self-reflection – Haley V. Norris

Week 1 of Medicating for ADHD

In the fall of 2020 I underwent a screening for ADHD. I was in my fourth year of my PhD program and had completed coursework and passed my comprehensive exams. Working as a Teaching Assistant meant that I had sporadic deadlines and no longer had a daily routine to follow. I was struggling immensely to get anything done on my dissertation and had been in therapy for over a year.

The screening for ADHD was familiar to me because I was screened for my school district’s ‘gifted’ program as a kid. It included a series of tests to measure my IQ as well as self-response questionnaires and a few more specific tests for things like impulse control and attention. I did really well on the screening–so well, in fact, that the pscyhologist who tested me wrote in the report that I couldn’t have ADHD and instead was suffering from severe depression that was causing executive functioning problems. I have placed a quote from the summary portion of the screening report below (the doctor uses the wrong pronouns for me but that’s a different story):

Based on the present results, her (sic) cognitive profile does not appear to be consistent with ADHD.
Rather, Ms. Norris’s cognitive complaints seem better attributable to her current psychological functioning. Ms. Norris has a longstanding history of anxiety and depression, complicated with the trauma of the death of her mother at a young age. Both depression and anxiety can have a significant impact on cognition including reducing concentration, attention, memory, and processing speed.
While she spoke more of her symptoms of anxiety and feeling overwhelmed, I suspect depression is more pervasive than she may be aware. Her restlessness, fatigue, and concentration difficulty I think
are largely explained in the context of depression. Additionally, she reported some self-esteem difficulty and feelings of worthlessness, both personally and professionally. She described uncertainty with what she wants to do when she completes school and described sometimes feeling “lost” and “out of place.” I suspect these feelings have become more prevalent as she has gotten further along in school and closer to completing her degree,

Throughout the report, my raw test results were noted and placed within context of the broader population using percentile rankings. In nearly every test I scored Average or Above Average. Receiving this report after being honest and vulnerable with the clinician was devastating. I had a panic attack and was, frankly, inconsolable for hours. After time away from the report and working with a psychiatrist to try different medications I have decided that the tests employed were inappropriate and could not have accurately determined if I have ADHD or not (hooray research design training).

First–my academic success was well documented and as someone in a PhD program it is expected that I have good recall of concepts and theories, strong reading skills, and can meet regular benchmarks for program success. In my view, these tests that I took were basic. I was asked to repeat 2 syllable words after hearing them. As an instructor, I was frequently listening to my students complex responses and then paraphrasing them on the fly. A simple list of words was not going to pose a challenge to me. These tests could not adequately assess the struggles I was facing in my actual day-to-day life.

The motor skill tests were also useless for my age and development. I’m an adult who played sports and through time developed good gross and small motor skills. The test used by the examiner required me to place small pegs into holes. I had played this game as a child and so my previous experience should have made the results null for this study. A better examination of my motor skills would have been to have me walk around the office, climb a flight of stairs, even go through several doorways while being told to go get a specific item from the area/room. When I’m at home I frequently run into the corners of furniture, fall against the wall while walking, and bump into doorframes.

I could give a hundred more examples of the poor research design and why the outcomes pointed to depression as the root cause of my problems, but I want to focus on the positives that I’ve experienced this week instead, and how those things have reaffirmed for me that I do have ADHD. Many adults who have ADHD also suffer from anxiety and depression due to the difficulty of living in a neurotypical world. My sense of worthlessness is driven by my inability to accurately assess my own work, and by my knowledge that I’m smart and “should be doing better work”. In my first semester of graduate school I received a C on an assignment full of typos and wandering thoughts. I had mispelled nearly every author’s name–In a journal article I submitted in December I made mistakes like “Michelle” when the author’s name was “Melissa”. The skills and abilities that I had developed, which served me well during this screening, were developed under duress. I had panic attacks and suffered from insomnia my entire life. I was constantly filled with a fear of failure, which motivated my work, as opposed to being driven by a sense of ability and confidence.

I started seeing my psychiatrist roughly a year ago. After describing my problems, symptoms, and medical history he immediately wanted to put me on a stimulant. I am a child of D.A.R.E and am terrified of drugs. I refused the stimulant but was willing to try an SNRI which produces a similar chemical response but is ‘less intense’. I tried that for a year in conjunction with my anti-depressant (lexapro). It didn’t work. I spent the last year struggling to do anything. In the midst of a pandemic where I truly have nowhere to be, setting routines, deadlines, and goals for myself became impossible. I got a second job as a barista to try and create a sense of urgency in my week. My thought was this: If I lose two days of PhD work to a coffee shop, then I’ll understand that those other three days are important and so I’ll need to do my work. That didn’t work.

Last month I had my regularly scheduled check-in with my psychiatrist. I told him I was finally ready to try stimulants because I was running out of time and coping strategies for my inability to initiate tasks, plan large projects, and switch tasks during the work-day. I’m pretty sure he was thrilled because his only response before writing the prescription order was “I wanted to put you on stimulants from the start”.

I was prescribed 10mg of Adderall XR (extended release). It took me a while to get the actual medication (ADHD problems) but this week I finally started. I’ve actually only taken it twice so far but the results were incredible. When I take the meds my brain feels physically lighter. All of these little intermediate steps to starting a task are no longer daunting or debilitating. I can brush my teeth, pause for a bathroom break, or refill my water bottle with ease. These are not things that I can do on a day without medication.

You see, when I’m not taking a stimulant, all of those small things become impossible “task switches”. Task interruption or task switching is the bane of many neurodivergent people and it is something that keeps me in bed until 10:30 on days when I don’t take meds. How can I possibly manage all of the small things in a timely way that still leaves room for me to sit down and write my dissertation? When a neurotypical person wakes up they are able to think “time to get ready!” and then do it. This is how it goes for me:

gather energy to push off blankets
gather balance/mobility to stand
do I have to pee first or brush my teeth? I can’t tell how badly I need to go yet.
What if I start brushing my teeth but then have to pee but then maybe I’ll get thirsty.
Oh no I’m already hungry. Should I eat first? If I eat then brush my teeth that might be better. What about my coffee, it tastes gross after toothpaste.
(I’m still not out of bed yet)
Shit it’s my morning to walk the dog. This means I have to get dressed but I don’t even know what I’m doing today so I can’t figure out what to wear (note: I change my clothes about 3-5x a day)
What do I have to do today? Am I leaving the house or should I just stay in pajamas all day?
I guess pajamas are fine. I should get up so my dog doesn’t get a UTI. Okay, getting up. Time to trip down the stairs.

Maybe you don’t have ADHD and you go through this enormous list too. That’s fine. Each of these bullet points subtracts about 100 points of focus/attention from my mental tank. So let’s say that I start the day with 500 points. By the end of walking my dog I’m at -400 in this example and I’ve only done 1-2 things on the list (maybe got dressed + walk the dog).

Brushing my teeth is not a smooth transition. Instead, it’s a task switch from ‘walking the dog’.

Now let’s dive into what it takes to actually work as a PhD Candidate. I have a few different writing projects at different points of completion. One is a co-authored book chapter. I knew I had to finish it this week but when I think about it, even on meds, my brain just supplies me with the instructions: “work on book chapter!!”. Great, super helpful. If I sit down and break it into tasks, that takes all my energy for the day. So, I’ve successfully planed the steps out but can’t execute them and now when I try again tomorrow this plan will be overwhelming and useless since I failed at it yesterday.

Instead, about thirty minutes after taking my Adderall I was able to do this:

Open most recent file
Locate previous comments and complete necessary edits
Fill out two sections (roughly 800 words)
Revise my writing for style/clarity
Answer my partner’s question without getting angry or having to completely stop working
Take note of all missing citations
Look up citation information
Add bibliographic information to my citation manager
Re-read relevant passages in citations to double-check page numbers
Communicate with my co-author about word-count issues
Use citation manager to generate bibliography entries
Copy and paste bibliography in alphabetical order, merging it with my co-author’s.
Send to co-author for review.

This took me two hours. I had been avoiding it for over a month. I was then able to do a major task switch to a completely different project: backwards planning for the final writing push on my dissertation. This took another 1-2 hours and I was even able to fit in a check-in call with a good friend. Usually, that type of activity would cause my research-writing brain to completely shut down since socializing is also a major task switch. I was excited to get back to work, set a goal for myself within a specific time limit and managed to meet it. Even on my best unmedicated day this would have been impossible.

I’m writing this post on an unmedicated day. My partner just came in the room and asked when we were going down the shore this month. I couldn’t respond for a full 30 seconds because I was so angry at being interrupted. That is the reality of unmedicated ADHD for me. It means that I’ve been awake for 3 hours, haven’t had water or eaten, and feel like both of those things are too overwhelming to tackle. I wish that I had sought out better care and support for myself sooner. And I really wish my parents had done it for me as a kid. Mostly, I wish that people could appreciate how hard it is for me to have gotten where I am today without medication and therapy.

I’m ending this post abruptly because my dog is barking and I can’t focus anymore. I want to close with this: I think that more academics need to share their stories of mental health and their disabilities so that we can all have better conversations with our students and colleagues about ways to make this job actually do-able. Maybe reading this will encourage you to do some self-reflection on how you judge your disabled colleagues and recognize the immense privilege that comes with being neurotypical.

2022: New Orientations

How can I put this? I’m quitting academia. At least, quitting the version of academia that I’ve been pursuing for the last six years (who am I kidding, the last 20). To write those words is like stabbing myself in the gut. This decision has not been easy and has been about three years in the making.

My life has changed a lot since I started in my PhD program in 2016 and the job market has also changed dramatically. I was warned by my undergraduate mentors, two professors who wrote my recommendation letters for graduate school, that the job market was rough and that I should only pursue graduate school if I was prepared to fight through that. I thought I was—and I think that I would have survived a 2018 or even 2019 market. But COVID wrecked universities in a way that is unsurvivable for me.

I’m grieving because the last two years of my graduate experience have been the most fruitful and intellectually stimulating years of my life and I finally felt like I was really hitting my stride. I’m learning how to dig into my ideas with confidence and pull them apart so that they can be reassembled for people who don’t live in my brain. In large part this was due to a feminist theory course that I took way after I was done with coursework, exams, and my prospectus defense. I took it for fun, I had been the TA for our introduction to the political science major course, which was really a survey of political theory, for three years. I considered myself a junior theorist but I really grew to love theory during that graduate course.

Political theory doesn’t matter much in the professional world. I won’t be able to have debates about different feminisms or the tension between feminist and queer thinkers in whatever job I pursue next. So, to find it so late was devastating. The best representation of “bitter sweet” I’ve had so far. That graduate seminar shaped my dissertation profoundly because my professor gave me permission to get lost in my thoughts a bit. To spend the time pulling words apart and asking what our assumptions and expectations were for them.

My dissertation is very fucking cool. And I say without shame that if I was staying in academia I’d be absolutely changing the field of political representation forever. But since I’m not, I don’t really mind if you don’t believe me. The classes I taught were also pretty cool too, and I’m going to miss my students so much. The joy that you experience as an educator when you get to see the curiosity and confidence of your students grow over a dozen weeks is unparalleled. I’m grateful I was able to teach as much as I did, and to meet so many incredible undergraduate students.

Those are all the things I’ll miss and you’re probably wondering how I could ever leave if I have such fond feelings for the many parts of academic life. As I recently told a friend, there’s a long, medium, and short version of that answer. The shortest version is that I’m the primary earner in my little family and we cannot make a graduate student stipend work anymore. The medium version includes that bit, but also the fact that I’ve made a home for myself in Philadelphia and I really don’t want to have to move away, during a pandemic, and try to start again. The long version is all of that, plus the reality that academia is hostile to anyone with mental health issues or disabilities. I suffer from pretty intense anxiety and have ADHD symptoms (caused by ADHD itself or depression, my psychologist isn’t sure).

In order to succeed on the job market, you have to be perfectly ready all the time and wait. You wait for jobs to be posted and then you wait to hear back and then you wait for the self-loathing to dissipate when all you get is radio silence. During all of that waiting, academia has no interest in what’s going on in your personal life. Want to buy a house? Wait. Want to get a medical procedure taken care of? Wait. Want to settle into a routine in this city you live in? Wait.

Not everyone has the ability to wait, and this is even more true for those living with disabilities or financial insecurity. In part, I’m leaving academia for my own challenges, but I’m also leaving because my partner and mother-in-law are both disabled in different ways and being in the hustle culture of academia pisses me off on their behalf.

My advisors and friends don’t really understand when I explain all of this. To be honest, it took me two years to get the message across in a way that made me feel like they were actually hearing me. I still don’t know if any of the faculty in my program actually understand…they’re all living very different financial lives than I am. My partner and I both have student loans, combined it’s well over 200k. We also pay for my mother-in-law’s rent and other living expenses. This means I can’t take a VAP and just wait around for the job market to get better. Why? Because we pay VAPs shit wages (you’re lucky if you get 50k a year).

So I’ve spent the last six years training for jobs that don’t exist and trying to squirm my way into a world that isn’t very interested in having me around. I’m queer and trans and I study queer trans people. I’m not interested in perpetuating the colonialism of political science and so my job options are even more limited. I’m not going to teach a class on international development. I’m not trained in American politics or intense quantitative methods. I think that’s all pretty dumb, to be honest. So not only is the institution failing me I practical ways, but also intellectually.

I’m not going to re-read this or make it sound better. I’m definitely forgetting to include certain points or experiences but, I don’t really owe academia a more thorough explanation. This is all they’re getting from me and its more for my catharsis than their benefit. I’d like to think that the wonderful people who are working to try and change universities from the inside out will succeed, but I don’t think they will. They’re up against so much: nationalism, surveillance, late capitalism, racism, sexism, transphobia…

I wish you the best of luck if you’ve decided to stick it out. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Lou Sullivan

I did not know who Lou Sullivan was two days ago. A friend recommended the recently published volume of his diaries, We Both Laughed In Pleasure, and it has been sitting patiently on my windowsill for about a month. It was meant to be personal reading but as a trans person who studies trans and queer politics, it has become increasingly “work-related”.

I also did not know that the anniversary of Lou’s death was this week. Just as I’m learning of his life, I am confronted with his death. The collection has caused so much introspection and to see other people sharing their thoughts publicly has been jarring. I’m still not used to people seeing me or knowing me this deeply! Now we’re all reading the same thing! And, to know that Lou himself started collecting his diaries for publication towards the end of his life is hard for me to grapple with; Why would someone share their internal self so brazenly with the world? There are several answer that I’ve come up with…he had nothing to ‘hide’, he wanted to remain an elder after his death, he had worked hard on building his life and living fully which deserves to be shared. I’m sure there is an explicit answer somewhere, from him, perhaps an interview or a diary entry. When I find it, I’ll let ya’ll know. For now, those three reasons are floating front-and-center in my mind all day. I am thinking about how they relate to myself but also my research: the idea that trans people have nothing to hide, that we don’t want to be ignored or erased, that our lives are worth knowing deeply.

I’ve only read about 100 pages of the collection, roughly his first 23 years of life, and I am too fascinated with these early memories to move on into the later years when he begins to transition, when he moves to San Francisco, when he “becomes” a gay trans activist, when he dies after contracting HIV/AIDS.

I see many people sharing his quote, from an early teenage entry, about wanting to be seen by people as someone who “interprets their own happiness”. In the introduction to the collection, Susan Stryker says that this phrase has stuck with her as the definition of trans experiences. I have to say that I agree. I nearly cried when I read those words. They are powerful and earnest and so honest. But, I also found tears welling when Lou complains about people “up the mountain” digging in to build a new house. There are two entries, back to back in the collection about the house. He’s disgusted by it! Annoyed! A child recording the things around him, the changes in his home. I could not help but wonder what my childhood self would have written. I was annoyed by the bus being late for school, by the new neighbors and their kid who used to peek in our front door…

I think we call this type of introspection “reflexivity” in research methodologies. We must be in tune with ourselves and our research subjects and must remember to treat them as complex people, not objects we can classify and extract from to move on to the next ‘big thing’. Even as a trans queer lesbian…I have slipped into a non-reflexive mode of research. My discipline almost demands it–the emphasis is on analytical clarity and causal stories. Reading Lou’s diaries reminded me that as a trans person I am complex and hold many stories, histories, versions of self. I remembered that my transness is about seeking joy and presenting my interpretation of happiness. The people that I’m writing and thinking about are doing the same thing.

We cannot give our research subjects the space to be full, complex, contradictory, and important if we do not give that space to ourselves as well. I want to thank Lou for reminding me of this and for sharing his life so that I can remember my own.

Writing & Dreaming Big

As graduate students we frequently hear the phrase “The best dissertation is the done dissertation”. It is said with a smile or a chuckle or a wink. Usually it comes from someone on your committee or a well-meaning friend. It is absolutely impossible to believe, however, after spending years criticizing other scholars for their research design, their writing, their theoretical developments, etc. Once you arrive at the dissertation stage, you’ve built up expectations that your dissertation will be the moment you can ‘dream big’ and go beyond whatever limitations those other scholars experienced that caused them to deliver imperfect work.

I struggle with this constantly. Nearly every time I try to work on my dissertation I hit this block. My work is deeply personal. As a queer, agender-trans person I’m writing about myself and not-myself in ways that press on me. Not everyone takes up research projects about their right to rights but for those of us who do the mental health toll of slogging through a dissertation is sometimes unbearable. I don’t believe people when they say that I just need to ‘finish’ my dissertation because I have been viewing my dissertation as a reflection of my queerness. In a way, it is, but mostly its actually just about demonstrating I know how to do a big research project.

I didn’t believe the ‘done dissertation’ line until twenty minutes ago when I looked up Roxane Gay’s dissertation on proquest. She wrote about the narrative of students being bad writers and did a bunch of surveys to figure out how that narrative functioned at her university. It is a really cool dissertation that has absolutely nothing to do with the writing that I know her for today: Bad Feminist and Hunger.

We are pressured to produce a dissertation that contains some type of publishable material so that in our first year as a VAP or (miraculously) an assistant professor we have research that we can send out as quickly as possible. The push to write a dissertation that will follow you for publication is directly connected to the corporate and hyper-productive requirements of today’s universities. I don’t think anyone explains this to you because many faculty want to prepare you for success which sometimes means ignoring the bad things so that you don’t get trapped in spirals of self-doubt or anger.

The unspoken reality is that graduate students are pressured at every moment, just like faculty are, to produce. Graduate school is not a time for exploration or learning. It is an environment where those who achieve mastery status the fastest are most likely to succeed–rewarded with funding, research opportunities, and eventually, jobs. My dissertation will be a product of this type of environment. It will also be a product of the education that I received and not necessarily reflective of the types of thinking I want to do in the next phase of my life. I have to learn to be okay with that even if its heartbreaking to realize that I’m just going to fall into the same imperfect status as everyone else.