ADHD Strategies: RuPaul Edition
He reframed chronic lateness and everything makes sense now
Of all the ways RuPaul could impress me, explaining chronic lateness was probably the last one I expected.
Before I share his thought, I’ll give some context for why it pierced me to the core. I experience ADHD in a way that has only intensified as I grow older. It wasn’t something anyone put a name to as a child and I stumbled through years of school and after school activities with moderate success, kept mostly upright by their solid structures. However, once I graduated and my days became a blank slate, the consequences of my brain’s lifelong stylings hit me like a truck and I was drowning. All I’ll say is that when I was finally diagnosed, the word the psychologist used to describe my level of ADHD experience was “profound”. Beyond how much I hated what it was doing to my life, I was deeply afraid of the ways it had eroded the lives and relationships of older people around me who will remain nameless. That’s what ADHD does- as a psychological condition it isn’t nearly as consequential as something like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but it chips away slowly until one day you realize you aren’t at all who or where you intended to be. I decided to take it seriously.
There are myriad informative essays on how ADHD affects those socialized as female differently and is under-diagnosed since it often doesn’t cause “disruptive” behavior. After all, I would argue that often the reason parents take their kids to psychologists is because the situation is bothering them more than the child. I wasn’t constantly restless in class and I didn’t speak out of turn which might have sent me straight to the counselor, instead I was mostly quietly lost in thought- my dad’s nickname for me was “space cadet”. There were a million other symptoms, but if they don’t dramatically hinder other people’s abilities to function, they just call that “personality”. Still, ADHD is trouble for everyone involved- it has put a real strain on relationships, both with family and friends who also experience it, as well as friends who simply cannot wrap their heads around the resulting behaviors, namely lateness.
It’s almost a joke except it isn’t that funny.
My best friends expectations of my timeliness could not get any lower. But Lila, you say, everyone is late sometimes! What if I tell you it is every single time? And by at least twenty minutes? You might start to call it my personality. A really really annoying personality.
Timely people, like perfect person Tom Hanks, will call timeliness a sign of respect. (He didn’t use that word, but he implied it!) By this meter I absolutely hate my friends and couldn’t care less if they all went and died in a hole. Of course I understand this reasoning, because yes, it is disrespectful, but just like throwing a baseball and hitting your neighbor’s window is disrespectful- I didn’t mean to do it. I’ve never done that but movies tell me that it happens all the time. One of my dear friends Sam is the biggest chronic victim of my wicked ways, not only because it happened with him the most pre-covid, but because he was not this way in the slightest, and in eight years of friendship has never done it to me. He used to take my lateness on the chin for five or six meetups until finally expressing his frustration. I would vow to change, be modestly better the next time, and then revert straight back to the same cycle. He knew he shouldn’t sustain anger over something casual- these were never “appointments” per se, just hanging out and doing deadline free work together, but when he got past expressing frustration and slid back into being “chill” about the whole thing, I too would slide back into my lateness. Sam was by no means getting special treatment, everyone, truly everyone, got to experience it, and it is the only reason I have ever almost been fired. If these jobs were even remotely more desirable I’m sure I would have been. Except for the time in Catholic high school that I wore a cream colored shirt instead of a dress code abiding white shirt to liturgy like an absolute heathen, lateness is the only reason I ever got detention.
I try to be an introspective person so I wanted to understand why I was doing this, since I was pretty sure I liked my friends. I could blame it on my parents (always a solid choice), who both definitely have ADHD and who were often given special start times for events and still managed to be late for the real start times. That explanation fails a bit because my brother is not really this way as far as I can tell. I came to one conclusion that I still think is partly true, which is that I have a very poor sense of the passage of time- another common experience of those with ADHD. The words “five minutes” could mean anything from three to thirty minutes and I would scarcely know the difference. Even more laughable is the concept of “two minutes”. Nothing I’ve done has ever taken two minutes. I have a bit more of a handle on “ten seconds”. To manage this now I put timers on everything. I probably set 10–20 timers a day for the smallest activities, just to make sure I don’t go to the milky way in the middle of them, or let an entire stick of butter melt to liquid on top of the oven while I find a recipe, which I totally didn’t do last week. The timer technique is great, but it’s the symptom, not the disease. I’ll spare you the other reasons I considered because they were thin. Now to the point of the essay…
So what did RuPaul say?
A couple weeks ago I logged onto MasterClass which I really don’t make enough use of because though some of the lessons somehow feel a bit silly, a lot of them are truly helpful. MasterClass did not pay me to say that (MasterClass if you’re reading I’ll delete the silly part and really amplify the endorsement if you do feel like paying me). Anyway, RuPaul teaches a course called “Self-Expression and Authenticity” and I clicked because who doesn’t need some guidance there? It’s wonderful to hear a little bit about his journey and I found him engaging and sincere in a way that’s harder to express in a reality show competition (though Drag Race is so much fun).
He started talking about how he used to be chronically late and my ears perked right up. A reformed chronic late person? How?! His revelation and solution were concise.
He realized that hurrying was giving him an adrenaline rush.
Once he acknowledged that as the very root of the problem, he made a conscious decision to give up that adrenaline rush and is now fifteen minutes early to absolutely everything.
This may seem ridiculously simple but to me it was a groundbreaking reframing of the problem. In the book Scattered, psychologist Gabor Maté draws connections between ADHD and addiction which might seem questionable to some, but even though it sounds harsh I think it is very helpful to frame any chronic harmful behavior as an addiction. Addiction Center defines this, saying “behavioral addictions or non-substance addictions, like gambling addiction, are a set of behaviors that a person becomes dependent on and craves.”. There is endless debate about the true nature of non-substance addiction as there are fewer studies which link behavior to physical brain alterations, but while this is anecdotal, cigarette smokers often talk about the physical activity of smoking being almost as hard to quit as the nicotine.
When we consider addiction, we have to ask “what is this doing for the addict?”
In the case of heroin it’s simple: straight to the opioid receptors, short lived bliss. If we consider hurrying (because of lateness) an addiction, it’s harder to unpack, but I think adrenaline is right. For myself it is a cocktail of thoughts and subsequent emotions which make it harder to identify the adrenaline. There’s self-directed shame and frustration, a feeling of doom at never being able to change, but more pointedly, there’s fear. Fear of what my friend is going to say, how they’re going to think of me, and how they’re going to behave towards me going forward. There’s the physical- I’m running for the train now, my heart is beating. Even before the run to the train, there’s the rushing around the house, losing my phone, finding my phone, losing it again, dropping to the floor to fumble under the bed for the phone a second time. Forgetting the keys and running back for the keys- did I turn off the oven? More fear. I should market it and make it an exercise trend. Fear and physically hurrying result in both adrenaline and endorphins. Even though the intellectual experience is terrible- no one wants to be running from the lion, the physical effect is somehow ultimately enjoyable.
ADHD brains are motivated by their search for optimal stimulation. It follows that this little high from lateness could be something I subconsciously look for.
Don’t be jealous, but my ADHD also pairs nicely with depression, as it often does, so this “high” is particularly craved. Combine that with my blindness to the passage of time and it seems to me to be a pretty satisfying reason for my chronic lateness.
So now that we know that I’m broken, I’m off the hook? Everyone else should be more understanding of ME, right?!
No. What happend is that RuPaul, out of great concern for me specifically, staged a cozy little intervention for two, in which I was not allowed to ask questions. It’s up to me now to admit I have a problem (I do), then definitely make some amends, and see about this idea of “consciously choosing to give up that rush”. It may not be enough to immediately end such a persisting behavior, but as it is one of the habits that most consistently inconveniences and harms loved ones, as well as my own professional life, I am motivated to try.
In this case, before “admitting”, Step 0 is understanding the problem. So thanks RuPaul for helping me do just that, and if we ever meet I hope to be sixteen minutes early.
