Pathological demand avoidance

In an irony so clanging it would wake the dead, I've been putting this one off for ages.

About a month after starting my Substack, I connected with the excellent

Maggie Jon

. We compared ADHD war stories for a bit, before Maggie mentioned pathological demand avoidance (PDA). Like so many ADHD traits¹, I had no idea it even existed until I was hit around the head with it. A massive great bat strobe went off in my head, and I remember telling Maggie I would write about it soon. Then I shoved it to the back of the queue and wrote about a whole load of other things instead.

That’s because talking about pathological demand avoidance forces me to talk about some of my very worst behaviour. It is the root cause of so much juvenile selfishness and it leaves me feeling quite shameful. It reduces me - a grown man with creaky knees, a preposterously grey beard, and two decanters - to mewling like a child who’s been told to clean their room. I am not proud of myself one jot when PDA kicks in. Prefixing words with ‘man’ to create new words may be a woeful 21st century quirk, but sometimes the shoe fits. PDA turns me into a fucking great manbaby.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

You know in Shaun of the Dead when Diane is coaching them all through their zombie impressions on the way to The Winchester? Nick Frost’s Ed replies “I’ll do it on the night.” That’s my immediate, go-to response to literally anything that doesn’t immediately fill me with joy. Tasks that aren’t all singing all dancing fun, with me Greatest Showman-ing the entire piece to completion, get pushed to the back of the queue. Were they diners in a restaurant, they would be on a two top by the toilets, tutting over their complimentary bread.

When approaching a new project my script is much loved and dogeared.

“When do you need this?”

“As soon as possible, please.”

“Give. Me. A. Date.”

“Okay, the 12th.”

“Cool, you shall have it on the 11th.”

This tried and tested recipe for success leaves me, inevitably, piling up all of my work in the corner and getting to it five minutes before it’s due. My contributions to the daily stand up at work often go something like this:

Monday: “Just business as usual today.”

Tuesday: “Still just business as usual.”

Wednesday: “Little bit more BAU.”

Thursday: “18 page updates, three stakeholder meetings, and that whole site audit you wanted done.”

And a partridge in a fucking pear tree, indeed.

Once you dig at this sort of thing, you see just how deep the roots go into your past. When I was a kid, homework was anathema. I knew it had to be done, but it provoked an almost physical revulsion in me when I sat down to do it, like when they tried to christen Damien in The Omen. There was no fucking fun to be had brushing up on the industrial revolution², especially when Street Fighter II was right there next to me. Chun-Li³ kicked the shit out of Isambard Kingdom Brunel each and every time.

Did you ever see the (possibly apocryphal) snippet of a typical day in the life of Hunter S. Thompson? The great hedonist apparently slept until 3pm before pumping himself full of stimulants, gorging like an emperor around dinner time, and loading up on more booze and stimulants as the night wore on. Only then would he finally sit down to write. He’d finish his working day with a soak in the hot tub around sunrise. My exam revision was carried out in a similar fashion, just swap Chartreuse and cocaine for Jolt cola and hobnobs, and the nice long soak in a hot tub for thin sleep while bathed in a cold sweat. Those minor details aside, I’m basically exactly the same as old Hunter.

Credit: The Independent

It was the only way I knew to get it done. Those sunny spring evenings were for fun things, self reward and grabbing up every single drop of dopamine that I could. The last thing on my mind was some abstract concept of future success that may or may not shape my entire life. Only once the night came down could I get my brain focused on serious matters, it simply didn’t work any other way. It’s a minor miracle that I managed to get any qualifications at all, considering how frantic my preparation was. Thank you, natural intelligence.

I have adapted very little over the intervening 30-ish years.

I had two weeks off work over the festive period. The day before New Year’s Eve, I crafted a rarely seen list of things than needed doing. Nothing massive - clean the car, get some decent plonk for new year, eat some fruit, that sort of thing. I smashed that list out of the park on a single day, with the exception of one item. I have forms to fill out. Stupid fucking forms that need filling out with an actual fucking pen.

I am currently unmedicated for ADHD. Feels like a big step to chemically alter something that’s been ticking along nicely⁴ for 47 years, but at the same time maybe it’ll help me discover the best version of myself. That’s what I’m supposed to be striving to find, right? This internal debate has raged back and forth for months, although in November I at least saw my GP to discuss accessing Right to Choose via the NHS.

The forms to facilitate this have sat on my desk for weeks now. At least three times in the last week, while I’ve been playing video games and popping marzipan in my gob at every opportunity, The Muse has wandered past the living room and said “You should fill those forms in while you’re off.” Each time I responded “Yeah, I will” and then went back to Assassin’s Creed⁵. I’m officially back at work now, and still those forms sit on my desk, glaring at me, daring me to be a grown up. I’m currently ignoring them and clearing out my email archives instead. That’ll show ‘em.

It seems that the more important the job, the more likely it is to crash off my mental highways and into some bottomless canyon. The worst (best?) example of this came when The Muse and I were buying our first home together. I was responsible for booking viewings and bullying liaising with estate agents. You know, the fun stuff. The Muse handled literally everything else. When we found the right place the fun stuff naturally came to an end. One day I came home from work to a simple request: “Can we have a conversation about the details of the mortgage?”

I completely shut down. My brain refused to contemplate this new and horrendous bit of life admin. It was too huge; an Everest of responsibility and commitment, looming over my tiny mind, promising instant hypoxia if I dared try to summit it. But I couldn’t vocalise any of that. Instead I simply dropped my laptop bag, went into the bedroom and laid down on the bed.

What followed was a brief melodrama akin to the video for Radiohead’s Just: my long-suffering wife standing over me asking me what was wrong, while I stared into the middle distance and responded with “Nothing, I just want to be left alone.” Ferris Mewler, our idiot cat at the time, sat in the doorway idly watching on, the feline Thom Yorke in all this. It took about an hour for me to untangle the knot in my head and finally explain myself.

That was about six years ago, long before diagnosis. However, it provided an object lesson into how my head works. They may seem simple to most, but some tasks are gargantuan endurance events that I have to be rigorously prepared for. Special forces training for the limbic system. If you‘ve got something important to discuss with me, then signpost that shit like it’s services on the M1. I need to see it all the way on the horizon. I need to brace myself, I need a run up that would shame a spin bowler, and I need regular sandwich breaks.

1. No two people experience the same ADHD. We’re navigating the same sea, but we’ve all got different boats.

2. Such an idiot child. History is brilliant.

3. Don’t let the Zangief beard fool you, I nearly always played as Chun-Li. You wanna make something of that?

4. Shut up laughing at the back.

5. My favourite video game franchise ever - historical accuracy and spectacular bloodletting in perfect harmony.