Nothing connects one idea to another like a good metaphor.
In fact, metaphor – what Douglas Hofstadter has called analogical thinking – is the cornerstone of learning. When I realize that this is like that, my experiential knowledge of something I learned earlier boosts my understanding of something I’ve experienced more recently.
And so it is with ADD. Those who don’t have it don’t experience it; but we can boost their understanding of it by connecting it to something they have experienced.
You've probably heard this one. It’s one of the most widely-used metaphors for describing the ADD experience:
“Having ADD is like watching TV while someone else has the remote and keeps randomly changing channels..”
~ADHD coach Brett Thornhill
This is a terrific metaphor, because it connects your experience to theirs; who hasn’t sat next to a channel surfer and found it maddening? It also conveys to the non-ADD person the frustration that ADD adults often feel – an unfulfilled desire to take control, and the helplessness and irritation of not having it. When you’re sitting next to the channel surfer and your eyes and ears are at their mercy, don’t you want to just yank the damn remote right out of their hands? That’s how it feels to be an ADD adult suffering from racing thoughts.
Harvard psychiatrist Edward Hallowell has made a career of explaining ADD to laypeople using metaphor and analogy. He has appeared on countless television shows, spreading a gospel of redemption to those who have ADD and understanding to those who don’t. Here’s one of his best:
“ADHD is like having a Ferrari engine for a brain with bicycle brakes,” he often says, capturing it exactly. Then he adds, “Strengthen the brakes and you have a champion.”
Hallowell does indeed champion ADD adults. He told Carmine Gallo of Forbes magazine that “people with ADHD are the inventors and the innovators, the movers and the doers, the dreamers who built America.”
With his Ferrari analogy, he does more than convey understanding; he removes stigma. He calls the Ferrari comparison “morally neutral,” side-stepping the word “disorder” - ADHD, he says, is more trait than disability. Making it flourish as a trait is a matter of strengthening the brakes.
“We need to use more analogies in this field,” Hallowell told Forbes. “With ADD, a list of symptoms doesn't show the power of the traits these people have—they are creative and imaginative. We're the people who colonized this country. Who would get on a boat in the 1600s and come over here? You'd have to be a visionary, a pioneer, a dreamer, and a risk-taker. That's why our gene pool is loaded with ADD. I see it as the American edge.”
He’s also very critical of how most people treat those with ADD, especially children. He’s often used this one:
“Telling someone with ADD to ‘try harder’ is like telling someone who’s nearsighted to squint harder.”
A great many terrific metaphors and analogies have emerged from laypeople with ADD. Here’s a sampling from the website www.ADHDCollective.com, many of which originated on Quora:
“For me, it feels like my brain is broken.”
“It’s a horrible feeling – you're trapped inside your own head but not in control, kind of like the last scene in Being John Malkovich.”
“It feels like my brain is understeering.”
(Colin Barrett)
“For me, it’s like my brain is a computer with really low RAM.”
“Sometimes I have this thing when (think of my brain as a computer) it’s like someone tried to run a whole bunch of different programs all at once and the computer froze which really sucks because the only way to completely ‘unfreeze’ my brain is to ‘restart’ it (aka go to sleep).”
(Anonymous)
“It feels like my brain is a browser with way too many open tabs.”
(Pat, on Quora)
“It feels like that scene in Austin Powers where the guy is just standing there for what seems like forever, staring at the steam roller, unable to get out of the way and it just runs him over.”
(Lisa Perry)
Randall Munroe, a cartoonist who can be found at www.xkcd.com, created one called “Chasing Balloons” to convey the ADD experience – each balloon is labeled with a to-do task, and they are drifting every which way, and the person in the cartoon is trying to chase them all at once.
“...like a roller coaster that never rests.”
(Curtis Dickerson)
“Say you have a filing cabinet, and all the information is inside, but instead of alphabetical order, everything has been arranged every hour by a different person who did what made sense to them at the time. That’s about how I feel my brain works.”
(Valerie Fletcher)
Rachel Binfold, on Quora, likened ADD to juggling on a unicycle:
“Every few years, I go to the local Renaissance festival,” she wrote. “There’s a guy there who juggles all kinds of random things – balls, swords, hats, fire, you name it. Then, he gets on a unicycle. Someone throws him each of the objects in turn and he starts juggling again.
“I’m sure he’s practiced for years to do this, but when you watch him, he’s shaking back and forth on the unicycle with an intense amount of concentration. In just a few minutes, you can see the sweat start to bead on his brow from the effort. Even as a professional, he does actually drop things occasionally. It’s not too long after that when the show ends and he gets to stop.
“Unfortunately, life never lets you stop juggling – there’s work projects, home projects, kid’s activities, household chores, personal life… Without ADHD (or any mental disorder, for that matter), you’re standing on the stage juggling.”
From there, Rachel compares ADD adults to non-ADD; ADD isn’t the juggling, it’s the unicycle:
“With adult ADHD, you’re on the unicycle. Not only are you trying to juggle, but you also don’t have a firm surface under your feet. It takes lots more concentration just to keep juggling because you’ve got the mental overhead of staying upright. Plus you have way more balls, because your projects are broken up into smaller pieces. Plus the balls are painted with super shiny colors. Your attention flits between the many balls because they’re all coming at you at the same time and you can’t just focus on one of them. If you happen to have a passion for red and deeply focus on those, you’re going to drop something else.
“Not only are you trying to juggle, but you also don’t have a firm surface under your feet. It takes lots more concentration just to keep juggling because you’ve got the mental overhead of staying upright.”
She points out that, unlike the performance of the juggler, the ADD adult’s unicycle is “invisible. No one gives you credit for the difficulty level of the juggling act. All they see are the number of dropped balls, not the effort it takes to keep them in the air. Because what matters in the adult world is the answer to the equation. You don’t get partial credit for showing your work.”
Finally, Rachel likens ADD medication to “training wheels on the unicycle. It takes the edge off the juggling act so that you can slow down and focus on each ball a little better.”
And finally,
“Having ADHD/ADD is like having an iPhone loaded with apps and enabling notifications for all of them.”
"If you did this on an iPhone,” Pennell wrote, you’d get overwhelmed with ‘someone tagged you in X,’ ‘So and so checked in at X,’ ‘You’ve received a coupon for nearby y’ notifications every couple of minutes. Only through practice and discipline are you actually able to turn those notifications off and actually get some function out of your tool. In this case, it’s my mind.”
That’s enough to get you started, isn’t it? Using metaphors and analogies that everyone who doesn’t have ADD can easily relate to these, and hopefully understand you and what you go through a little better.
Can you think of some new ones?
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