Embrace the Barrier

On Friday, in not so many words, the Nurse Practitioner gave me an ADHD diagnosis, mild distractibility with no hyperactivity (ADD). Over the course of the weekend I felt great - it was freeing and I was able to spend plenty of time with friends, playing music and watching Liverpool FC beat Bournemouth 4-nil. At one point I commented to Deanna that I feel like I have been able to accept the fact that my brain works differently.

Well, the weekend wore off and Monday came around and I had to go back to work. As if reality set in and I stood behind the bar all day with people coming in, trying to force conversation with some people and relishing in the moments of easy conversation - it occurred to me that it will take a while for me to deeply and fully accept my ADD brain.

I have so much to learn about this neurological condition. I am grateful for the small ways in which the people on Instagram share and explain how their ADHD affects them. It has been able to add nuance and real relatable examples that the medical community lacks. That said, I am learning to discern the difference between ADD traits and personality traits - which Instagram does not excel at.

Today I have been feeling sad. Sad for how many years I have wanted to fit in and be normal. Sad that I have spent so many years concerned about my memory and not being able to pick up on details that other people appear to have no issues with - only to learn that poor working memory is a symptom. I am sad about all the unnecessary suffering I have experienced being undiagnosed. My mind has been flooded with embarrassing memories of actions I took that, with this new information, could make so much more sense. I could share examples of the memories but frankly they are incredibly cringy.

I have had difficulties accepting myself. I think that was because I hardly understood myself. Now that I understand this piece of who I am there is no need to continue trying to change myself. There is nothing to change, it is all to be embraced.

I go to Church. It's untraditional and cool, yet grounded in some beautiful tradition and free. This past Sunday, my friend Rachael Barham gave a talk on the classic passage in Ephesians about how nothing can separate us from the Love of God. The theme for this season is Being Rooted in Love Together, as people, as a community. Rachael is great at including embodiment practices into Church, guiding the congregation into stillness and reading passages in a way that the texts almost feel like water washing over you. She shared a poem from the Sufi mystic Rumi:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

The obvious question that arises from this poem is what do we do with the barriers? I guess some people found out that there was a piece missing from this poem. The full poems reads:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it, and embrace them.

I am sitting here thinking how to share my exclamation over this. Ironically, inappropriately, and honestly “God dammit and Jesus Christ” come to mind.

The only way forward is love. To learn to love the way my brain is hardwired, to learn to love the way I think and work and wrestle with this world. I want to be able to embrace what I feel is a barrier to the point that it only brings me closer to love.

(How's that for a blogpost narrative arc?)

And again, the obvious question is how? How do I embrace the barriers?
One of the recent narratives I have heard is that perhaps once upon a time, people with ADD would have made great hunters. They would have scanned their environment looking for threats and food and would be able to leap into action with a moments notice. This is a fun way to think about it, and maybe makes it easier to embrace the barrier.