an intensity that's contrary to a good time

on the emotional road with ADHD

The artist Pipilotti Rist in a scene from Ever is Over All, 1997

Mood-wise, I’m having a fairly trash week, one filled with annoying, discombobulating events, large and small. I’m off my game, overwhelmed by disproportionate seething, a low-level hum of rage carrying me through my days. It’s the end of year crunch and I’m (literally) out of gas. This morning, driving back from (LATE) school drop off, racing home (LATE) for a meeting, the “empty tank” light flashing on my dashboard, I pulled into the closest (JAMMED) gas station on Sunset Boulevard, stopped behind the nearest pump and waited my turn. The person inside the car in front of me, a young man, had finished pumping his gas. But instead of vacating his spot, this driver simply sat, immovable, staring and — from what I could see in his rearview mirror — grinning at his phone. The lot was too packed with other cars to squeeze around to next pump. I waited. Two minutes passed. I gave a light honk. Nothing. A minute more. A longer honk. Nothing still.

A flurry of violent fantasies flashed before me. I felt murderous or, at the very least, capable of harm. I considered getting out of my car, making myself big like you do when you’re trying to scare a bear, banging on the car’s window, calling my dude a Philly-style AYss-hole, scream-asking WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK. But then I remembered the facts: I’m a middle-aged Los Angeles mom who drives a Prius. I was wearing orthopedic sandals with socks. At this stage of life — and maybe always? — outbursts like this bring more humiliation and regret than any sort of cathartic emotional release.

As soon as I could, I pulled around the motionless Subaru, filled my tank and, like a blonde-Italian she/her Andy Rooney, spent the ride home cursing society’s ills.

It’s not all gloom and doom. Earlier in the week, before I became Andy Rooney, I listened to a podcast that unexpectedly blew my middle-aged ADHD mind.