How would I know if I was an idiot?

Here’s a question that nags at me from time to time: if I was a full and proper idiot, how would I know? Who would tell me? Would I even be able to understand what it means? As a smart person, you think you’ve got a pretty good handle on what an idiot is — what he looks like, what he sounds like, the things he does and says — but if I was a true idiot, I might not have the comparison points nor the mental apparatus to say definitively whether I was or wasn’t an idiot.

Amy Jones wrote yesterday about her recent diagnosis of ADHD, a condition I was also diagnosed with last year. There are a lot of us now; during lockdown, we were left with our circular thoughts and for perhaps the first time we had no outlet for them. When you’re at work or school, you might go years without noticing that your brain doesn’t work quite like anyone else’s. Your lack of focus, your distractibility, your impulsivity, your emotional dysregulation, your sensitivity to rejection both actual and perceived — all of this, absent the formal diagnosis of a brain problem, paints the picture, to the general public, of an idiot. With nobody around to take the brunt of it, you’re left only with yourself, and you start to wonder if it’s something you ought to get tested for.

It isn’t fair that people think you’re an idiot, obviously, but that doesn’t affect material reality. Facts don’t care about your feelings, but the inverse is also true: your feelings don’t care about the facts. If the car in front of you takes a few extra seconds to get going at a green light, that driver — so says the voice in your head — is an idiot, a moron, a waste of perfectly good genetic material. It might cross your mind that maybe her engine wasn’t working, or that there might have been a hedgehog crossing the road ahead that you couldn’t see from your vantage point, but that would be after the pyre was built and put to flame. The driver ahead of you has been convicted and the sentence carried out. The driver ahead of you has been branded: idiot.

Does this make you an asshole? I don’t think it does. As human beings, we get to enjoy the fruits of metacognition — the ability to think about our thoughts, to form a second-order response to a given stimulus. If, after reading this newsletter, I said or did something you thought was idiotic, you’d be able to say “ah, but he has ADHD, which explains it.”

As part of the diagnostic process, you’re asked to send a questionnaire to someone who knows you well. In this (extremely long) questionnaire, your loved one recounts your various idiocies. Jamie tends to interrupt you in a conversation. He forgets where he put his keys. His newsletters are random and pointless. He stares out the window for solidly half an hour and when asked what he’s looking at he says there was a bird here some time ago and by way of several derailed trains of thought he got to thinking about those dinosaur-shaped processed turkey nuggets he enjoyed so much as a lad, and you look at his laptop screen and you find that he has opened twenty-five browser tabs on various Wikipedia articles. He does not know if they still make those dinosaur nuggets. He has been reading about the Crimean war. All of this is to say that Jamie might be an idiot, unless he is diagnosed with a combined-type brain problem, which would explain all of these behaviours.

I would never describe another person as an idiot. There are a lot of different kinds of intelligence. Ben Carson, one of the Republican Party’s candidates for the U.S. presidency in 2016, believes that the pyramids were built for grain storage, that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only the Jewish population had assault rifles, that prisons make you gay, and he’s also a pioneering neurosurgeon, a no-doubt legend in that field. He had a Lifetime movie made about him starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Is it fair that we call him an idiot? In one sense, yes, because he says and does idiotic things; in another, no, because nobody truly is a full-blown 100-percent across-the-board idiot.

The only exception to this rule is me, Jamie Drew. Everyone else lacks focus because they’re hungry, tired, stressed, burned out; I lack focus because that’s a core part of the experience of being me. I’m a horrible driver and everybody else just saw a hedghehog.

Intellectually, I know that I believe this because I spent most of my life under the impression that I had a brain that worked properly and that genetic and societal circumstances had rendered me an idiot possibly from birth, and I know that when teachers and employers called me an idiot — to my face — this was because I fell through the cracks of an underfunded system designed to identify and support young people with brain problems. I’ve worked in those systems. They don’t have the resources to catch all of us. As a society we have a narrow definition of ADHD that spotlights eight-year-old boys who can’t sit still in class. As a result, I’ve lived most of my thirty-eight years on earth thinking I was just a little bit stupid. And that’s a tough habit to break.

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, whenever that was, I went to Italy for a week. The promised boat rental was cancelled because of the rough seas, so I ate double my weight in focaccia as a consolation prize.

Visiting Manarola, one of Cinque Terre’s five beautiful towns on the Ligurian coast, all of which have been stuffed with tourists since we could transmit images through the internet and yes I know I’m part of the problem, Janina and I embarked on an impromptu hike to escape said tourists. The only route out of the town was a “easy/moderate” walking trail, roughly 15,000 steps to Vernazza and a gentle slope down to Corniglia through what turned out to be the platonic ideal of a Golden Hour — the period just before the sun dips below the horizon, when the rays of light travel at a lower angle through Earth’s atmosphere, scattering the blue/violet wavelengths into nothing through the thicker atmosphere and giving the sunlight more of an orange/red glow. In addition, the shadows become softer thanks to the dust and particles in the air, bouncing all of that lovely golden light around like a giant diffuser. It’s something that photographers can spend their whole careers chasing — the previous week I had to call off a shoot because the conditions wouldn’t allow for this exact kind of light — and I found it while I was sweaty and exhausted.

Anyway, here’s a picture of a sweaty and exhausted Janina Matthewson.

Relatedly, I’ve built up a collection of Rothko-inspired sea- and landscape photographs. I might start selling prints of them. Do people still buy prints? Is that what you ravenous animals want from me? Let me know. I think this platform allows for comments.