Author: Mark Heath

I'm a freelance cartoonist. My work has appeared in Reader's Digest, Harvard Business Review, American Scientist, Woman's World, and others. I'm also the creator of Spot the Frog, a comic strip you can find at Gocomics.com.

What ADHD Feels Like

~ Mark Heath ~ 2 Comments

Speaking for myself, ADD can feel like many things, depending on my mood and medication.

I recently moved back to a town I knew fairly well, having grown up there. I took a drive through its center for the first time in twelve years. The changes were bewildering, the traffic was daunting, and even though it’s essentially one long road — a flat-lined roller coaster — I felt completely lost.

I took another drive today, this time tanked off with Ritalin, and felt at ease, my brain calmly observing what it saw before me, not imagining the million and one things it couldn’t see around me.

Here’s another description of unmedicated ADHD:

What ADHD feels like – Boing Boing.

Tools of the Trade

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Tools of the Trade

I don’t have the hat anymore, nor the couch it’s sitting on. But I still have the lap board (one word? two words?), and the Rotring pen. I miss the hat and the couch, but mostly the hat. My head is immense, you could set it on a stand and use it as a globe. Not many hats fit. They mostly slide around on the north pole. They can’t stay still. They’re tectonic plates rearranging the Earth. But that modest and otherwise unremarkable hat was just large enough to make itself comfortable.

Yelling Bull in a Crowded Family-Oriented Theater

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I haven’t seen Katrina, Queen of the Trees, in a long while. I’m not even sure that her name is Katrina. She only appeared for a few weeks. She was too much mammal in a strip about too-much frog.

This daily is noteworthy to me because I cursed in a mild and indirect fashion. Buddy, the frog yelling, “Bull,” is looking for Bull, another frog character. His final “Bull!” makes me laugh. It’s like yelling BULL in a crowded family-oriented theater, with no one noticing.

Or, perhaps it was noticed, and considered unremarkable. When you’re writing a strip, you never know for certain what’s allowed, until it isn’t.

Bull, as profanity goes, is tame, domesticated, Bowdlerized, nearly invisible. But in a family strip — that’s how it was sold; I never thought of Spot the Frog as family-oriented — yelling Bull! felt subversive. I wrote a lot of subversive dailies in Spot, but few noticed.