My ADHD: A Scenic Route Taken by a Lunatic with the Window Down

Creativity does not march in formation; it dances drunk in the street.

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I must confess something without ceremony: I have ADHD. This revelation will shock precisely no one who’s been trapped in conversation with me for more than forty-five seconds. If consistency and coherence were my crowning virtues, I’d be chiselling neat, lapidary¹ phrases into marble for the benefit of future schoolchildren.

Instead, my intellectual calling card is to veer off the highway of thought, take the exit ramp for no reason at all, pull into a cul-de-sac, hop out of the car, knock on a stranger’s door, and interrogate them about their wallpaper pattern—before roaring back onto the freeway to assure you that this was, in fact, germane to the point.

And it is germane. You may not see it, but I do: the hidden footpaths, the crooked alleys, the lightly trodden goat-tracks of thought that, in my head at least, connect the wallpaper of Mrs Scipio’s front hall to the global crisis of the West’s dwindling civilizational stamina.

You might call it “distraction.” I call it reconnaissance.

This drives some people mad. I once went on a radio show with my friend Jack, who, after enduring an hour of my conversational meanderings, informed me—without malice, but with the haunted eyes of a man who’d survived a siege—that while my writing is admirably straight-lined, my speaking style is “a sort of scenic route taken by a lunatic with the window down.”

And maybe that’s why, back in college, when I was drunk (a more frequent event than lunar eclipses), people swore I made more sense. This is not the compliment it sounds like. I’m not about to prescribe gin as the miracle cure for ADHD—unless Pfizer or Moderna wish to bankroll the clinical trial, in which case I’ll nobly volunteer. But for now, let’s assume that turning my bloodstream into a gin and tonic is the most reckless shortcut to “linear coherence” since Hemingway tried to proofread drunk.

There may, however, be a genetic breadcrumb trail for this restless, zigzagging brain of mine. I was adopted, though years later my birth mother turned up—actually she tracked me down, which is another saga entirely.

God bless her: a woman of undeniable brilliance, or at least intermittent flashes of it, like a lighthouse whose bulb was forever on the fritz. She lived squarely in that perilous no-man’s-land between “eccentric” and “please keep her away from the matches,” which, in retrospect, explains a great deal.

I remember her wearing her coat backwards because she insisted it kept her warmer. It also looked like a straitjacket. She happily picked fruit out of a ditch and once asked at a restaurant if she could have “seconds”—and she wasn’t joking. She admitted she’d toyed with the idea of an abortion, that would be my abortion—“I thought about messing around down there,” as she put it—but that never happened. So my twin and I stumbled out alive from her distracted plans and wayward womb.

As for my biological father, I never met him, but apparently, he was a gifted but misanthropic engineer, the kind of chap who designs bridges but resents the fact that people insist on driving across them.

He hired my mother to babysit, and… well, let’s just say the arrangement eventually included extracurricular activities not normally listed under “get them fed, into bed by eight, and don’t let them play in traffic.”

And here’s where the narrative veers into territory that sounds less like a sepia-toned family history and more like a draft script for 1970s Scandinavian porn. Which, I now realise, means I’m doing the very thing I am writing about—going off track. Sorry.

This essay is supposed to be about ADHD, not my suspiciously cinematic conception. So let me retreat to the safer ground of “distraction,” which, as you’ve noticed, I’ve just demonstrated in action.

I can always claim it’s genetic. But even if you deny me the dignity of ADHD as a blessing, I insist it’s not a defect. It’s the turbocharger strapped to the back of my brain.

Evidence That Would Make a Bureaucrat Weep

The sneer from the productivity cult is predictable: “Show me the data.” Very well. A 2020 review of 31 studies found that those with ADHD traits excel at divergent thinking—generating many original ideas—though they lag in “convergent thinking” (arriving neatly at one correct answer). Translation: we can invent fifty ways to open a tin of soup, but don’t ask us to pick just one.

College students with ADHD scored higher than their peers in conceptual expansion—stretching an idea beyond its conventional limits—and breaking through mental constraints. In a study of 470 adults, higher ADHD symptom scores correlated with greater fluency, flexibility, and originality. In other words: more ideas, from more angles, in more inventive forms.

Even the respectable corners of psychology admit the link. Professor Gail Saltz calls ADHD’s “wavering attention and day-dreamy state” fertile ground for original thinking. And yes—Paris Hilton calls it her “superpower.” If that last example troubles you, remember: even a broken clock is right twice a day.

A Scenic Route Is Still a Route

Yes, I wander mid-sentence—sometimes mid-syllable—but the detours aren’t wasted. In those tangents, stray ideas collide and breed.

The orderly mind walks a straight path; the ADHD mind cuts across the field, finds an old ruin, and comes back with treasure.

The world worships at the altar of linearity: bullet journals, colour-coded schedules, corporate vision statements that read like the minutes of a meeting nobody wanted to attend. Against this tyranny of straight lines, ADHD is a mutiny.

Creativity does not march in formation; it dances drunk in the street.

From the Hunt to the Cubicle (and Back Again)

The standard narrative is that ADHD is a deficit. I contend it is an evolutionary feature—misunderstood, perhaps maladapted to the grey cubicle farm, but invaluable when the terrain is unknown and the task demands invention.

The “hunter vs. farmer” theory may be imperfect science. Still, it rings true: traits like hyperfocus, impulsivity, and rapid scanning would have been indispensable for a hunter—less so for counting beans in a ledger. And hyperfocus, that much-maligned quirk, can be nothing short of rapture: hours vanish while the mind locks like a heat-seeking missile on something worth pursuing.

And let’s not forget—neurodiverse individuals often see patterns that the rest overlook, precisely because they are looking everywhere at once. The farmer sees the row; the hunter sees the horizon.

The Case for Controlled Chaos

This, then, is my private manifesto. Let ADHD’s meanderings not be catalogued solely as symptoms, but mapped as the territory of creative possibility—where ideas pile up, build bridges across impossible spans, and erupt in sudden clarity.

When one idea vaults into another, when thought arcs sideways instead of plodding forward, that is not disorder—it is life in motion.

Let’s praise ADHD—not as a burden—but as a co-conspirator in the pursuit of imaginative truth.

So if you still think I’m crazy, fine. I like chocolate pudding. And by the way, Martin Luther had an irritable bowel. That’s history for you.

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1. When you see someone say “lapidary prose,” they don’t mean the author is moonlighting as a jeweler. They mean the sentences are carefully crafted, tight, and designed to last—no wasted words, no flab, like inscriptions meant to be read centuries later.