Being recidivist

Angel’s son has ADD and is making her moedeloos (no English equivalent) at the moment. Angel feels that much of it is her fault. As parents – people do make mistakes and the things parents do and don’t do does have an effect on their children. I still feel Angel shouldn’t beat herself up too much. Personally I am very wary of blaming ADD for everything that goes wrong in my life, but if you read my blog and the blogs of people like Angel & Momcat (both to whom I regularly refer to) you’ll find that it ain’t easy. The word recidivist often applies to people with ADD. A recidivist is someone who continues to display undesirable behaviour or even commit crimes despite having been punished for such behaviour before and despite of full knowing well what the consequences of such behaviour may be. Lamb tells me of a boy with ADD in her grade 1 class. This boy sits at the back of the class and every afternoon when the final bell rings and Lamb lets them out he puts his schoolbag on his back and as he walks to the door bumps off all the little chairs which Lamb had the children put on the desks before they leave. Notwithstanding everything she’d done to deter the boy from doing this and even in the face of her threatening him with whatever punishment, he continues to do this. People call this anti-social behaviour and whatnot, but here is some insight that I, J. Hardspear de la Azotea can give you, being a recidivist myself. Even though I have become extremely adept at hiding my bad behaviour, I still get caught. Why do I do it then?... Well I don’t know. All I know is that the simplest of tasks, for instance having to make a short phone call at work to arrange something, sometimes seems insurmountable to me. And when I get to such a task – it is like a dam wall, blocking all the other things I have to do. I find it impossible to do anything else until I’ve done this thing which I positively cannot get myself to do. So all my work pile up and pile up till I am in real trouble. When I then get into trouble, it most definitely does not deter me from doing it again. Ok, that is: not doing what I should do. The same applies for: doing what I shouldn’t do. The compulsion to do something I know I must not do sometimes becomes overriding and an obsession. And it is not only addictions. It is like starting to swear real bad at someone without being provoked, simply because you feel like it. Why do I feel it is not anti-social? Because my conscience eats at me when I do that which I shouldn’t and even more so when I don’t do what I should. It positively eats at me. I do feel that people with ADD should face the consequences of what they do like anybody else, but sometimes it feels to me that my life consists entirely of facing consequences. When I am in a good mood I can with effort desist these compulsions, but boy, when I am tired or depressed it becomes real hard. I can deal with significant people in my life’s disappointment in me, but fuck; I cannot deal with my own disappointment in myself nor the regret of not doing which I should. Nor the guilt of doing which I shouldn’t.