stories

My Story, Ollie, (1/98)

Hello Steven Ledingham!

I gladly take up your offer to respond to question you re. ADD. Unfortunately I am South African, and there may be no way for you to extend your help to me, except through this medium. Sometimes I also find that American companies only target their own country. For very good financial reasons.

I'm hoping (for the first time in twenty years) and praying that I'll get understanding and help for what I'd always believed to be a terrible and shameful failing in my personality.

I am 45 years old, Afrikaans-speaking, and working near Cape Town.

I was first IQ-tested at the age of 12 years, and then when I was 16, and again when I was 20 years old. The first figures showed an IQ of 145, and then Stellenbosch University tested me at 151 in 1972.

However, and here is the beginning of my woeful story, I never excelled at school, except sporadically, and dropped out of university after the first year. Since the age of 10 I spent every minute of spare time, and study time, reading. Novels, stories, comics etc. Escapist material.

This only stopped when we developed marital problems because of my reading. Even today I have to watch my television diet. When I read, I can read through the night. I have difficulty putting a book down. When I watch television, I am incommunicado.

I have fits (outbursts) of temper. I can develop a blind rage over insignificant events. Sometimes, for long stretches, the irritation bubbles just below the surface. I battle endlessly with self-control.

I could never, never stay focused on something for longer than a few weeks. After university, where I found myself completely adrift, I knew that to do any courses which lasted for more than two months was fatal. Even then I barely managed to reach the end and attain success.

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Usually I manage by cramming most of the learning material into the last couple of days before the exams.

Projects are started and dropped with sickening predictability. Always I do good, even brilliantly, to start off with. Then I seem to hit a wall. Sometimes I manage to pick up the pieces again, but then other ideas come up (VERY good ideas, mind you), and there I go again.

Please help! What must I do? Is there hope? Like I said, I'm 45 years old, and time is getting shorter and shorter to achieve success in the one field that I really want to- writing. Yet again I've started on a writing course that is slipping away from me. The computer and internet need to be set up for the children, you know.

Regards.

Ollie

508@adept.co.za

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