NEURODIVERSITY ORIGIN STORY: PART 3
Hello folks! It has been a long while since I posted to my blog, and I figured that a partial explanation is due. As some of you may know, my wife Elizabeth was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and, to become as much of a caregiver as I could be, The Dusty Unknown had to take a backseat. While I haven’t been out with my camera as much as I would normally either, it was my blog specifically that was put on a temporary hiatus while my wife and I figured things out. Thank you all very much for your understanding and so glad you stuck around.
As always, I am grateful to you for joining me on this journey and please remember that I am not an expert in neurodiversity despite being neurodiverse. So, please don’t take anything written here as medical advice.
Welcome back for part three of my neurodiversity origin story. As I wrote about this stage of my life, I realized that it would be a disservice not to highlight the many moments of joy I have experienced both despite, and because of, my neurodiversity. As such, I decided to focus on some of the positive aspects of my life with ADHD in this post.
In part two of my neurodiversity origin story, I ended off on a cliff hanger that had me working in the trades as a plumber’s assistant while attempting to salvage the pieces of my life that had been unravelled by undiagnosed ADHD. If you have read the first two parts of this story, or know me at all, you will understand how dramatic a departure leaving the arts for plumbing was and how passionately I would have rebelled against it. That’s not to say that all aspects of the job were horrible: I loved my employer and enjoyed working with interesting people in an everchanging environment. What I hated was nearly everything else— the hours, the grime (ask me about my pee lip story), and the hypermasculinity. As an impulsive, emotionally dysregulated, empath, my tolerance for bullshit is extraordinarily low. So, working with adults who prided themselves on constructing personas built on displays of cruelty and avarice was hard to swallow. To make matters worse, I desperately needed the money. For all intents and purposes, I was trapped.
At this point, I will reiterate that I am not an ADHD expert, but there is one thing I can speak about with certainty—figuratively caging a person with ADHD is one of the quickest ways to breed chaos. By chaos, I mean depression, anxiety, impulsivity and dysregulation, but I also mean creativity, wanderlust, and divergent thinking. With such a diverse response pattern to feeling trapped, it’s safe to say that chaos doesn’t always lead to a negative outcome, but it can sure be messy.
During my time as a plumber’s assistant, I had one thing going for me that helped me maneuver each and every obstacle while also helping me balance impulsivity with reason—my partner Elizabeth. As with most relationships where one individual experiences undiagnosed neurodiversity, my relationship with Elizabeth has been a complex journey to understand and appreciate the strengths we each bring to the table. Our time together hasn’t always been easy, but we have grown as couple through years of trial, error, and education. My time as a plumber’s assistance was a defining moment in our relationship and changed the way we thought about work, life, and creativity.
With a more consistent income from a job in the trades, Liz and I were able to save some money and finally go on our first “big” Canadian trip: to visit friends and family in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Traveling together was incredible and, without exaggeration, transformed our lives. Exploring a new environment as a couple was the first time in our relationship where my ADHD symptoms were perfectly suited for the situation. My impulsivity became an adventurous spirit, my divergent thinking helped us deal with the surprises of travel, and my empathic nature allowed me to connect with a multitude of new and wonderful human beings. I was also able to embrace creativity through my designated position of trip photographer. Camera in hand, I spent a vast majority of our travels documenting the tiniest details of the places we explored. The feeling of unbridled creative exploration was exhilarating and left me pleasantly exhausted and deeply joyful. But not as joyful as the proposal.
While on our trip, I decided to finally pop the question and ask Elizabeth to marry me. While staying at the picturesque Blomidon Inn in the beautiful town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, I worked up the courage and, just like that, we were engaged. I also decided to get a tattoo on the top of my foot just before boarding our flight home, but that’s a story for another time. Either way, the trip was filled with the spontaneous, the impulsive, and the truly magical. The experiences of our first true trip together cemented a deep-seeded love of travel in both of us and an aching wanderlust that has enveloped me ever since.
After returning home from our travels, life just wasn’t the same. Seeing what existence was like when my ADHD worked for me, rather than against me, was revolutionary, even if I didn’t understand precisely what was going on pre-diagnosis. Returning to my job as a plumber’s assistant after seeing a small but glorious part of the world was unbearable, and I began to plot a way to reintroduce the arts in my life and leave the world of plumbing behind—with the intention that travel could become a focus rather than an afterthought.
Somewhat serendipitously, the University of Winnipeg had just revamped its English degrees to offer a more focused educational experience. After a quick online search, I discovered that a 4-year B.A. in Young People’s Texts and Cultures was available. The courses looked incredible, and the professors seemed amazing; so, after several lengthy discussions with Elizabeth, I ended my career in plumbing and returned to university.
Over the next few years, I worked various jobs on campus while going to class full-time. I excelled in my course work, wrote my first picture book, met life-changing professors, forged lasting friendships, and graduated without once utilizing student loans. The experience was transformative and dramatically different from my first attempt as a post-secondary student. What made things so different the second time around? The answer, it turns out, was everything.
The obvious difference going into my B.A. was age and life experience. I was generally less impulsive and had spent years learning to mask my ADHD in the workforce with various coping mechanisms. The other difference was a deeper sense of focus, both in terms of my life goals and the overall course load each semester. I went into the program with the full intent of finishing my B.A. and then moving to Scotland to complete a master’s degree in comics studies. I needed to maintain a high grade-point average to achieve that goal and achieving the goal meant an abundance of travel possibilities. I also planned out and maintained a strict coursework routine that helped me stay, somewhat, on top of my to-do list. I obviously still struggled with distractibility and procrastination, but even maintaining a loose routine worked wonders.
In addition to my routine, I stopped taking notes almost entirely. Due to auditory issues associated with ADHD, my borderline dyslexia, and my poor penmanship, taking notes had always been fraught with anxiety and frustration. In my B.A., I realized that if I took the anxiety out of class, I was much more likely to both remember and enjoy the content being taught. Instead of taking notes, I engaged with the professor and my peers via questions and discussion. If I visually linked concepts to what someone was wearing, their body language, or how they talked, I had much greater recall of course content. All things I couldn’t focus on when I was struggling to take notes.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there were two significant aspects of my B.A. that lead to my success: interest and connection. The courses I took were genuinely fascinating to me with topics ranging from pop-culture and comics to animation and children’s literature. Most days, I couldn’t wait to do the course readings and share my thoughts via assignments. My professors were also incredible, and I would deliberately register for courses taught by the profs I learned the most from, essentially curating my courses for success. I legitimately formed lifelong connections to some of my professors, and the nature of the focused degree also meant that I started to take courses with the same people. Unlike my education degree, where everyone was forced to take the same classes, my B.A. was filled with people who chose to take the same courses. The connections I made through those classes have lasted to this day. As the seminal Brian Adams sings, “those were the best days of my life”.
To be fair, I also got married to my amazing life-partner, worked with great people, and my success in school sent my self-esteem through the stratosphere. I also discovered the Young Canada Works Program, which matched students with jobs in the field of cultural heritage. I ended up working at several museums in some of the most rewarding jobs I have ever had. All things considered, my time in my B.A. was one of the few times in my life where I have been truly, madly, deeply, happy.
After I graduated from my B.A., Liz and decided that we were going to invest as much of our time as possible into travel. We applied for teaching jobs in South Korea and decided that we would take a five and a half-week trip to Costa Rica for our honeymoon. My dream of a master’s degree in Scotland was no longer possible as the cost of completing my B.A. without incurring further student debt had made moving to another country financially impossible.
In anticipation of our trip to Costa Rica, and as a graduation gift, Liz bought me my first camera, the short-lived Nikon J2. The camera was extremely small, had tiny interchangeable lenses, and was pumpkin orange. I took that camera everywhere on our adventures and fell further in love with photography. I photographed graffiti in San Jose, quetzal in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, and poison dart frogs in the jungles on the Osa Peninsula. The trip was incredible, a childhood dream come to life that took us to some of the most biodiverse places on earth. My J2 in hand, photographing wildlife in Costa Rica was the first time I felt like I was doing something I could love for the rest of my days.
In addition to laying the groundwork for a career in wildlife photography, our trip to Costa Rica also changed the course of lives in other ways. While staying at the foot of the Arenal Volcano over Christmas, Elizabeth and I decided we would turn down our jobs in South Korea so that I might capitalize on the momentum of my B.A. and enroll in a master’s program back at the University of Winnipeg. The hope was that with a master’s degree, I might find funding to enroll in a PhD program and complete my doctorate overseas. The events that transpired while in my master’s would not only quell all thoughts of a PhD but would also nearly destroy both my brain and my marriage.
Come back next week for the fourth (because who even likes trilogies anyways) part of my neurodiversity origin story!
You can also head over to Facebook and Instagram to check out more of my work.
