Piece by Piece: getting fuzzy

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Brian Higgins

Staff reporter Madison Saviano explores hot topics and issues that students face in her weekly column Piece by Piece.

Madison Saviano, Staff Reporter

I’ve been so tired lately and it never feels like I’ve been asleep long enough. Sleep, where your mind can find relative quiet. 

In the waking hours it feels like there’s always some tick on my mind, something to hone in and fixate on. Everything feels a bit out of reach, though, and everytime I try to reel something in, I feel like I obliterate it with my concentrated efforts. 

Everything is out of focus, no matter how hard I try to scrub the lens. I’ve tried yoga, painting, reading, and more recently, I’ve tried meditation (again). Of course, whenever I try to focus on something like my breathing, I suddenly forget how to do it altogether. 

This ties back to the overarching theme I’ve found: whenever I try to focus on any given thing, it eludes me. It’s like my mind is filled with a bunch of radio static and whenever I try to tune in to one channel, there’s some kind of electrical short.  

Talking to my mom, I learned there is probably something more to it. In psychology we learned that even if one parent has ADHD, their child is likely to have more than a 50 percent chance. Well, there you go I guess. My mom has ADHD and while I’ve always known that, I just never thought there was anything further to it. When you think of the disorder, you always imagine, as my mom put it, “the kid in class who can’t sit still.” 

The stigma behind that is indicative of the type that boys usually suffer from, hence why they are diagnosed 3x more often. Their display of it is more observable since it stems from hyperactivity most of the time, while girls on the other hand have the more internally focused ‘inattentive type’. 

I don’t know, though. I’m going to see my mom’s old therapist about all of this soon, about how I’ve been feeling lately, but still, I don’t know. Mental health is very stigmatized, you know, and nobody wants something abnormal about them in this field. That might sound offensive, but we all know it’s true. I can’t imagine anybody wants to be written a lifetime prescription of something like Adderall

Anyways, I don’t know where it goes from here, but I’m glad that I know more than I did before, and I’m glad I have tangible options, so thank you very much for reading.