Since getting my diagnosis of ADHD last fall, things have been crazy.
It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough on my plate with all the other pesky issues like Crohn’s, IBS, arthritis in my knees and tendinitis in my hands. I had to learn that for my entire life, I’ve actually been neurodivergent, and that has explained so damned much about who I am and the way I’ve moved through the world.
One of the things that is common after an ADHD or autism (they have some overlap) diagnosis in adults is a process called unmasking. This means that, as you become more aware of the ways in which your differently-wired brain actually works, a lot of the behaviors you engaged in so that you could fit in begin to fall away. This happens because you realize that these behaviors have hidden who you really are not only from everyone else, but also from yourself. It’s not a straightforward process, and it plays out individually for each person. But it’s real and it can be quite unsettling until you realize what’s happening.
For me, this unmasking has been difficult and easy.
Difficult because right now, it’s coinciding with a host of physical health issues that are compelling me to file for disability. The fact is that, with the combination of all these issues, there is nowhere I could find living-wage employment and keep the job. (Show me the employer who can live with my need for bathroom breaks up to twenty times a day, who needs time away from the job every couple hours to sit still in a quiet room and come down from the overstimulation, and who can no longer do physically demanding work due to arthritis, tendinitis and age. Hello?) The fact is that I can no longer work full-time, or even half-reliably enough to keep a job. So I have to concede that I’m in some kind of retirement mode right now. That is difficult financially and also emotionally.
Easy, though, because once I understood that I was going through an unmasking period, I could begin to understand that so much of what I did before was in pursuit of a sense of belonging that I had never known while growing up. Not belonging during one’s formative years can have devastating results on the rest of one’s life, especially when it comes to relationships and how to be in community with other people.
I have always had a strong sense of detachment from people. I had a highly mobile childhood, few friends until college, and no strong sense of belonging in any one community. So when someone doesn’t put in the effort of sustaining a friendship (by not returning my calls or messages, by not being present), I tend to drop that person, perhaps more quickly than most people might.
It’s the same with groups and organizations. If I cannot make myself fit into a group, I leave, and I have left often. It’s easier than staying and trying to be a square peg jammed into a round hole. The truth is that I have seldom found my people in a deeply-rooted, familial way; and I too have made the mistake of looking to groups to provide the family closeness and cohesion I lacked when I was young.
Right now, I am examining my connections to Jewish community, and even in some small measure to Judaism itself. I still pray at night before I go to sleep, and I still light candles for Shabbat every week, but I don’t really do much beyond that. I am in a different place, and a different body, than I was just four or five years ago, and some of that means it’s hard to even leave the house and go to services on a Saturday morning anymore. Some of that leaves me wondering if anything I’ve done Jewishly has been authentic, or just an authentic attempt at belonging somewhere.
I mean, of course, a great deal of what I’ve done has been real in the moment. If not, I couldn’t have written all that music. But at the same time I have really struggled to find my sense of place among the Jewish people, and among Jewish artists. I could never seem to crack some imperceptible inner circle of belonging, due to my lack of long term history, or finances, or geography, or even just my personality,
What people have seen on the outside has seldom matched what I knew on the inside. And for reasons I can’t yet articulate, that has meant so much to me and has deeply colored how I’ve moved through the world.
When my hands told me it was time to stop hustling, I felt some moments of sadness, followed by huge waves of relief.
I miss playing guitar. It’s a wonderful instrument and has given me ways of expressing myself that drums can’t match. But hustling for gigs and submitting to the scrutiny of more deeply-rooted Jews has been, frankly, a fucking slog. And I am mostly glad I don’t have to do it anymore.
I feel that, on the downward slope of my arc — I’m not going to die tomorrow, but I’ll be quite surprised to make to ninety — I am well-situated to explore what’s available to me locally. I want to see what lights a fire under my butt and inspires me to take action. I haven't found it yet, not really; but I am hopeful that, after this time of lateral drift, something will become clear.
In the meantime, I am working on collecting all my music and some writing and photos into a kind of songbook/‘zine. It will not look like any Jewish songbook you’ve ever seen, and that’s the most exciting part. That’s my only big project for now, one I can do a little bit at a time and, with some help from friends, I hope it will be ready by late summer.
For today I’m in the lateral drift, sorting out what’s real and worth keeping and honoring the way I’m wired as much as I can.
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