in that moment, it registered in a way it hadn’t before, what a big change that would be, just being calm. I wanted to know more…”
In the passage above, which I wrote in 2008, I tried to describe the inner experience of having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, including the constant sense of failure, of being out of control when you’re most trying to keep your wits about you, the erosion of your confidence in yourself, the enormous difficulty in “just being calm,” and the frequent skepticism of others who suspect you’re making it all up.
I wrote “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention,” shortly after both I and my then-nine-year-old son were diagnosed, and I decided to take a full year to better understand this mysterious condition, which affects more than ten million US adults and an equal number of children. It’s no coincidence that I first signed up to work as a facilitator for the Beat Within around the same time.
Anyone who has this diagnosis or loves someone who does knows how it can shape, and unfortunately sometimes also destroy your life. The most common symptoms are distractedness, forgetfulness, and impulsivity, which helps explain why so many people with ADHD wind up in car accidents, divorce proceedings, unemployment lines – and juvenile hall. Researchers consistently find that more than half of juvenile offenders – and likely many more — meet the criteria for ADHD. Meaning that every Monday night from 7-8 p.m., I’m with my peeps.
I’ve been extremely lucky, mostly. It’s true I’ve been in some car accidents (and once even crashed my bike into a parked car) and done other bone-headed things like – oh, getting sued for libel, for eleven million, for a careless mistake when I was just starting out reporting.
Another peak moment in my career of distraction came years later, when I was working as a foreign correspondent in Nicaragua, and fell in a manhole, breaking my leg, while chasing after Violeta Chamorro, the newly elected president, who at the time was walking with crutches.
Throughout my life, I’ve made many senseless mistakes and gotten into way too many ridiculous arguments, including with people I love. On the other hand, I’ve always had lots of support from my family, a first-class education, and the wherewithal, when I needed it, to track down an exceptionally gifted psychiatrist.
I’ve also been able to find work I’m passionate about, as well as an unnaturally understanding husband I’ve managed to stay married to for twenty-eight years. Together we’ve raised two wonderful kids who despite their risky adolescent behavior have yet to wind up behind bars.
Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention was published in 2010, and of the ten books I’ve authored and co-authored, it’s the one that makes me most proud, since I continue to get letters from families telling me it has helped them get through a crazy time, making them feel at least a little less alone.
Every Monday evening I’m reminded how much luck had to do with all this. My neurological makeup, under other circumstances, might easily have led me to a life of addiction and maybe even crime, had I been born elsewhere, with a different kind of family.
I sadly can’t transfer those advantages to the kids in the hall, but I take hope in the fact that I can give them the secret weapon I discovered as a child, and which has helped me all my life: namely, writing.
Throughout my life, my writing in journals, letters, and ultimately, published stories has brought me wisdom, solace, friends, an income, and a decent amount of self-respect.
On a long shelf in my office is a line of journals I’ve filled, through the years, at times when writing was often my only friend. Writing so often helps make big problems smaller, providing at least a small sense of control as you break down wild emotions into words. At its best, it also draws you out of isolation, connecting you with others through your honesty and similar experience.
Thanks to The Beat Within, each week, the kids in the Marin County Juvenile Hall, and in other halls throughout California and beyond, open their hearts and fill pages with their anger, longing, fear, and love. It’s one of the biggest privileges of my admittedly very privileged life that I get to share that magic with them.