Breathe
By Sofía Guadarrama Collado
It is 12:52 a.m. and I am about to begin my 51st opinion, or to be clearer, my 51st column, a number that coincides with the title of this wonderful page.
Today I will not talk about politics or history. Today I want to write about the importance in my life of writing this column.
I started writing long before I learned to write. In the bunker inside my head there was imagination when I was five, six, seven or eight years old. It is hard to remember how old I was when I began to imagine stories furtively, as if it were a sin, a lie or a foolishness, because at home there were no books and no one to read me a single one.
I was not fortunate enough to be born into a reading family or to grow up among readers. In my world, people with a university degree were looked up to with admiration and sometimes envy. For the marginalized, high school is already a luxury.
The longest memory I have in my mind must be when I was about eight years old. Maybe seven. I was in the classroom imagining a story when the teacher interrupted me. Yes,that insolent one dared to interrupt my creative process to ask me something I cared less about than a mustard seed. Not only that, she haughtily demanded that I answer her question.
And what was I supposed to do, pull the answer out of my sleeve? How the hell was I supposed to know what the hell they were talking about in class? I had been bored in the classroom for three or four years. At home no one checked my homework or cared about that abstract noun called learning. And neither did my teachers, because they passed me by the skin of my teeth.
It took more than 30 years for a psychologist to diagnose me with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
My ADHD caused me dozens of problems not only at school but also in my love relationships. I've lost count of the number of times one of my partners has complained to me about my lack of attention. "You just don't listen to me." "I do listen to you, but I get distracted and it's hard for me to come back. what were we talking about?"
My ADHD made it difficult for me to learn subjects that did not interest me (almost all of them), made me fail fourth grade and dozens of exams. Not because I was dumb or stupid, just distracted.
My ADHD prevents me from remembering first and last names. If I meet someone and that person tells me his or her name, it is very likely that at that moment my brain will not register it, even if I say hello with a "mucho gusto" and continue with the conversation. In five minutes I will have to embarrassedly ask them to repeat their name. If I see a movie I have to ask my girlfriend what the actors are called in real life and the protagonists in fiction.
My ADHD hides words from me. Extremely simple words that I simply forget just when I need them the most. So, I made a list on my cell phone of words that I frequently forget. Arbitrary, discipline, ideological indoctrination, guild, abject, omnipotent, obelisk, apologia, acrylic. Why these words? I do not know. They must be codas.
My ADHD distracts me while watching TV, listening to a radio show, when reading a book, when writing, when talking to someone, when in an interview; even in moments of passion. Oops. (Sigh and exhale). It's not funny to me, let alone my partner.
My ADHD has allowed me to ply the two best trades in the world: writing and history. Incredibly, history sticks to me like chewing gum. Writing is the craft I can do best, mainly because I love it and I was born for it; and secondly because I can distract myself whenever I feel like it: I can read a note in the newspaper, distract myself, tend to my dogs, go back to my desk, read news, hop on Facebook, distract myself, jump to X, check my messages on WhatsApp, open my file to start my writing, distract myself, make a bank payment, distract myself, make a call, distract myself, read a book, distract myself, read the news, get bored, listen to the radio, get distracted, open a video on YouTube, choose some newscast to listen to, read the note, open the file for my writing, think I'm going to write, review what I wrote the day before, get distracted again, close YouTube, answer some mail, play some wordless music, go back to my writing, drum my fingers on the keyboard, and so on, ad infinitum. Mothers! It's already 7:50 p.m. the next day and I have to send my column to Soledad.
ADHD is not a disability. Nor is it related to IQ. But it does make us perfectionists. ADHD does not make us less intelligent. We are simply born with hundreds of channels on the right side of the brain.
This does not mean that anyone who is frequently distracted has ADHD. Nor does it mean that people with low IQ have ADHD. They simply do not have a high IQ and are distractible.
And as always happens to me in my writing, I got distracted and got off the initial topic. I was telling you about the way I started writing before I learned to write. I think I was eight years old when I imagined my first complete story without writing a word. Before that, I could imagine micro stories at any time.
In those years I didn't know that stories could be written, because I didn't know literature. I didn't know that this profession existed. In 1989 my mother took me illegally to the United States. I was 12 years old. I didn't know English. In the school - Baker middle school - where she enrolled me, there were not many Hispanics. The school had to assign a teacher just for me. The following year, we moved houses and I moved schools. At Wynn Seale Junior High School there were many more Hispanics and a class called ESL, English as a Second language. By then I had learned English.
Then in my class schedule there was a class called Reading class. My first thought was, "Reading class? But I already know how to read.
Upon entering, the teacher informed us that there would be no homework in her class, that we did not need to bring books or notebooks, and that we could leave everything in our lockers. The school assigned books on a loan basis. For reading class we had been given a copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson.
-They are not going to read here," the teacher announced. I will read to them," she threatened. It is forbidden for them to anticipate. Forbidden to read at home. -Then she worked magic. She managed to hold my attention for the entire class. The first thing I did when I got home that afternoon was to open the book and read.
I cannot tell you my entire life story in one column. I will end by sharing that, at the beginning of this year, a trio of infamous people (named Soraya, Andrea and David) launched a campaign of discrimination against me and destroyed my life. I had 18 books published and my career was in sawdust. People with ADHD tend to obsess over our worries and constantly go over them in our minds, which is extremely painful.
One of my favorite activities is swimming. I have practiced it since I was 14 years old when my mother enrolled me in the YWCA. Swimming goes great with ADHD. It improves cognitive functions, reduces stress, improves lower body coordination and laterality and helps connect the hemispheres. I can swim and swim without being distracted by a thousand thoughts. But at the beginning of this year, swimming was not so pleasant, because all I could think about was the infamy that had been done to me. And I cried. I cried a lot. I could not write. I had no head to write and no publishing house to publish.
Until one day I received a call from Pamela Cerdeira and she rescued me: she invited me to write for Opinion 51. Thanks to this column I was able to keep my mind occupied with something other than the deluge that had flooded my life.
Thank you, Pamela.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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