The discerning reader/viewer/user/visitor of or to this site may notice a certain disjunction. There are the ruminations and divagations on and about why read the Canon, how I came to Georgetown, what particular pull canonical texts have for me, and then there are the actual encounters with the Canon. But perhaps lacking is some sort of bridge or connective tissue between the two. A lacuna may yawn, if the former can do the latter.

 The following may serve as some sort of swaying, not terribly sturdy, rope line between the two halves.

My brain is broken. Or in shards, or fractured. Depending on the day, the hour, the situation, how I think of what happens in my head changes. Some in the disability rights movement might object to my phrasing, saying that my brain is not “broken” but rather that I think differently than others. In my view, both are true.

What goes on inside my head can be called a disability, an impairment, a condition. Just as with  a brilliant, creative, manic-depressive friend of mine, the open question is whether it’s an integral part of who I am or instead, something layered on, something extra, like an overcoat.

Although I’m not yet completely comfortable with using the term “disability,” that is – among other things – what it is. A good friend of mine has helped me a great deal when she, in her blunt way, often refers to my “disability.” I rear back every time I read an email from her with the D-word in it, and then catch myself and wonder why that is my reaction.

Because my disability belongs to that category known as an invisible disability. So unlike someone with a prosthesis or someone who uses a wheelchair, you can’t see it with your eyes. If you know me well and spend enough time around me, you may get a sense, but that’s rare (or so I think – my husband insists that anyone who knows me has already guessed!). I’m fairly high functioning and have had some successes in my life, so anyone who knows of my bumps in the road is most likely to put them down to depression or anxiety, those common and fairly-readily-accepted invisible disabilities whose effects can range from severe to mild.

The discerning reader will by now be wondering something along the lines of: When the hell is she actually going to name this thing that ails her?

And the answer is: Not yet.

People tend to jump the gun, I’ve noticed. When I say I lived for several years in France, they say: “Oh, how did you like Paris?” Well, actually, I never lived in Paris, and that’s not what I said. Similarly, when I say I’m from New York, they say: “I’m a New Yorker too – I lived there for three years in ’90s.” Well, actually, that doesn’t make you a New Yorker. So it is with my disorder, which is very common, is often in the news, has become something of a buzzword, and, sad to say, something of a cultural joke.

The minute I name it, people think they know what it is, and all nuance is lost. It’s a disorder that for many years was diagnosed only among children, and mostly among boys. I am neither a child nor a boy. Many people believe it is overdiagnosed as part of a near-conspiracy move by Big Pharma. (I believe this too – the drugs that purport to help my condition are a huge revenue producer for drug companies.) Many also believe that these drugs are given to underprivileged poor kids as a way of shutting them up and to privileged white kids as a way of giving them even more of an advantage than they have to start with. I believe both of these things are true.

I was a good – no a very good – student when I was a young child, but somewhere around adolescence, my ability to focus on reading dissipated. The time and place were 1970s New York, and revolution (or as we say now, disruption) was in the air, so my mother put it down to hormones, adolescence, the general Vietnam/Woodstock era of upset. All that may be true, but it is also true that many of rebellious friends managed to graduate from high school without being told one fine day that if they didn’t read and write an essay about The Brothers Karamazov by the end of spring break, they wouldn’t graduate from high school. I remember locking (or being locked?) into my bedroom and tortuously trying to absorb the unabsorbable words. I somehow did it, but I really have no idea how, and to this day, can’t remember a word of the novel. That is when I think I knew there was a problem.

I took a year off between high school and college, worked at an eccentric alternative newspaper in downtown Manhattan, sat on the floor in my thrift-shop dresses, bending over a heavy old Royal typewriter and I discovered a parallel universe just four miles south of where I’d grown up. The tasks were many and varied, the joint was constantly jumpin’, there was always something new to learn, a new freaky person to steal sidelong stares at. Concentration wasn’t an issue.

Ah, but the following year, it was. I’d somehow gotten myself admitted to the University of Chicago, and it wasn’t many weeks before I found myself in the Regenstein Library, a behemoth of a building that is even more lumbering and scary in my imagination that it is in real life. I sat in a carrel for hours upon hours – I really don’t know how many – desperately trying to take in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars. It wasn’t happening, and when I finally came to (for that’s what it was like: awakening after a fainting spell), I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. A very eerie sensation.

I flailed, I began drowning. I couldn’t admit what was going on because I had no idea what was going on, no idea that anything was going on. I began sleeping an inordinate number of hours per day, until finally when that number reached 17, an acquaintance walked me over to the Student Mental Health Center. I ended up dropping out, but – as strange as it seems now – no one at the university, no one in my family sought a diagnosis, a name, a solution for what was going on with me. And even if one had been sought, it’s doubtful that at that time, a correct naming could have taken place.

It wasn’t until almost a decade later, when I’d returned to school to get my B.A. but was, once again, having incredible difficulties reading, that a name rose to the surface. I remember sitting on the floor of my ratty Lower East Side apartment, back for some reason against the refrigerator (the cool was calming, perhaps?) and reading – aloud, to myself – Dante’s Inferno. It was only by mouthing the words, hearing them, feeling the vowels and consonants and syllables on my tongue, that I could impress them upon my brain, take them in, absorb their meaning, keep track of their sense.

But once I went on to take more than one course at a time, this method wasn’t feasible. I went to a shrink who listened – carefully, no gun-jumping – to my story, and told me he thought I might possibly have anxiety issues (fear of failure, pressure for perfection ­– a familiar litany). But, he paused, he also wanted to tell me about another idea he had. There was a disorder, a syndrome, a condition, whose name had morphed over the decades and had until very recently been thought to affect only children, not adults. These children ran around like crazy, misbehaved, were super-speedy. Although my speech was (and is) supercharged, running around like a crazed top wasn’t my thing. Its name was attention deficit disorder – now more commonly known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. As he began to reel off the list of symptoms, I began to feel as though I was having an epiphany, one of those “aha” moments described by second-wave feminists in their consciousness-raising groups.

Yes, my mind would wander. Check. Yes, I would “come to,” and have no idea of where I’d been. Check. Yes, my thoughts jumped from one place to another – sometimes resulting in wonderful creative leaps that often seemed remarkable to others, although not so to me. Yes, yes, yes, I couldn’t sustain the deep concentration necessary to make my way through difficult works (ah, Thucydides, my man!).

I began seeing an educational therapist, who taught me many tricks, foremost among them the use of non-vocal music (thank you, Mozart) as a way of screening out distracting ambient noise. At that time, along with going to school, I was working in an open newsroom, and the conversation of the typesetters would drive me around the bend (yes, Virginia, there was, once upon a time, such a thing as a typesetter!). The chatter of one young woman, whose long frizzy blond hair and grating Bronx accent I will see and hear in my nightmares until the day I die, made my brain itch uncontrollably. Classical music played on a Walkman (yep, another anachronism) was a means of fending her off, and saved both my academic and professional lives.

And for all the controversy and bad press and criticism that I and others have leveled at Big Pharma, I have to say that the drug methylphenidate was – and remains – a life raft, a buoy, a savior. It is overprescribed and misused, and yet, I could never have finished college, gotten through many tough assignments in my life as an editor, nor finished my M.A. (especially not Moby-Dick!) without it.

In spite of the aha feeling engendered by that moment of diagnosis, of revelation, in spite of the incredible power of that naming, I never managed to fully disclose to everyone in my life. I told a few friends, by no means all, and the man who became my husband; my parents, interestingly, did not “believe” it (but that’s another story).

In 1997, I wrote a long Washington Post Magazine story about the fascinating, disturbing huckster culture around ADD (as it was then known). I struggled with establishing and maintaining a balance between my belief that the disorder was a real thing, my strong conviction that, although overdiagnosed, it was a true problem for many and that its naming carried extraordinary power for those who had it, and my equally fervent conviction that there was a world of hype and bullshit surrounding the condition – a world of quack coaches, charlatan peddlers of sham diets and vitamins, ineffectual brain scans, fake cheerleaders (“Einstein was one of us, and look at him!”). The piece would have been so much more effective if I had ridden the memoir wave just gathering force back then and included my own perspective, my own story. But I could not bring myself to do so. And even, much more recently, writing a paper for a Georgetown Disability Studies class  in which I talked about memoirs of disability, a paper that would have no doubt been strengthened by the inclusion of my own narrative, I could not do it.

But now, here I am. Shards and all.