Scattered storytelling: On writing and attention

BY JESSICA COLE

Ted Leavitt, MSc, is a registered clinical counsellor based in Abbotsford, BC. He specializes in treating people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and more. Ted comes by this clinical focus honestly: he was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of thirtythree. He relates the journey in his streamof-consciousness-style memoir, Teddy Hit Me: Scattered Stories of My Search for Attention (Connectivity Mental Health Counselling 2019).

In it, Ted writes that prior to his diagnosis, “I had always felt like there was something more I could do, that if people gave me a chance, they would see that I was smart and […] a good person, but because I had fallen flat on my face so many times in my attempts to prove this, I also felt that my potential would always remain as […] something that could have been.” The diagnosis conveyed to him “an acceptance that I had been searching for my entire life.”

The idea of being a “person of permanent potential”—a quote from Gabor Maté’s seminal work on attention deficit disorder, Scattered Minds (Ebury Publishing 1999)—is threaded throughout Ted’s memoir. The stories in Teddy Hit Me are funny and relatable for anyone who struggles with impulsivity and inattentiveness—but the book is also tinged with sadness as Ted explores the effects of his search for attention on his self-esteem.

“I didn’t know that when I started the book,” he says when asked about the theme. “I realized how many of these experiences that ended in some form of pain for me were built around trying to get people to notice me. […] My initial plan was to write about all the stuff that I talk about in my presentations and with my clients, about neuroscience and implicit memory and trauma and anxiety and addiction and all that stuff.”

He recommends writers be prepared for their own intended themes to evolve. “If you keep going to this place that’s not what the theme is, but you keep going there, maybe that’s what the book’s actually about.”

Ted encourages other writers who are struggling with inattentiveness to consider the source of their resistance: “My first tip is to get the book, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, in which he names resistance and personifies it.”

Of resistance and people with ADHD, Ted explains, “There’s a neurological thing going on in our prefrontal cortex that makes that happen. And so, the frustrating part of it is that we are even resistant to ourselves. So, as soon as writing starts to be a thing that I’m supposed to be doing, I don’t do it. It has to be a thing that I want to do.”

How can writers who are struggling to stay in the chair work around resistance then? “What I tell clients who are dealing with this sort of, like, having to force yourself […] is [to] visualize the finished product. Because maybe the process isn’t super enjoyable for you. It feels like work. So don’t picture the process, picture being done. Picture what your book is going to look like, what the cover is going to look like, what that’s going to feel like.”

On the writing of Teddy Hit Me and how his own inner resistor affected his process, Ted muses, “It would have been more frustrating if I didn’t know my ADHD as well as I do.”

Ted Leavitt can be found at connectivitycounselling.com. Teddy Hit Me: Stories of My Search for Attention is available at various retailers.

Jessica Cole is the managing editor of WordWorks. She writes fiction under the pen name Jess Wesley and enjoys working with writers to polish their work.