I told my mother of my diagnosis. She seemed surprised and didn’t remember the many times she had come in to school on Parents’ Day and wondered why I was seated separate from the class. But mothers remember what they want.
A few days later when I was on the phone with my sister Carol, she told me she’d had a conversation with our mom about my ADD. Then she said to me, “Don’t you think you were seated separate from the rest of the class because you were always trying to be the center of attention?”
This made me feel like my brain was splitting open. When asked these kinds of loaded questions by my family members, I immediately go on the defensive. I was hurt at the insensitivity of what seemed like her invalidation of what I was telling her, as if my issues were “all in my head.” So many things that I felt, thought, or experienced as a child were attributed by my family to being all in my head. When they said something hurtful and I got upset, it was all in my head. When I felt like someone was making fun of me, it was all in my head. If my mother criticized me and I reacted negatively or defensively, I was too sensitive. If I was nervous or upset about something like a performance or show I was about to do, my father would say to me, “Why are you nervous? You have no reason to be nervous.”
For a huge portion of my life one of my greatest challenges has been to flatline myself emotionally around my family, because when I expressed my feelings I was told that I was either overreacting or being hysterical. Maybe this was because I bottled so much up that when feelings finally did come through it was in the form of an explosion. Nevertheless, my sister Carol and my mother believed that I was always trying to be the center of attention, and this simply wasn’t true.
“No, actually, I think I was made uncomfortable by the fact that I received too much attention.” My sister didn’t seem to believe me.
“It’s okay to want a lot of attention. I did. Everyone wants a lot of attention.”
“Maybe you wanted a lot of attention. Perhaps that’s why you were the president of your class from sixth grade till the end of high school and were voted most popular in your class. I don’t think I would have spent most of my teenage years hiding out in my best girlfriend’s room reading gothic romance novels and listening to Elton John records if I wanted so much attention.”
THE FIRST TIME I WAS SEPARATED FROM THE class was in first grade. I think I felt very lonely then because I wasn’t sure exactly where I fit in. Generally, I found myself befriending the less outgoing, shy people in the class. I was very good at bringing them out of their shells and making them laugh. I was attracted to outsiders. I always felt very skittish when surrounded by too many people—when I felt like I had too many eyes upon me.
I have a cousin Pam who’s three months younger than I and who I always felt extremely close to. When I wasn’t with her I imagined she was with me, and I took great comfort in her presence. I distinctly recall arranging it so that I had to sit at the end of the row of desks in order that there would be room for a desk for my invisible cousin to sit next to me. There was an imaginary desk for an imaginary friend in an open space, which made me feel safe. I quickly learned that if I got stuck between two people all I had to do was engage them in too much conversation and my desk would be moved. I would be seated on my own and have a space to create a world around me where I felt safe, in spite of the fact that I had a “behavioral problem.” When on my own I was perfectly fine. When left to myself without the distractions of so many people around me I was much better able to focus on the tasks at hand. I realize now that my “need for attention” was really more of a need for simplicity.
I STARTED ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN 1969. AT THAT time, people weren’t diagnosing children with mental health issues the way that they do today. We were just “trouble.” I mention this because Carol, during the same recent conversation, told me a story about a boy who grew up next door to us who had been my archnemesis and who had recently been arrested for impersonating a drug enforcement agent out on Route 81. Evidently they had nabbed him somewhere between the Valley Mall and Martinsburg, West Virginia. According to my sister he had been operating under an assumed code name: Tango.
“Did you hear about Michael Hunter?”
Immediately I felt a fluttering in my stomach. I hadn’t seen Michael Hunter anywhere other than in my dreams for a good long time. In spite of the fact that I hated him, we had been lovers, if you could call it that, from the ages of eleven to sixteen. My sister knew there had been a lot of tension between us when we were kids, but I don’t know if she really knew the full extent of our relationship. Nonetheless we got a good laugh that he had given himself the code name “Tango,” and wondered if it came from the 1980s Kurt Russell movie Tango and Cash in which Kurt Russell plays a narcotics detective who is paired up with a partner he can’t stand but with whom he has to work in order to clear his name. Clearly, Michael Hunter was living a life of delusion and may have had some kind of psychotic break.
It is a terrible thing to laugh at another’s misfortunes, but Carol and I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdities of Michael Hunter’s arrest that day. As soon as I got off the phone, I went online and found a newspaper article about his arrest with the headline “Man Posing as Cop Nabbed,” along with his mug shot. His face looked tragic. He had become a middle-aged bald man. Instead of feeling any kind of satisfaction I felt tremendous sadness because I knew that he had been through hell. I did think, however, that calling himself Tango showed that somewhere inside he still had a touch of panache. I thought of Kurt Russell who had gone from playing a boy who could make himself invisible in Disney’s Now You See Him, Now You Don’t to being a gun-toting action adventure hero in such films as Escape from New York and Death Proof. The newspaper said that Tango was wearing a bulletproof vest, fatigues, and a green shirt that read JOINT TERRORIST TASK FORCE when he was arrested. He probably thought he was starring in Death Proof 2: The Sequel.
It was reported that the police had found handcuffs, two-way radios, and various law enforcement equipment in Michael’s blue BMW. Reading this, many memories came flooding back. This definitely wasn’t the first time “Tango” had impersonated a law officer. Tango and I had a history of arrest ourselves. When we were young, one of the games we liked to play involved one of us posing as an undercover police officer and the other as a criminal. Many summer afternoons were spent getting frisked in his parents’ two-car garage, where invariably one of us was found with a concealed weapon in his pants.
It was all too much. After reading the article I called my sister back. Carol is now an elementary school vice principal who deals with lots of medicated children. Looking back, we both agreed that Michael had probably had mental health issues since childhood.
“YOU WALK LIKE A GIRL.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. You walk like a girl.”
“Well, I’m a boy, and this is how I walk. So I don’t walk like a girl, I walk like a boy.”
I had this conversation with a little girl when I was nine years old, in the fourth grade. I remember the spot where it happened. It was in the doorway at Pangborn Boulevard Elementary School as we were exiting onto the playground. She didn’t say it to be rude. It was just an observation. For me, it was more complex. I was simultaneously flattered and confused. I hadn’t been aware that I walked like a girl. I don’t even know that I aspired to walk like a girl. But I’m sure I never tried to walk like a boy. I didn’t like boys. I’d never really liked boys.
FOR THE FIRST PART OF MY LIFE, I THINK MY role was very clearly defined: I was my mother’s most glamorous accessory. I was cute, fairly at ease socially, and I began talking at a very young age. My parents were delighted that their first child was a boy and it was several more years until my sister came along, so I was the focus of quite