Attention Deficit... Oh Snowflake

The title is an adaptation of a quote from a friend who says, "I have ADOS.  Attention Deficit Oh Shiny."  Sort of a similar thought today.

As the first winter storm of this season set in, every time I tried to think of something to write, I was distracted by snowflakes.  A friend said I should write about snowflakes and how different each one is from the rest.  I didn't want to do it, but then as I was doing research trying to figure out how best to help explain why having ADHD is not the end of the world to one of the kids on my caseload, I realized snowflakes were exactly what I needed to write about.

Let's think of each thought of someone with ADHD as a snowflake and recognize that no example is going to be perfect.  It is unique and beautiful, but it's hard to focus on.  The closer you get to it, the more likely you are to melt it and it disappears.  As individual thoughts, they can be jumbled and fly every which way.  But then through intervention, both in teaching organizational skills and in medication, those thoughts start to come together and instead of disappearing with the slightest touch, they start to accumulate.  They grow and build on each other, and as trials come, they are pressed together.  This could make them dangerous, but it could also turn them into beautiful ice formations or super fast and fun sledding hills.

I'm mixing the two together a bit more than is probably actually helpful, but I guess my point is, every struggle we go through has the potential to pack us tightly together within ourselves and make us dangerous.  We can become abusive, self-destructive, unhealthy.  But then there are the people who overcome adversity, whose tightly packed selves have formed into beautiful snow sculptures.  But it took a lot of individual flakes of thought, pressed so tightly together it was painful, to become those sculptures.  This is true of anyone, not just someone with ADHD.

For those who do have this disorder, though, they are fighting through a blizzard where the rest of us may be fighting through a flurry.  For us, our thoughts may be difficult to focus on, but there is still the opportunity to see our thoughts as individual flakes of snow.  For the person with ADHD, it is so much harder to see individual thoughts through the white out conditions.  If properly treated, this actually makes them more likely to be successful.  They're the ones who can win the chess game before I've moved my first pawn.

I suppose I am preaching unnecessarily about the thought patterns of those with ADHD, but it has always been an important issue to me, more so now that I am trying to help kids I care about figure out the first steps of their journey.  And more than that, I am saddened that I will not be walking that path with them any longer.  This has become one of those areas that means something to me because I saw a kid's face light up today as I opened a window into a world he never thought possible.  A world where he can focus on his homework.  A world where he can gather his thoughts and turn them into something wonderful.  I just hope someday I get to see what he does with that amazing brain of his.