All About Being

On an abstract level I’ve understood the statistics about Attention Deficit Disorder and employment. On average, people with ADD make much lower salary and are unemployed more than non-ADDers. But as happens so many times in my life, I thought that it didn’t apply to me. I think I was wrong.

I’ve owned a number of businesses over the years. None of them were hugely successful but I gotten by. I’ve owned my current business for almost 4 years and have done it exclusively (no day job) for about 2 and 1/2 years. As always seems to happen, I’ve lost interest in what I’m doing and consequently my income goes down.

So I decided that I need to get a job. Something I really don’t want to do because I keep thinking that I can get my business back to profitability. I used to make a pretty good living at it, but I seem to have reached a point where my ADD confusion, lack of motivation, and apathy has taken over.

This week I started to look for a job and what I’ve realized is that I’m not "technically" qualified for a lot of positions. I have the knowledge and ability but I don’t have the certification, or for that matter a college degree. The whole college degree thing has always really annoyed me. If you can do the job then why does the piece of paper really matter? The really dumb thing is that many jobs don’t even specify that you need a particular kind of degree. You may be looking for a job in finance and if you have a totally unrelated degree in something like French or women’s studies you can get the job, but if you have 10 years of experience and no degree you can’t. It’s really stupid.

My IQ scores place me in the 99.7%-99.9% percentile depending on which of my IQ tests are more accurate. I’ve always been able to do anything and everything that I’ve wanted. The problem is, in what I now realize is typical ADD style, I either don’t know what I want to do, or I find a subject that I’m interested in, learn all there is to know about it, and then become bored and move on to something else. That’s one of the primary reasons I didn’t go to college. I wanted to learn what I wanted to learn and I knew that I would not learn what I didn’t want to know. At 18 I knew that even though I didn’t know why.

A woman in my ADD group who’s about 50 years old said that she has over 150 college credits but no degree. She’d be interested in something, take a bunch of classes, but then become interested in something else and take a bunch of classes in that and so on through the years. It didn’t hit home with her until she was fired from a job that she’d held for 14 years. A new manager came in, saw that she didn’t have a degree, fired her and hired a recent college graduate with no experience. Her 14 years of experience didn’t matter, the fact that all the staff loved her and that she was great at her job didn’t matter either. All that mattered to this bone-headed manager was the piece of paper.

I’m not saying all of this out of sour grapes. What it really is is a realization of where my life is. I have years of experience owning and running businesses, managing people, working in many different industries, I’m intelligent, get along with people, am creative, and on and on. But here I am almost 42 years old and I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. I know that I can do anything I set my mind to. The problem is I don’t know what that is most of the time.

I’ve always known that I’d have to make it on my own–that I couldn’t work some boring job for 40 years. And subconsciously I always knew that since I didn’t have a college degree this is the path I’d have to take. But as I get older, the ADD affects me more. The confusion is worse, the apathy, and having no sense of direction is really getting to me. The desire to always see and do something new has always been with me, but I’m finding that doesn’t fit in with the way of employment in the world.

I’ve always known that I didn’t fit into the world’s ideas. I’m not cut out to be a corporate zombie. I just can’t do it. I know there’s got to be a place for me to make a good living but finding that place is not easy. When I was younger I was happy to fight the world and break down walls. But now as I get older I don’t have the energy for that anymore.

I’m at mid-life and yes maybe this is the typical mid-life crisis, I don’t know. I don’t want to end up at 70 years old as a greeter at Wal-Mart, but I’m starting to wonder. I know I’m better than this and I know I have great ideas and great potential–in my mind. If I could just get off the couch and do it. Or if I could stick with one thing for long enough. What really scares me though is that I’ve become a statistic.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Working Life, Attention Deficit Disorder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.