SOME THOUGHTS

3:00 AM, recently diagnosed with ADHD, I couldn’t sleep …

Aiche & Emm stories are mostly private and not for publishing yet. Hazel and I are 1-yr. old, a new relationship unlike any either of us has had, and given our chapter of life — not something to proceed with lightly, but at the same time, we have no time to waste …

Add to this recipe that she met me, and like me, didn’t know anything about ADHD or that I would have a life-altering shock/thrill and grapple with understanding ADHD, reflecting on a life that now has new meaning for nearly every fork in the road and nearly every significant decision. And, the thrill of a new energy/focus and clarity that comes from treatment and a medication that is having a miraculous impact on my life, my writing, my work and my relationships with everyone. She’s still with me and learning, as I am, that the person is intact, the intellect, humour, personality and skill-sets are there … they never left, but at the same time, ‘everything is different’.

I wrote to her recently (July 24, 2002 — in the middle of the night). I was overnighting at her place, but restful sleep was eluding me.

Aiche, Good morning. I couldn’t sleep, so I wrote this:

I read a quote from Saul Bellow many years ago; said, “Never edit anything you write at 3:00 AM,” and I have many memories of writing in the middle of the night. Not on purpose, but on those nights when I’ve awakened feeling well-rested, and my busy head gets busy. Most often, those thoughts flit in and out of my mind and are lost if I don’t capture them at the moment. While that might be witnessing my non-conscious mind at work, it is inspiring. Until recently, I questioned myself about those busy-head moments, but now I have an appreciation for the disentanglement required to cope with this, and I’ve gained a sense of how to harness the buzzing idea swirl that is the inside of my head. It’s not a time of day thing, but at 3:00 AM, there is silence, lack of interruption, lack of urgency or pressure. It is neither night nor morning — each is not too far away, but it’s like being halfway across a bridge over a river, and realizing the bridge is imaginary; there are only thoughts, perchance dreams, to keep me aloft …

I know this 3:00 AM thing from times past — I wrote my best-ever poem in the middle of the night, and I edited only one word to switch out the f-word for something softer, but otherwise, it remains one of my favourite pieces after 12? years since I wrote it.

The converse of this notion, obviously, is “Go back to sleep.” But that is a difficult instruction to follow in the middle of the night, awake in the dark, summer’s breeze still warm and sleeping atop the bed without any covers seems too warm …

Waking alone at 3:00 AM, is easy — you can pace the floor, take your dog for a walk if you have one, or walk under the moonlight to the sounds of the night, something I’ve also done plenty of over many years, but it is seasonal — no fun mid-winter.

All this fell out of my head this morning, and now it is 3:41 AM, time to write what I really got up to do.

You see, it went like this:

I woke up at 1:15 to pee. Back to bed, not restless, but I took a while to drift off. Then it was 2:45, pee’d again, back to bed. I thought about turning on the TV or going to the living room to turn that one on — not wanting to wake you, and not feeling a need to be up and moving around, but my head was not a quiet place. I was mixing three things in my mind. The first, death and dying — and how unprepared I am to leave this life not-done, not ready to go, not prepared. Yes, I have a will, but I have too much that is in some state of ‘mess’ that nobody understands except me, and it’s too much to expect my kids or you to sort out if I didn’t wake up in the morning. The second is the need to capture these thoughts while fresh — because a scrawled note on a yellow sticky won’t suffice to trigger me to write it down later. Third, I wanted to write something about the juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity.

My vantage point, with plenty of runway still ahead of me, has seven decades of rear-view memories with no simple task lately, coming to grips with, to grasp that I’ve spent all that time in an ‘altered state’ without knowing it, now having an explanation for the bursts of anger, the bursts of brilliance, and all the things I did to avoid shining best, from living up to my potential.

Diversions happen, even in the quiet, in the dark, in the middle of the night — checking emails, chasing some rabbit holes of googling distractions. At the kitchen counter, typing away, the only audible is my breathing and the clicking of keys on my laptop, but in my head, it’s a lot of noise … and the challenge I now see and the past few weeks have started to teach me, is not to ignore those thought-streams (some are a trickle, some feel like the Niagara River), and there are no note pads big enough to capture them all.

Back to simplicity and complexity.

My mission must be to live, to write, to talk, to persuade, to lead, to lobby, to create solutions to insoluble problems, to show people/clients and organizations that I know a way through their proverbial jungle, that I can help them do more and do it with less cost and angst than they might imagine — and create value far in excess of what it costs …

The complexity is twofold; the first, things in my life that need to be cleaned up/resolved in terms of money, accounting, tax filings, and ‘too much stuff’ cluttering my life. I’ve purged before, but a new push is needed.

The other part of the complexity piece is hard to ‘splain — because it’s complex. As I lay in your bed this morning, this middle-of-the-night, I am at peace with myself, with you, with the world, but at the same time, I have so much to do, so many wrong things to put right, so many ideas to explore and problems of the world to solve — and I need to do work on my novel too — that I know I am shortchanging you in terms of time, attention, and sharing. I’m working on that. ADHD Mark works on that every night and early in the morning, and medicated Mark does the better-focused work all day long, but I wonder if it is enough, that it is not too late, and that I can make all these experiences in my life make more sense for me, and maybe make life better for others in the process.

Now, back to you, sorry to have slipped out at 3:00 AM, but now it’s 4:12 … and it will soon be 4:30, time to get up soon. Oh, I’m already up. Well, I’ll be on my way to the office shortly, and I’ll call you later.

I’ll end with this — I’m happy to be where I am in my life, and where I am with you. We’ve had a year of scratching the surface, and there is no telling what we’ll be able to do in our remaining 40 or 50 or 60 years, but for now, I’m happy sitting on a bar stool at your kitchen counter writing this. I am more relaxed than ever. Not without problems to solve and hills to climb, I know you’ve got my back. If, in some small way, I can be as strong and supportive of you as you have been of me, then I will have achieved far more than I have in all previous relationships.

Now, time to sign off, turn off the computer and be ready to ‘get up’ at 4:30.

G’night,

Mark … 4:23 AM