Sometimes the world around me tends to fade. Splatters of black and white appear making the colors wash away. My name would be called over and over again and I would not realize I was dreaming until reality woke me up. “Laura, focus!” is just one of the many phrases I would constantly hear throughout my life. Being a child, when my focus first started to dissipate, I was not all aware of what was going on.  I thought I was an average eight-year-old with a normal life. Even though no one seemed to want to interact with me, I never thought of myself as “different.”

Living a lifestyle so isolated never gave me the proper grasp of how to deal with a problem that might occur. I was never told how to cope if something negative came down my path. The path my mind traveled down was not the correct way to approach what everyone else wanted, success. “Mr. and Mrs. Miller, Laura seems to be having some trouble with staying on task” was the conversation that started it all. Third grade is when my flaw was discovered, by a teacher who actually cared about her students. I noticed I would struggle with my school work and never know what was going on when my head would finally decide to function.  As blank as my mind was, I would always get a tight chest and pain in the pit of my stomach every time this happened. My breathing would start to weaken and the tension in my body would make it hard to catch my breath.  These feelings always made me scared; it still does, because I thought I was dying. Of course death never occurred, but I was a kid; I had no idea what was happening to me.

“Okay, she has focusing problems, nothing to be done. She will grow out of it” is probably a consistent thought that my parents had.  Being in a private school most of my life made my parents think I was going to get help from my teachers, to overcome my focusing problem. Did it help? I don’t think so. The focusing and tension increased as life dragged on. Changing from private to public school made it worse. I was exposed to a bigger crowd and a higher level of academics.

It wasn’t until eighth-grade when my mom finally decided to have me evaluated. The test took over two hours. It was a series of activities that would seem easy to a normal mind but to me, they were a challenge. The end results took a couple weeks to be processed. When they arrived, the doctor diagnosed me with an attention deficit disorder; ADD. With no knowledge of what ADD was, the doctor characterized it as “an inability to concentrate on one task for any length of time.”

Everyone has a story, but sadly for me, I did not understand mine. Growing further away from who I really was wasn’t something a parent would want for their child. Did my parents even know my attention became a deficient disorder?  Was anyone aware of the fact that I was not connected to this world? To my knowledge, my parents did not really focus on the matter that my concentration level was not where it was meant to be until it got out of hand. All that my mind contains now is a series of vivid memories, but they are just enough for me to be able to put them into some kind of order.  Seeming endless, I finally found a shortcut to help control my ADD. My state of mind might not be just right, but I am not striving for perfection. Perfect is a mythical word that someone with no sense made up to make sane people go insane-at least that is what I think. Going through test after test was time consuming, but I feel those processes were worth it.   I discover a little bit of what makes me-me.  It is not the most important thing and it makes me unique.  My mind is not “right,” but I have come to realize that the right question to ask instead of “Why me?” is “Is anyone’s?”