Ever felt that you were different? You know… other. I have for all of my life. How to describe this feeling. Imagine there’s the whole world, and everyone on it, and everything that’s happening on it, but you are not part of it. You are on the outside looking in. Of course you are there physically, but it doesn’t feel like that. There is a weird disconnect and you cant work out why? You want to be in it. You yearn to be in the centre of it, but somehow you feel outside of it all. Like a square peg in a round hole. Like a fish out of water. Like a freshly cooked rasher of bacon in a hotel breakfast buffet. You just don’t quite fit in. Despite friends, colleagues, lovers and wives telling you how loved you are, you never truly accept it. You only ever feel tolerated. Not loved, not respected, certainly not admired… Just tolerated.
This feeling of being other, for me, was never a big feeling. Never an overwhelming feeling that crushed me. It was worse when I was young. As a kid I was a very much in my own head. It’s like that song, ‘Me and My Shadow’, except my constant companion was (and still is) my imagination, and boy what an imagination I had! I was a scientist, a poet and a philosopher. All in my mind and all before I reached the age of 12. I used to play alone a lot, but I didn’t mind. The house where I grew up in from the age of 2 up until the age of around 14 was the last house on the street and had a very large side garden. I would spend hours playing with my football. Happily destroying my mum and dad’s prized rose bushes. I mean they spaced them out to look like goal posts. They were asking for it… surely? And when I played I wasn’t in my garden, oh no. Those bushes weren’t just any old goal posts, they were goal posts at Wembley Stadium, and I had just scored THE GOAL OF THE CENTURY!!! Funnily enough, I never wanted play football with anyone else. I hated sports at school. It was all so competitive. Loud and aggressive, and well… I just got lost there. But in the garden I was the centre of my own fantasy world, and that was good enough for me. World of Mike. Not so much a daydreamer. More like an extreme daydreamer.
Also central to World Of Mike was my bedroom, the scene of many bouts of extreme daydreaming. I loved my toys but wasn’t so attached to the idea of putting them away. I mean, what was the point? They would all come out again right? Lego, that was my favourite. With Lego, I first learned about building science and architecture at the age of ten. Then, of course, there was Meccano where I learned engineering, and my action man, where I learnt, not war, I already hated that, but travel and adventure. Anyway, messy. That’s the point. I was very, very messy. I don’t remember that ever bothering me either. I knew where everything was.
Now I have to say at this point that I am definitly not qualified to dish out an ADHD diagnosis, but looking back on it both my parents had neurodivergent traits. My mum seamed to know intuitively how to handle these traits in me that neither of us knew I had. She never told me off, never made me tidy up after myself. She just used to wait until it got so bad. And when I say so bad, I mean the floor space completely covered with toys apart from a small pathway from the door to my bed. When it got to this point she would just put everything away herself, and miraculously the room was tidy. Then I would get them out again, and play with them, not see the point of putting them away, and so the cycle would continue. Years later, when I was in therapy, after the collapse of my first marriage, in a fit of Freudian rage I blamed her for not making me tidy, and allowing me to be messy. I blamed her for not being hard on me and correcting my bad behaviour. If I’d been tidy and together perhaps my marriage wouldn’t have failed, perhaps I’d be a success. Perhaps I’d be rich and famous, and not knee deep in credit card debt. Why had she not given me the drive to succeed like all of those pushy parents of successful kids? “I’m a failure, a fuck up, and it’s all your fault mum!” I’m ashamed to admit that I actually felt that way for a time. I realise now that it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. I was only really giving myself a hard time. She did exactly the right thing. If she’d bullied me like that, I’d still be very very untidy and very untogether, but really fucked up with it. It’s just the way I am.
It was around this time that I was given a Chess set. I can’t remember if I asked for it, or if it was just a present. I also acquired a book called ‘Begin Chess’. “Good place to start,” I thought. I devoured the book and read it from cover to cover in a matter of days. I say read the whole book. I mean I read the interesting bits. Strategy tactics, gameplay. You know, all of the juicy theory stuff. I neglected to bother with the boring stuff about practice and exercises and doing things over and over again. What was the point? I got it. I GOT chess. So it was time to take someone on, in what would be the first match in a glittering chess playing career. I joined the school chess club. The first club that I shouldn’t have been a member of because they let me in (to miss quote Groucho Marx). At the club I faced my first opponent. I knew what I had to do. In the first few moves I swiftly open up my left flank, and advanced down the middle of the board. “Sucker!” I thought, “he’s obviously doesn’t know the Nimsowitsch-Larson attack”. “Checkmate” he exclaimed. “Then again maybe he does.” I thought. Humiliated, I packed up my board and never played chess again. The gratification of success didn’t come instantly, so I just gave up on it. A theme of my life was emerging. Not that I cared. I had already moved on, and was devouring another book called, “How To Develop A Super Power Memory” by Magician Harry Lorraine. This book had a huge impact on me at the time but, up until writing this, I’d completely forgotten about it. Ironic really. Suffice to say that with ADHD a super power memory is something that I’ve never quite developed, but I digress.
This feeling of ‘being other’ persisted into my teens. Although I felt like a bit of a loner I sill managed to form a tight circle of friends. You know, a few good mates. We would walk for hours to remote country pubs, in North Wales where I was growing up at the time. These were specially picked out of the way places. Not picked for their style or popularity, but because they tolerated underage drinking. We’d have a few pints, get merry and stagger home for hours across the now moonlit countryside talking absolute shit. We put the world to rights good and proper. It was like some bizarre half drunken teenage version of Last of the summer wine. We were a close group, but even then, I still felt… well just tolerated. They were the brains, I was just… well the clown. But hey I was in a clique. I’ll take tolerated all day long. At least I was in.
It was around this time that I discovered theatre, and I fell in love with it. I remember a dance student that I met at an audition for the performing arts degree at Leicester Polytechnic. Although way overqualified for this degree, it was the one that I ended up doing. She was assigned to look after us at audition day. She introduced herself as a second year student majoring in dance, but I just saw a complete goddess. My proverbial jaw hit the earth’s core. I was going to do a combined physics and music degree at University, but I hadn’t met any physics or music students quite like her. She was the reason I decided to go there. I guess at this point you are thinking that I’m now telling the story about how I met the love of my life, got married, had kids and settled down but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. I never even got to tell her how I felt. To my shame I confess that I got distracted by other goddesses and forgot all about her.
So I had found theatre, and those in it. Was this my tribe? my people? As I made my way through this mad roller coaster ride of up and downs, triumphs and disappointments that I like to call the story of my life. As I made my way in the exciting world of theatre, and later street theatre and the creative arts. As I drank, and laughed, and performed my way around the world, meeting amazing and interesting people, I came to the conclusion that, in many ways, these really were my people. But the feeling of being different never quite went away. Not an elephant in the room, more like a mouse in the corner. A nagging doubt. I KNEW I was different, but I just couldn’t put my finger on how?
All of this left a massive question in my mind, a mind that just loves to overthink, a mind that loves to chew things over til it hurts. If I’m not like everyone else then who, or indeed what the hell am I? This question plagued me more when I was young. In those days, one of my favourite day dreams was that one day I would ‘find myself’, that I would ‘discover who I really am.’ I would take myself off to some remote place, preferably up a mountain. Like the sages and hermits of old I would spent months alone, in quite contemplation. I would eat little, sleep even less, and not emerge from my mountain retreat until, like Jesus Christ in the wilderness, I would, fanfare!… drum roll!, finally find out just who the fuck I really am! To my mind this was an epic adventure, and the revelation would be an earth shattering moment. In reality, perhaps the biggest revelation of my life happened in quite an ordinary way, in my sister’s front room, near Mold in North Wales, staring at my laptop Fifteen simple words were staring back at me. “The patient has symptoms highly consistent with ADHD in adults and further investigation is warranted”. On reading these fifteen simple words, just three simple words leapt from my brain with razor sharp clarity. This was the sort of clarity that my addled often confused and overthinking brain was just not used to. Three simple words, “SHIT! THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!”. Well four words if you count the unnecessary swear word, but you get the point. I had just done the ADHDuk/World Health Organisation online ADHD screening. And, although just hours prior to this, my mind had told myself how ‘cool’, ‘trendy’ and ‘fun’ it would be to have ADHD when faced with the stark truth an overwhelming sense of shock and disbelief ensued. Up until this point my life had been dominated with chaos and change. The constant battle to re invent myself after some great loss. It really did feel like this was something greater. Since then I’ve fought to get myself on the diagnostic pathway, here in Wales, and have come to the conclusion that it is more than highly likely that I have ADHD, but that’s another story.