14 Comments

I have way too many thoughts about this (of this?) for a comment. I was thinking the other day about what it means to "fix" someone. As if it weren't society that was broken. Behind all the ableist self-critiques we can twice-exceptionally muster, I feel an unbrokenness that needs expression. And for that to be expressed we REALLY have to find a way to talk about ADHD so that it's not a "disorder." It needs to be something that can lead to community, the way autism does. I feel very heartened to be part of your community, our community, whatever nouns or adjectives (or verbs!) we decide to rally around. Thank you.

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"I was a nomad, enough of the time, but now there are fields to be plowed and crops to be picked and I am lying down in the dirt and curling into a ball, waiting for the crows to take me before someone makes me submit another timesheet." Thank you for this beautiful description. This is me. Me going back to working fulltime after having a baby and buying a house and suddenly having a "household" to manage along with my fulltime boring/stressful job. TAKE ME CROWS

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This is amazing and insightful. I love how you write but this piece really touched me in a different way. I spent my entire professional career in special education and I always harbored the secret that we are ALL on a continuum of strengths and weaknesses. Cultural expectations and opportunities determine who succeeds and who fails. We are all messy and complicated combinations. Society causes so much heartbreak. I have felt like an imposter dozens of times. Your honesty and bravery enriches everyone who knows or reads you. Thank you.

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Beautiful and inspiring. Nothing has made me feel more free than learning that the various 'bad' and 'lazy' labels that I'd given myself were in fact ways for me to ignore that there was more going on in my brain than I'd thought. Powerful to read your words about this and your own diagnoses. Thank you for your words!

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Beautiful. I find myself thinking about how for all the things I do well, I just wouldn't be able to write a piece like this. I would love to, it's just not in my wheelhouse. I think I'd make a pretty good farmer, and a pretty bad nomad. So many gifts and challenges. I think that one of your many gifts is a profound ability to see and understand both of these in people, and in yourself as well

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Thanks for gathering all the thread to make something so beautiful and true for us. It makes me understand people I love, including you, better. It makes me understand my own journey of telling and retelling my story, meeting and remeeting myself, feel less lonely.

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I was introduced to Sarah Wheeler by Courtney Martin, through their exchange in Courtney's marvelous Newsletter. I posted a comment there but I want to add here my appreciation of Sarah's inspired "Call Me By My Name." I agree with Chris Martin about the implication of "fixing" someone with such problems and that ADHD is not a "disorder" in any meaningful sense. This is a systemic failure of our deeply unjust capitalist, patriarchal, punitive society. I've often thanked Courtney for her consistently incisive commentaries, so now, with my subscription to Sarah's Momspreading, I'm truly grateful as an old (83) grandfather for your amazing fresh insights, expressed with pure eloquence.

Dennis Dalton (DD), whose claim to fame is having been Courtney's teacher at Barnard College (where there was an epidemic of ADHD regularly diagnosed during my 40 years tenure).

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Being best-at and worst-at while being clear-eyed enough to see both is quite the human dilemma. Thank you for persevering.

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I see my story very much in yours. Thank you for sharing and making me feel a little less alone.

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Wow! Thanks to Courtney Martin, I have found you, Sarah Wheeler. I wish I had read this article before finishing my teaching career, but it will help me be a better grandparent, for sure. The comments say it all, and I agree with a whole heart.

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I just read your HuffPost article on discovering you had ADHD, and that led me here to your blog. I was diagnosed by my therapist at 38, but honestly we didn’t delve too much into it as I was seeing her more for my marital problems and anxiety. I had to stop therapy about two years in, because I just couldn’t keep up with paying the co-pay. I’ve been looking on self help articles to help me cope with my anxiety and ADHD along with some other mental health issues. Can you recommend a book I could read about treating ADHD? I’m not big on taking pills if it can be avoided.

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This is so brilliant, and so thoughtful. It makes me reflect on the ways I experience life, and my brain, both similarly to and differently from you.

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