Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?

I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes.

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, Lord my God.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,

My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.

*****

 A compilation of Psalms and other verses.

I put this together for a friend, who asked me to pray for one of the many incomprehensible cruelties that are happening in our world right now. "groanings too deep for words" The phrase has been in my mind since the 2015 Paris attacks, when, as I stood in the hallway of our University spiritual center, the images on the public TV screen burned themselves into my brain. The students laughing and walking past me echoed in my head with horrible dissonance as I struggled to understand how the world hadn't stopped to mourn the bodies on the screen.
They had fallen limp as they ran out of the building, their blood still visible from the helicopter recording the live footage. It brought back into painful focus images that my younger brain could not comprehend at the time: 9/11, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora.

And suddenly it became incessant,

San Bernardino 2015

The Isis Bombings: Jakarta, Istanbul, Brussels, Baghdad, Libya, Phillipines, Sri Lanka, too many and too terrible to even name

Aleppo

Orlando 2016

Fort Lauderdale airport 2017

Little Rock 2017

Las Vegas 2017

Sutherland Springs Church 2017

Parkland 2018

Santa Fe 2018

Jacksonville 2018

Pittsburgh 2018

Thousand Oaks 2018

Virginia Beach 2019

The Boeing crashes 2019

Kyoto 2019

Hong Kong 2019

And just in this past week: Gilroy - July 28, El Paso - August 3, Dayton - August 4

This is by no means a full list, only the ones that have haunted me; a documentation of my thoughts. There is no war, there is no fair fight, just senseless violence and disregard.

 2018 Thousand Oaks

"Let us weep together.

Since the Paris shootings, I've been haunted by the images of similar events happening around me. Every moment of quiet I had, I couldn't stop a flash of those images in my mind: sitting in class, in a movie theatre, waiting for the elevator door to open,.. I've had dreams of being on the ground and watching strangers fall around me as a man relentlessly guns them down. My heart is broken and my life seems even more insignificant. I don't know how to live my life seeing these things happen. I cry for God to tell me what to do. One survivor who had the courage to help others get out said "I know where I'm going when I die so I just did what I could" I don't know that about so many people around me. I weep for this world. I don't know the dead. I don't know the shooter. I don't know the survivors. But I can see the pain from this violence that is so far beyond comprehension. I see the guilt in the faces of the survivors. There is little relief to be found in surviving beyond giving purpose to that survival. Let me not rest but restlessly live to love others. Let me not waste what blessings are given to me in the time that I am given. Let me not lose this heart that breaks for these evil events. Give me the strength to do more than I think I can so that more could be saved in my stead. Give me the perseverance to sacrifice myself for others who do not yet have hope. God please. Give me the wisdom that I don't have, to reconcile these thoughts and defeat doubt."

2019 Virginia Beach

"Elsewhere there are wars. Elsewhere there is political, religious, even social unrest. Here, in a country as undeniably privileged as ours, we have attacks. Violence without comprehensibly justifiable reason. Selfish, individual, and shortly thereafter, denied. Legally obtained high caliber, high capacity weapons continue to kill the innocent people that legality is supposed to protect. It's not a stance, it's a statement. People kill people. But the bullets sure do help.

https://everytownresearch.org/mass-shootings/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/27/upshot/deadly-bullets-guns.html "

It's been 4 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_linked_to_ISIL

"Girls with ADHD are 3 times more likely to be treated for a mood disorder before receiving their ADHD diagnosis. 

One-third of women with ADHD have anxiety disorders, and almost half of those have considered suicide."

Before I was diagnosed with ADHD I was diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression. I'm not saying I don't have those things, but it took so long to get to the heart of the problem. When I received my official diagnosis, they showed me the analysis of my test results, and I was finally able to understand and have an explanation for this invisible monster that I always felt like I was fighting. But it was also like discovering that I'd been partially blind my entire life, and the world actually looks completely different from what I thought it did. And the reason why I kept running into walls all the time wasn't because I was just a clumsy person. It was because I couldn't see as well as everyone else could. And the only treatments that could help me catch up in life, were to take a pill that would allow me to see for a few hours at a time and try to learn ways to not run into things when I can't see them.

But what can I say about Mia? 
What can I say about the 22 years of life that I've lived not knowing that I had ADHD? What can I say about that person and that world that in some ways never really existed? I know that may sound dramatic to most people. But it's hard to explain just how much ADHD is a part of your life. ADHD isn't something that just exists in a classroom and effects your grades. My ADHD diagnosis gave sense to all of the questions that I had about my life that I didn't think could be answered:

• Why I so strongly remember feeling frustrated, in 2nd grade, because I would whiz through all of the difficult tasks and be the first one to finish, and yet have to watch my classmates pass me by because I couldn't finish something as simple as cutting nouns out of a newspaper.
• Why I started shaving my entire body in 3rd grade because the feeling of my own body hair. "bothered me" so much that I couldn't think about anything else.
• Why I always found it easier to befriend boys and struggled to deepen friendships with girls.
• Why I've never been able fall asleep at night in less than 3 hours.
• Why I will actually sob in despair if I am woken up right as I'm falling asleep because I know I might not be able to do it again.
• Why my nighttime routine:
•           - requires me to be freshly showered even if I may have showered earlier in the day
•          - requires me to get in and out of bed an average of 6 times a night because, in the process of waiting to fall asleep, I might be too thirsty and need water, but then need to go to the bathroom, be too hungry and eat but need to brush my teeth... repeat.
•           - will usually require me to remove every piece of clothing I may have on, because the sensation of the cloth against my bed and blanket are too distracting, or sometimes shave or cut my nails for the same reason.
•           - requires me to occupy my mind with the same bland shows or audio books because otherwise my own mind might terrorize me with the imagination of  the detailed deaths of myself or my loved ones.
• Why my childish fears only seemed to grow stronger as I got older.
• Why writing two sentences of an essay would take 2 hours because I would have to read articles 3 or 4 times because every time I went to write, I would forget what I wanted to write about.
• Why the tiniest most insignificant things, like a stuck seatbelt or an untied shoe, can make me cry and want to scream.
• Why I spend sometimes hours of frustration feeling like I can't find my memories even if I know I have them.
• Why I somehow make the strangest and idiotic mistakes.
• Why I would fail even the easiest classes, because I would forget assignments, forget the class existed, forget to take an exam, do a project entirely wrong and be too embarrassed to present/submit it, or miss half or all of the class because I would miss the bus or be late, and then not be able to have the courage to walk into the classroom
• Why I sometimes sit and feel like I'm doing everything, and then sit back hours later realizing I've done nothing.
• Why I can take the most involved and perfect notes in class and not remember a thing that happened.
• Why I can't participate in class discussions, not because I'm afraid to speak or that I have no thoughts, but because I can't remember what they said and what I want to say at the same time.
• Why I could never seem to speak the thoughts in my head.
• Why my inability to function in cities causes my anxiety rather than the other way around.
• Why I can want to do something, know how to do it, and why I should do it. And somehow not be able to.
• Why I feel like I'm trapped by my own head, by my own body.

For 22 years I didn't know that there were answers to these questions. I didn't know or think about if they were normal or not. That was just the way life was. But as there were more and more things to focus on, my symptoms became more and more pronounced and harder to hide. When I read the first ADHD inattentive story, I cried because it felt like it was describing my own life. When I got my diagnosis, I cried because they told me I would need accommodations, therapy, and medication. I cried because I was angry at all of the lost time and possibilities. I cried because the person who I thought I was and could become was different now. But I also cried because I knew that there was something that could help, that I didn't have to live believing I was useless.



People always say that ADHD is like trying to watch a television when someone else has the remote.  And in a lot of ways I think they're right; but I feel like it's a little more complicated than that.
* I would just like to remind everyone that I'm not a doctor, and I am very aware of that. These explanations are my attempts to explain my ADHD with my own perspectives,  my own experience, and limited knowledge.

It's as if everyone's brain was one of those surveillance rooms with a gigantic grid of TVs, and every time you learn something new, you add a TV to the grid. To navigate and control this room you have a processing unit that operates a bit like Siri or OK Google. When you tell the unit what you want to focus on, it will select that TV to focus on and then light up the most related TVs containing the information you need.

I'd say ADHD is like this except with really shitty voice recognition that has about 55% accuracy and next-to zero search engine optimization. You tell it what you want and just pray that it picks the right one, and when it does, it also lights up 2 others and every other TV-screen within the 2nd, 3rd and 4th degree of relation to those.

It's not that we aren't paying attention, it's that our brains are trying to pay attention to everything at the same time. I think it's as if brains are like cameras (here's to all you photographers out there). All brains are taking pictures continuously but the aperture and shutter speed will determine how many photos and how much information we get.



Neurotypical brains have the ability to adjust their aperture and shutter speed to be able to get the optimum focus on the subject they need. They will take in fewer pictures and less information, so they are able to look at each photo and get the information they need from them quickly for the present moment. But a few years later when their brain auto-deletes some of the photos they took,  if you ask them about the details of the subject in those photos, they'll have a harder time recalling them because they didn't have those details in focus.

ADHD brains are like cameras with sticky mechanics. So, most of the time we have everything constantly in focus, which means our shutter speed is faster and we're taking in more pictures and more information per second as compared to a neurotypical brain. So if we're trying to get the information we need right now, it's so hard because we have so many more pictures and so much information to process in them. So to go through to get the specific information we need right now will take significantly more time and effort. But ask us a few years later about the details in those photos and we'll be able to recall them with ease, because chances are we've kept at least one of those photos that has allllll the details in it.

I feel like people get the idea that ADHD brains operate the exact same way that theirs does except that we just get distracted by squirrels/shiny things and we have less memory space. But the reality is my memory is fine, better than most even. It's just that the way that we are able to see the world is fundamentally different.

A video on ADHD if you've got 30 minutes lying around...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouZrZa5pLXk&feature=youtu.be

*https://www.additudemag.com/the-statistics-of-adhd/
  https://www.additudemag.com/slideshows/what-undiagnosed-adhd-feels-like/
  https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-symptoms-in-women/
  https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-in-adults-acceptance-late-diagnosis/?src=embed_link
  https://www.additudemag.com/slideshows/adhd-in-girls-women/

"Do you miss me?" it asked.

She didn't answer.

"Tell me I didn't love you."

Not the way you should have.

"What do you know?"

Nothing. I don't know. Except that you were wrong.

"You left me, I never would have left you."

Maybe.

"If you cared you would have stayed."

That's cruel. If I didn't care, this never would have happened. 

You were perfect for me. I can't ever deny that. You were everything I ever wanted. 

And you knew me perfectly. 

You knew me. And you knew that it would hurt me. 

And yet you did it anyways. You knew, and you chose not to say anything. You knew and you were never going to tell me if I'd never found out. So what good did knowing me do?

In the end you just loved what I could do for you. 

Do I miss you? I tried not to let myself get that far. I never let myself stray too close to regret. But you were everywhere. There was too much of you to burn away. If I did, there would have been nothing left of me. 

But now? Now I'm cutting off the flesh you put on my bones. Now I'm burning the scars. Because I have enough of me now. Enough to make it.

It hurts. Now I look back and know I missed you. I know I did. Now I feel all of it. 

I never wanted to leave.

She pulled a piece of paper from the box. It was a second copy of the card that she drew for their second anniversary. She'd been saving it for their wedding day. She fingered the bent corners and thought about all the time that had passed.

 Such a stupid little thing. 

All yellowed paper and pencil marks.

Where does it go now? What do I do with all these words? Words that held the bricks of my world together. Words that filled the empty spaces between my ribs. Words that tied the strings between my bones. 

You're not here anymore. You're so far beyond the reach of my hands, grasping through the looking glass of my memories.  There's nothing to burn. There's nothing there.

How do I burn away the phantom limbs? The memory of completeness. 

How do you forget the feeling of something that is no longer there?

She picked up the box. She packed it in her bags and carried it with her until the day she would step into the flames and let the fire burn them all away.

I remember the dream the same way I remember things that happened last week, or things from my childhood. It was so normal and familiar, filled with so much personal detail that even with the realization that it was a dream, it still a bit hard to separate it from my reality. I was living my life, surrounded with my friends and family, but everything was so grey, hovering on the edge of darkness and threatening to tip me over. It was like some dark personality looked into my heart and found every single little thing that would hurt me. Not the obvious pains and fears, but the smallest most sinister ones, and he stuck each one into me like a needle, just tiny pin pricks, but over and over until I was covered in needles and moving just a little bit would just push them even deeper. 

I struggle with feelings of anxiety sometimes, and they always seemed so unfounded and unreasonable and they were; but I could never really figure out what exactly would make me so anxious to live my life and spend time with the people I love and enjoy. And I realised that I'm terrified of the moments where being surrounded by my friends and family makes me feel even lonelier than when I'm alone. I went through a period where I felt that so strongly, that it made me so selfish and bitter and fearful. So much so that I couldn't find the will to give and love to those that I knew I loved. I hate that part of me and I never want that to be me again. 

So I'm going to try even harder now, to never let that happen again. Even though I'm afraid, even though I'm still terrifyingly selfish. To remember that loneliness is just some dark creature from my dreams trying to keep me from loving the people I love. But it was just a dream, and my loved ones are my reality. And I'll fight for them and fight to be me, because it's the least I could do. To be the me that they fell in love with in the first place. 

I'm a fool, for indulging in you. For hoping you would make, something of me. You asked for the apple, but your hand pointed back at me.