[jaycuda]

The chains of ADD and ADHD combined have flashed before my eyes for the past two weeks after a lifetime struggling to figure out why I can’t function in society.

I grew up thinking my eyes were able to dart lasers at objects. I twisted my mouth for no apparent reason as my siblings, cousins, and other kids in the neighborhood mocked and ridiculed me. I remember rolling down streets inside 55 gallon garbage drums and smelling like a pig pen. I remember hanging out with a bunch of kids that wore no shoes and who stole chickens, mangoes and oranges but I don’t remember anything about my early school days.

When I was nine, my family left the town that would soon become for Pablo Escobar what Chicago had once been to Al Capone. I arrived to a racially divided neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ in the late sixties to find that I was too white to fit in with the blacks and Puerto Rican’s and not white enough to fit in with the whites. I got jumped constantly by someone’s racial fist. In school I did terrible. I fantasized and daydreamed but I didn’t know any English so I figured it was normal. When two of my sisters caught up with me in fifth grade, I copied their homework and cheated to squeeze by in school; I graduated last in grammar school. In the neighborhood I learned to thrive by being reckless and by constantly searching for adrenaline. I focused on money. I delivered newspapers, washed cars, shoveled snow, shoplifted, stole. I entered my adolescence not being good in normal social situations—only good when drunk or drugged on a runaway train.

I got kicked out of two high schools and dropped out of two night schools, and then cheated on my GED to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a soldier. The thought of fighting for freedom and killing the enemy was sold to me hook, line and sinker and I took it wholeheartedly at seventeen years of age, I ended up in the United States Air Force, the only branch that doesn’t fight, unfortunately. I got bored and then discharged.

Before my eighteenth birthday, my father who had not talked to me in years embraced me and brought me into the world of drug trafficking where I fulfilled my dream of becoming a soldier, his soldier, his mule, a job with the adrenaline and excitement that I so much desired and was able to do. Not only that but I found the belonging and the love of my father. I had found myself.

At 21 I got arrested and given the maximum sentence allowed by law for flying into Florida with 268 kilos of cocaine. I was sent to level five and six maximum security penitentiary of Leavenworth despite being a first-time, non-violent offender. Prison life with the constant drama and dangers lurking at every corner did not seem to bother me much. What I had trouble with was with friendships, with bonding, with being able to relate like other inmates seemed to be able to. I suffered inside wondering why I felt so weird and incompetent.

I was released at 34 years of age and deported back to Colombia two months after the killing of Pablo Escobar when the city was a war zone. The bullets didn’t seem to bother me as much as the stress of integrating socially but then one of my girlfriends got pregnant and I had my first relationship ever. I had never shared a bed with a woman in 34 years and I gave the poor woman hell. When my daughter was born, I decided I would not smuggle drugs ever again. I left a toxic life on the edge and embarked on becoming a good husband and a father. I did good for about fifteen years; I worked two and three jobs without a problem. My wife must be OCD because she picked up everything I left on the floor.

A mid-life crisis hit me like a switch and I impulsively (like on one thought) went back to claim my youth—the six pack, the drugs, the booze, the women, the guns. I could focus on making money and was thriving in Europe but I was a broken man inside. How much money, sex and drugs can a man take and not find himself? Death from a quick bullet seemed better that a slow death from emotional and spiritual bankruptcy, a slow death from incompetency…but I think I wanted to at least know who I was and so I stopped drinking and drugging and entered numerous twelve steps recovery programs. I dropped everything in my life including family responsibilities and even forgot about making money. After five years of doing nothing but meetings on recovery, an Inner Child appeared and showed me glimpses of who I was. It wasn’t much but enough for me to take an interest in doing the right thing for my family, my son eleven, my daughter twenty and lastly, their mother, my ex, who took me back one year later.

Three years ago exactly, in December of 2016, I found out that I had been wrongly deported by US immigration and that I had been a United States citizen since 1978. I was given a US passport by the US embassy but immediately incarcerated in Central America, and then extradited back to the US, where I got locked up again over some bogus charge (long story but the Parole thought I had felt the country when Immigration had actually deported me). Prison at 56 years of age didn’t seem to bother me but once released in July of 2017, my life became hell again once I lost the structure, the discipline, and my family. It took the government two years to give me my citizenship. I struggled from impulsivity but kept going to meetings: I needed more work on my never-ending defects of character so I kept pounding at my recovery. I have not seen my wife and my son in three years. I seem to be going in circles again.

Two weeks ago someone left a book on ADD in one of the twelve step recovery rooms and I took it out of curiosity. I get 14 out of 14 on the self-examination and I get close to 100 per cent on just about every on-line ADD test. I don’t even try anymore. It’s like I know because now five decades of my life make sense. I can connect all the dots and see all the patterns. I have never been able to see my past with clarity until now.

It has not been easy turning on a dime, going from I’m a lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing, ex-convict whose getting paid what he deserves in life to going to the extreme grief and the loss of realizing that much of my life’s troubles have been due to a possible neurological problem that doesn’t allow me to measure the consequences of my actions. It seems unreal. It seems like another one of my cop-outs. It’s really overwhelming to think that the journey to self discovery and recovery will have to be started all over again with this possible ADD/ADHD.

My son also had Tourette around the same time I had mine when I was a child and I only hope that I might be able to help my son so that he doesn’t have to go through what I went through. It would be so much easier to think that I may be making excuses for my past actions and be able to just move on blissfully ignorant and maybe think that some day I’ll figure it out. But I can’t. There’s an empty hole inside of me. There is anger beyond anything I’ve ever felt because I could have known, because someone could have seen that maybe I wasn’t so stupid or lazy. I might have been rescued or saved or helped.

I’m hoping that in writing about this and sharing, I might find some like-minded individuals to maybe help me understand that I’m not crazy. Am I making this up or can this be true? Can anyone relate? Can it be possible that at 58 years of life, I have finally ripped through the thick concrete walls, and the steel bars of my imprisoned life inside a brain that has become my warden. Is this ADD/ADHD for real? I have read that many professionals think it’s made up by Big Pharma to sell drugs.

I have not been formally diagnosed and I know how complicated my issues are for any quick test so I wonder if I’ll ever know if this might be true or just a figment of my imagination. Please help if you can relate.

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