Day 14: Singled Out, School Pictures, and ADD
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today’s entry will be mostly about me in 1996. It’s a bit introspective and personal and not as “fun” as the others. If that doesn’t appeal to you, I’ll be sharing more universally fun 1996 things tomorrow, I promise.
To celebrate Valentine's, I’m watching a couple of episodes of MTV’s Singled Out, a dating show where 50 prospective mates are dwindled down based on attributes like height, body hair, career goals, among others. It’s hosted by Chris Hardwick, someone I didn’t know even existed until a few years ago. I assumed he was too young now to have been relevant then but apparently not, as I now see he was on several network programs throughout the late 90’s. I must not have been paying attention. Jenny McCarthy works the crowd just to drive home how extremely MTV and how painfully 1996 this show is. I never watched this show at the time. I guess I didn’t care who college-aged kids dated when I was 11 or 12. I was concerned with baseball, Weird Al, and bologna sandwiches.
This is me in 5th grade, post my bologna sandwich craze. The aforementioned Blizzard of ‘96 really did a number on my exercise routines, evidently. The good news is that in this picture I am on stage for having won some award, probably not missing a day or being on honor roll. I was pretty fun. The other cool thing I had going for me is that I was wearing an Orlando Magic t-shirt my dad got for me from a work trip to Orlando earlier that year. I wore that shirt at least twice a week. The rest of my clothes were hand-me downs from my cousin or from donation bins, Goodwill, and other second hand stores. That was a brand new shirt and I was pretty dang proud of it.
You know it’s me here when the rest of the class is aware a picture is being taken and I’m out of my seat, interested as fuck in learning similes for some reason. Interested as fuck is one of my favorites. Interested like fuck is also acceptable, or so I learned on the day this picture was taken. In order to pay attention in school (more on that in a bit), I had to trick myself into staying alert. I remember in this class there was another student who would prop himself up in his seat like this and he seemed to be very active in class. I wondered if this method would help me pay more attention. I tried it for a few days but I kept getting reprimanded by the teacher for not sitting down on my butt. That embarrassed me so I stopped. This was during my “prop up in the seat to try and learn better” phase. I was evidently captivated by the material enough here to ignorantly have the back of my giant head featured in the school yearbook.
Here’s my best pal Josh (known as Bushleaguehero on the Polykill Discord). He looked a lot like a Ninja Turtle when he was younger and he still kind of does because he’s ripped, but the cheeks are less fluffy now. It may be worth noting that the kid to the left murdered a family after we graduated and is in prison for life.
Here is just my regular school photo from 5th grade in the first half of 1996. Man, that kid had so many raging social anxieties, he was destined to grow up and hide behind a microphone to conduct all of his social interactions. It’s weird looking back and seeing this goofy kid given what I have learned over the last week. I used to see a kid with a strained home-life that made every excuse to not excel even more in school. Yes, a normal kid. But I used to resent that at around this time, perhaps slightly before, this kid completely lost interest in school, found focusing on what people were saying directly to him very difficult to follow, and did not have the attentiveness to read or participate in anything school related. He was dropped from a higher level reading class to a lower one based on his performance from the year prior indicating an issue had manifested before this point. On the first day of that reading class, the other students noticed and asked, “Wow, why is Travis here with us?”
Travis didn’t know.
His mom and dad thought he was just lazy and punished him for it. He did well on tests, he just didn’t get the participatory grades or pass the quizzes because he didn’t pay attention. He was bored. Intelligent but bored. If you asked that kid if he wanted to do well in school, he really did and not just because his mom demanded it. His friends were good at school too and he wanted to be like them and impress his peers and teachers. He was quiet, mannerly, and respectful. He was intelligent enough to coast by, wasn’t an outlier in behavior, and wasn’t restless enough to be on any matrix for a diagnosis. He just doodled constantly or wrote out all the rosters of professional sports teams he could remember instead of focusing on what was happening around him. He stared out the window and day dreamed, he fixated on pictures in the text book instead of taking in what was being taught. He couldn’t follow plots in movies and would be confused by the endings, and not understand any character motivations because at the end of a 90 minute movie his attention had been racing to every other topic in view for the previous 80 minutes. He was one of millions of kids like this and probably several others on this page in his yearbook. This slowly worsened for 25 years and was only overcome by cramming study materials into his head on his own time in order to perform well on tests or work deliverables. He was stimulated only by the pressures of avoiding failure or embarrassment in order to commit to learning. It worked but it made for an extremely anxious guy void of confidence, always assuming he would be wrong or out of place because he just knew he missed something.
I didn’t know what that kid in that picture was going through until last week when I was diagnosed with ADD, an affliction extremely acceptable and common but one that was missed entirely for me despite how obvious it appears in retrospect. This was not a self-diagnosis nor one of those things where people say they have ADD or ADHD because they believe it excuses them for being shallow or rude, or because they think it’s funny or makes them unique. I never wanted to have this and never would have guessed that I did. Now it just makes too much sense.
“It’s so hard to resist
And it’s all coming back to me
I can barely recall
But it’s all coming back to me now”
Work had become agonizingly difficult over the last couple of years even though I recognized the tasks to be simple, like reading, summarizing other writings, or writing in general. Focusing on tasks as ordinary as reading slowly became next to impossible for me to commit myself to. Not just difficult to do or against my will because “I don’t wanna”, no. Even when I wanted to, I couldn’t. Committing to reading words on a page was like forcing repellent magnets together. My mind bounced off almost immediately and if I was able to make my way through to the end of a few paragraphs, I retained very little. This wasn’t new but it was worse. I had previously gotten by on procrastinating until the fear of failure stimulated me enough to come through. Even this was not enough anymore. I assumed it was because I didn’t have any interest in the material. The issue was not that I was choosing not to focus on boring work tasks no matter how pressing or important they were or how extreme the work-related consequences for not doing those tasks were - the issue was that I was incapable of focusing. Having that unlocked for me and redirected from my knee jerk response to blame myself and internalize it was quite the awakening.
Thankfully, this has given me a reason to forgive younger me for struggling with school when he did and making things harder than they should have been. I thought the kid in that picture was lazy or distracted. He really was trying his best, he didn’t miss a day of school for 4 years, and he wanted to try even harder, it just wasn’t possible for him.
