Untangling the Gord

Take a Chill Pill

I heard this a lot as I was growing up. Sometimes is was phrased as a question: “Gord, did you take your chill pill?” I can still hear that question in my mom’s voice, as well as in the voice of some of my friends in junior high and high school.

In my house, and eventually in my social circle, a chill pill was not just a powerfully uncool metaphor for taking it easy or settling down. A chill pill was a quick-acting Sudafed – usually the Equate generic triprolidine-pseudoephedrine combo, which could be purchased in bulk back before the meth epidemic. If I took one of these, the pseudoephedrine, which is closely related to amphetamines, calmed me right down. If I didn’t, well… then everyone around me knew I had forgotten to take it because I couldn’t sit still and shut up.

I was actually surprised as a young adult to find that Sudafed acts as a stimulant for most people. “It’s legal speed,” explained an older, more experienced coworker one day. I thought it was an odd thing to say since, if anything, it helped me sleep.

Looking back, it’s so obvious what was going on – I had ADHD. My little grey cells don’t make enough dopamine, so I was compensating with more stimuli – more talking, more moving, more thinking, more doing. When I took my chill pill, the pseudoephedrine stimulated the release of dopamine in the same way that Adderall does now (but to a lesser extent). The result was the same – I could chill out and just breath, rather than feeling like my brain and body were stuck in first gear.

So why wasn’t it caught back then? The short answer is I don’t know. The longer answer is complicated. My older sister was diagnosed with ADHD about the same time I was finishing kindergarten. She had to repeat second grade, while I represented the school in a spelling bee the next year.

Incidentally, our IQs were tested that year, and the results came back within one point of each other. My sister is no dunce, but her ADHD manifested in poor performance in school. I’m also no dunce, but my ADHD wasn’t diagnosed until after I had nearly failed out of both my undergraduate program, and my master’s program a decade later. When I was hyper, everyone thought “that’s just Gord” instead of “maybe this is a symptom of something” because I was a straight-A student (who also had occasional, minor disciplinary problems).

Anyway, my point is that ADHD doesn’t always look the way you expect it to. My parents, teachers, and doctors all missed it for most of my life. It hid as my need for a chill pill, and later as unfulfilled potential and a bit of an alcohol problem in college.

Who knows what path my life would have taken if someone had noticed? We’ll never know. But I’m not bitter – just calmer thanks to my new and improved chill pills. Better living through chemistry, y’all.

The Belonging Kind

A couple of realizations hit me the other day: 1) I have a paranoid streak that is more than an occasional thing, and 2) I am especially paranoid about relationships and social situations.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the root of my paranoia is a feeling that I don’t quite belong in a group. It’s almost like I don’t quite speak the language well enough to catch the idioms and subtleties of everyday conversation. Cues to context, subtext, and pretext that let a normal person understand what a person means when they speak do not come naturally to me.

It probably doesn’t help that I was frequently made fun of as a kid because I didn’t act quite right. I’ve just always seen the world a little differently than everyone else, and important bits have mystified me at the worst possible moments. As a result, when I feel I’m missing something or that I don’t belong, I start to think people are talking shit about me, but in a figurative language I don’t understand.

My paranoia has been so bad at times that I’ve been tempted to bug my office so I can hear what my coworkers are saying when I’m not around. I didn’t do that – partly because it’s crazy pants and partly because I think I’m better off not knowing what people really think of me. When my wife and I were first dating, I showed up at her work and she was in a closed door meeting. I was convinced she was having sex with a coworker behind that closed door (instead of the far more likely explanation that she was just having a meeting). On another occasion, I did buy a bug and was going to place it in a friend’s office because I was convinced he was betraying me. Actually, it turned out he was, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the point is I struggle with paranoia because of my sense that I don’t belong. This brings me to the title of this post: The Belonging Kind is a short story by William Gibson and John Shirley. I first read it about 10 years ago in Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome – which is quite good, by the way. I won’t spoil the surprise, but I myself was surprised just a few days ago when I learned that the story is a “quiet horror” story rather than an insightful sci-fi story about finding a sense of belonging. The irony was not lost on me. At least, I don’t think it was.

Hello, World

Welcome to my new blog, Untangling the Gord. I am your host, TangledGord, and no that isn’t any semblance of my real name. I discovered long ago that anonymity is generally a good thing when posting about personal stuff on the internet. You can call me Gord for now, but I might be brave enough to share my real first name later.

So what’s with the name? No, I didn’t misspell gourd, which is a common euphemism for one’s head – especially when there is something wrong with it. The name is a reference to the Gordian Knot of Greek mythology, which according to legend was an impossibly tangled knot that only “the chosen one” could untangle. None other than Alexander the Great himself solved the knot either by cutting it with his sword or by pulling the lynch pin around which it was tangled. Basically, he pulled a Captain Kirk a la the Kobyashi Maru dilemma, and rather than solving the unsolvable problem, he literally hacked the scenario.

But enough about the fictional man-whore of the USS Enterprise and the very real military genius of Macedonia.

The Gordian knot is basically a metaphor for an intractable problem. I chose it for this blog after one of my recent sessions with my psychiatric nurse. I was discussing my self-doubt and second-guessing about my mental health and how I didn’t know how many of my problems are real vs. imagined vs. created by my seeming obsession about my mental health.

It felt like, and still feels like, I pull on a thread here, and the knot gets worse over there. If I work on the knot over there, I pull the thread back into the knot in yet another spot. I wish there was a simple “cut the knot” solution (other than suicide, which I’ll get to) but after the better part of a decade in therapy of one form or another, I feel just as tangled as ever.

So that’s what this is all about. Tugging on a thread here. Poking at the knot there. Looking at it from yet another angle. Talking about what I’m seeing and experiencing. Maybe a little discussion about your knots and how your progress is coming along.

If that is something that sounds interesting to you, then please subscribe. I look forward to sitting a while with you and hopefully easing the tension out of this knot in my mind.