The weight is a gift
The concept of an epiphany is bizarre. To think that in one moment something so powerful will reveal itself to you that it’ll completely alter your thinking is at once ridiculous and awesome. When you consider the biblical definition of an epiphany, that the divine can be revealed to a person, it feels powerful. All encompassing. Let’s keep with the biblical theme for a moment: you’re a random shepherd, as in you raise sheep-not “sheep of my people” sheep, but actual “baa baa” sheep). You’re going about your daily shepherd life, letting your sheep bros graze, watching them like you do, and you’re lost in thought. Long days wandering the countryside mean lots of time to think about your life, your family, the universe. You have a routine of watching these sheep and thinking your thoughts, some of them daily frustrations, others random fantasies. One day, just like any other, you’re watchin your sheep bros heading down the hill and you’re following them when, suddenly, you have a thought that makes you take a step back. We don’t need to get into the specifics of the thought; just know that it’s a thought so powerful that you have to take a moment from shepherding to realize what the fuck just happened. Something, or even ALL things, suddenly make sense. It’s the tetris piece that just disappeared a whole quarter of your mental screen and now you see everything clearly. You were just a shepherd and now…you’re still a shepherd, but you’ve just had an experience so all-encompassing that it overwhelms you. It’s no wonder epiphany is biblical in origin-”what else but a higher power could give us even the briefest moments of clarity”, you ask your shepherd self.
I’ve mentioned this before in a previous blog, but my graduate education was in the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Our curriculum had us going back into philosophy and all of the Greek and Roman shit. I say that because one of the biggest terms in rhetoric is that of kairos-the oversimplified definition of this is the “opportune moment''. I mentioned before that kairos is often spoken of as something we have agency over. We, the rhetors or speakers, take advantage of the opportune moments. [This idea, I feel, comes more from the Comm side of rhetorical studies, which is much more focused on messaging and speech, than the English/Composition side, which tends more towards rhetoric’s connection to pedagogy and the sophists.] But one of the newer developments in rhetoric is the idea that we actually have no control or agency over kairos; rather, kairos wills itself to be revealed to the rhetor with the right attunement. Meaning that you don’t dictate when and how kairos reveals itself, but you’re more apt to catch that revealing with the right disposition and training. It’s what Mario Untersteiner, via Heiddegger, referred to as “unconcealing”. It’s more of an ephemeral thing than a constant. I like the idea of kairos as connected to an epiphany. When things unconceal themselves in such a way that the fog in your brain has temporarily dissipated and you can finally see things in sharp definition. Zizek refers to this as access to “the real”-ideas or feelings that feel so capital-T True that it overwhelms you. The True has revealed itself to you and you just can’t believe you’ve never seen it before. Lately, I’ve felt that kairos has allowed more and more epiphanies to unconceal themselves, if you will: the fact that I like to write now, or that I want to write fiction. But in talking to my therapist, I’ve found one epiphany that has overtaken the rest: being diagnosed with ADHD.
I remember being in the sixth grade when I first learned what “procrastination” was: as is normal with any pre-teen, a once diligent and studious kid was starting to struggle. Grades were slipping. Assignments were being turned in late. I was getting in trouble at home. I remember my dad asking me why I wasn’t just doing my work as soon as I got it and not knowing the answer. I didn’t know why my brain was doing this and the worst part was that I could see it as it was happening: I’d get an assignment, see the deadline, and think, “ok, I should just start on it tonight” and I just…wouldn’t start on it. Then I’d keep thinking, “just START on it, ok?” And I still wouldn’t do it. So now I’ve got two voices in my head arguing with each other about why we’re not doing our fucking work and, after a few days of this, I’d start getting stomach cramps and having to ask permission to go to the bathroom every morning because what I NOW know is anxiety was turning my brain into a fucking honeybadger. As I got older, I began to think that it was me “rebelling” against the academic expectations that my family and I had set-my dad was always a diligent student and did extremely well in college. Cut to his firstborn who was collecting A’s on his report card like it was no big deal, and suddenly I had family members talking about me going to an ivy league university when I was fucking 11 years-old. Hell, I remember getting into the Duke T.I.P. in seventh grade and my parents being super proud of me. I still don’t know exactly what, if anything, the TIP experience taught me as I don’t remember shit about it. Yet, that same year, I was getting in trouble for “acting up” in class. There were parent-teacher conferences. There was getting in trouble for being “lazy” and I’m sure there was some of that because I was becoming a fucking teenager and teenagers are supposed to be lazy shitheads. But not when you’re being set up to become the family’s super-genius. No room for fuckery for YOU. YOU just have to stop procrastinating and get your shit together.
This isn’t to say my parents were to blame for this by any means-I think they did a great job raising both me and my sister. This is more of a reflection of what we knew about mental illness and neurodivergence at the time, which was precisely dick. All I remember at the time was that the “hyper” kids in my school were given Ritalin to calm them the fuck down, lest they be “classroom distractions”. My “procrastination”, it turns out, was feeding into my self worth; I’d feel guilty for putting things off, get frustrated with myself for not just fucking doing the thing then and there. I’d half-ass things and mostly still do well in school-
“But just imagine how much further you could go if you just got your shit together.”
When I look back on that now, as a 40 year-old college educator who regularly goes to therapy and takes Buproprion daily, my epiphany is that all of that was living with ADHD. I watch myself put off even the most menial task day after day and beat myself up over it until it gets so big I HAVE to address it and then I get even more frustrated with myself afterward for just how much easier I would’ve made things for myself had I just “done the thing”. That’s my neurodivergence at the wheel. I’m convinced it’s one of the main factors I went into both journalism and then academia: they were both fields where I could live and die by my own maladaptive behaviors. As long as I got my weekly stories in, it didn’t matter that I’d been up until 2AM writing the stories that were going to print at 10AM, as long as I finished them. Same with the master’s thesis and dissertation: don’t worry about how or when you get it done so much as just getting it done. Epiphany: I was building out a life where living with my “procrastination” was workable.
The infuriating thing about finally getting access to mental health counseling is that you just shake your head at how much easier things could have been for you had you had that access earlier. That’s the epiphany that stops me in my tracks: that I’ve been running a race with weights strapped to my legs this whole fucking time makes me seethe with rage. Two of the most difficult things I’ve encountered in therapy are:
Learning to accept the way things have turned out
Giving myself grace for they way I’ve been moving through the world
With this epiphany, knowing that bit-by-bit, I’ve been slowly creating an environment that would fit my own neurodivergence without wondering how much further I could have gone, even WITH all of the advantages I was given, is really fucking hard. But if nothing else, I can at least say, “hey, you were still able to do so much. And still can do so much too…”
