Paris: The Memoir(2)
Skin care. Seriously. If you take nothing else from my story, receive this: Skin care is sacred. Most women who did coke back in the 1990s looked beat by the mid-aughts. That was a strong deterrent for me. I won’t say I never tried it, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice my complexion for it. Same with cigarettes. You may as well hit yourself in the face with a shovel.
These days, my only bad habit is spray-tanning. My sister Nicky can’t stand it, but I’m kind of addicted. Otherwise, Carter and I are big on wellness and skin care. We always say, “Forever’s not long enough.” Taking care of ourselves is something we do for each other out of love. We want our good life to last.
After I put the frittata in the oven and set a cute little penguin timer, Kim said, “Now is the twelve minutes when we clean. Clean as you go is the rule.”
My only rule is skin care. Sunscreen is my eleventh commandment.
You may be wondering: What does all this have to do with ADHD?
Nothing. Also everything. And anything. All at once.
ADHD is exhausting and exhilarating, and it’s how God made me, so it must be right.
Carter doesn’t fully grasp what it means to be ADHD, but he’s the first and only man in my life who made an effort to understand. Early in our relationship, he spent a lot of time and energy researching ADHD, which is the most authentically loving thing any man has ever done for me. Most people sigh, drum their fingers, and let me know how insanely frustrating it is to be sucked into the endless spin cycle of my life. Carter rolls with it. Where most people see a dumpster fire, Carter sees Burning Man. He gets frustrated, for sure, but he’s not trying to deprogram me.
Carter is a venture capitalist. M13, the company he founded with his brother, Courtney, is known for engaging with unicorns—start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars—like Rothy’s, Ring, and Daily Harvest. Carter is a unicorn whisperer. He’s sentimental and forward thinking, and he likes to be the boss, but he has a light touch. If we’re in an 11:11 Media board meeting, talking about a contract, and I go off on a tangent about a better tool for impromptu IG videos and how that tool could be styled, manufactured, and marketed in a really fun, accessible way and I could promote them via cross-promotional content, and what if the nob was like a little otter or sloth or kangaroo—
Carter leans to whisper in my ear. “Babe.”
Not in a mean way. Just to bring me back to center.
A while back I was featured in The Disruptors, a documentary about extraordinary people with ADHD, including will.i.am, Jillian Michaels, Justin Timberlake, the founders of JetBlue and Ikea, Steve Madden, Simone Biles, Adam Levine, Terry Bradshaw, astronaut Scott Kelly, Channing Tatum—the list goes on and on. The Disruptors also features Dr. Hallowell and other psychologists and neurologists who’ve advanced the science of ADHD. The message of the film really flies in the face of the misconceptions and stigma.
The structure and function of the ADHD brain are a throwback to a time when you had to be a badass to survive, find food, and procreate. (Visual cue: Raquel Welch as the iconic cavewoman queen in One Million Years B.C.) The frontal lobe—home of impulse control, concentration, and inhibition—is smaller, because the primitive badass had to react on instinct, without fear. Neural pathways don’t connect or mature at the same rate, because it was more important for the primitive badass queen to be better at picking berries and killing saber-toothed tigers than she was at reading novels. Dopamine and noradrenaline, powerful chemicals that regulate sleep and facilitate communication between brain cells, were on a slow drip, because she had to wake up at the snap of a twig.
I, like 5 percent of children and 2.5 percent of adults, am a primitive badass in a world of contemporary thinkers, a world that wants obedience and conformity. Even if we wanted to be the orderly people our loved ones want us to be, we don’t have it in us. We must embrace who we are or die trying to be someone else.
The benefits of ADHD include creativity, intuition, resilience, and the ability to brainstorm. I’m good at damage control because I’m constantly losing things, showing up late, and pissing people off. I’m good at multitasking because I’m not hardwired to concentrate on one thing for a big block of time. Because my attention span is limited, I don’t see time as linear; the ADHD brain processes past, present, and future as a Spirograph of interconnected events, which gives me a certain Spidey sense about fashion trends and technology.
It’s easy to follow my bliss because my bliss is whatever interests me at any given moment. My brain chemistry craves sensory input. Sounds, images, puzzles, art, motion, experiences—everything that triggers adrenaline or endorphins—that’s all as necessary as oxygen for the ADHD brain.
I don’t just love fun. I need fun. Fun is my jet fuel.
The primary disadvantage of ADHD is that people around you are often inconvenienced, weirded out, or hurt by your behavior, so you’re constantly getting judged and punished, which makes you feel like shit. Suicidal ideation is higher in people with ADHD. Self-loathing and self-medication are endemic. If the rest of the world says you’re obnoxious or stupid or just not braining right, loving yourself is an act of rebellion, which is beautiful but exhausting, especially when you’re a little kid. With that needy little kid always inside you, your life becomes an epic quest for love—or whatever feels like love in the moment.
I was never medicated as a kid—never tested for ADHD, as far as I know. Even if you have the most wonderful, loving parents in the world (and I do), diagnosis doesn’t always happen early, especially for girls who are good at hiding the symptoms. Treatment of ADHD has traditionally focused on squashing undesirable behavior. In the 1980s, people had just started talking about being hyper or being on “the spectrum.”