Reading Challenges of an English Major with ADHD
A pile of recent books
(fI managed to go a long way with reading, even with ADHD that was unrecognized and untreated for many years. I earned a BA and MA in English, I completed a graduate-level program in secondary education, and became certified to teach in two states. I had two classes in special education. I am glad that one of them included a deep dive into autism, but am disappointed that neither of them addressed ADHD to any degree.
In a previous post, I wrote that “What I was told as a child was that I had a deficiency in attention, but in reality my attention follows my interest.” This is mostly true, but it conceals the fact that interests which are too taxing can become less interesting to me.
For example, I’m interested in history but reading it requires learning a new semantic web for any new period in time. Names, specialized terms, dates, timelines, need to be kept in working memory in order to make sense of a history text. This difficulty in itself can make history less appealing.
As an English major, however, I made a very similar journey. I wonder what the difference is between history and literature. History is higher stakes in a way, because it deals with real events while fiction is an imaginative world. History is tentative, changing, and incomplete— while fiction has the certainty of a (mostly) fixed text— at least for pleasure readers and students. To be sure, even fiction falls along a spectrum of higher stakes (Shakespeare) to lower stakes (say David Lodge), and more dense or less dense in its semantic web. We all have self-concepts of ourselves as readers, but the truth is more complex.
With novels, I’ve often had an anxiety or lack of trust in the author, so I speed through a book on the first time through and let myself enjoy it on a second reading. I became certified in Evelyn Wood Speed Reading in 5th grade (1400 words per minute). While plowing through books is not great for comprehension, it does build confidence. And confidence is useful for undertaking the work of comprehension.
In fact, Big books can be attractive for several reasons. 1. the immersive aspect of going into another world is extended. 2. The effort to learn the semantic web can pay off in a big way by supporting the long text (this is the gamble). And 3. Big books give you bragging rights. I once read Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! for fun because a teacher said yes, it’s difficult.
Speaking of big books, when I was 21, I ran across Hans Urs von Balthasar’s massive work The Glory of the Lord. It looked to me like Mount Everest must have looked to Hillary and Norgay when they made their ascent. I read a lot of Balthasar’s books, but the first volume of his massive trilogy, Seeing the Form, daunted me. On a weekend away from work, I outlined it by hand in a notebook in order to understand it. I’d learned outlining in school but this was the first time it was useful for my personal reading. For me, theology had the coherence of fiction, but I also appreciated Balthasar’s own background in literature.
I’ve been mostly self-directed in my reading, either choosing what I read or in choosing the class. When I had less control, I also had less completion. I never read Sister Carrie in high school. For a college biography as history class, I read all of Scarisbrick’s Henry VIII but none of the other assigned texts, although I did read God’s Englishmen after I failed the class. Although I had chosen the class and was interested in the subject, I still lacked the persistence to complete the readings*. This is a case where medication could have helped me to follow through on my desires and interests.
My graduate-level literacy studies class at Rockhurst helped me become a better reader. One thing I learned was how to make inferences by combining existing knowledge with incomplete details in the text. In one project, I had to go speak with teachers of different subjects (history, literature, math) and ask them how they read. That was a very enlightening task. For example, the math teacher told me that she reads to see what the variables and fixed terms are, which makes formulating problems easier. Different subjects require different approaches.
From Luigi Giussani, I learned to put my humanity at play in reading. I remember reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond for a class I was teaching. I felt a great deal of anxiety because Kit, the main character, was doing good things that were very risky in Puritan New England (for example, teaching a child to read when the parents opposed it). I realized that I was more concerned about the consequences of her actions than their goodness. This realization meant I had to decide for myself what was more important: avoiding censure or doing what’s right.
Putting my humanity into play makes reading history more challenging for me because I become dismayed at the injustices and human trauma. For example, reading about the history of Catholicism, colonialism, and slavery. This slows me down because I have to take breaks, but because it’s important to me, I keep picking up the books again and continuing. Even with the slower pace, I still feel like I miss a lot when reading history.
Lately I have embraced slow reading for literature. When I first read The Maiden of All Our Desires, I only read about 5 pages a day. Slow reading along with re-reading pays off well with reading poetry also.
Desire, interest, choice, have helped me to be a good reader even with the challenges of ADHD. Looking over these factors, it’s easy for me to see that others could prefer history or other nonfiction over literature. What was important to me was not being compelled to do something arduous.
* another curious fact. I read the entirety of Troilus and Criseyde for my Chaucer class but didn’t keep up with my readings from the Canterbury Tales (again, I kind of detest fragmentation with all its uncertainty).