The trouble with having a problem with your brain is you use your brain to notice when you have a problem. When it’s a problem with your brain it’s hard to notice there is a problem.

I was writing a story about a kid with ADD and decided to do some research. Because I wanted to portray the situation accurately I got an audiobook called Driven To Distraction. I constantly found myself distracted and having to rewind the audio to hear what was being seeing said.

“This sounds important,” I’d think. “I should rewind it and listen carefully.” I’d rewind the audio 30 seconds and press play. Before I knew it, I’d be gazing out the window, or waiting at a traffic light, or checking twitter, or whatever else, and realised I’d missed the important sounding information again. I couldn’t pay attention for 30 seconds.

I wondered if I had ADD. Luckily, I already had a book about it.

In Driven To Distraction there is a story of a woman reading a brain book and discovering her husband probably had ADD. “My wife has that book,” I thought. When I got home I asked her about it. “What’s the name of that brain book you have?”

“The female brain?”

“Yeah, is there a male version of that?” She said yes and I bought The Male Brain. I read the whole book cover to cover and loved it. It was really well-informed very enlightening. However, it doesn’t mention a single thing about ADD.

I decided I needed to check out some other Brain books and went to the library where I got Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. When I got home I showed it to my wife.

“I’ve got that book,” she said.

And then I knew that was the book mentioned in Driven To Distraction. At that point I realised I had ADD.