Paris: The Memoir(3)
No one ever said, “Relax, little girl. There are many different kinds of intelligence.”
Instead, people told me I was dumb, bratty, careless, ungrateful, or not applying myself. And none of that was true. I had to be creative and work hard to fit in, but I’m naturally creative and hardworking, so I was in it every day, grinding away, trying to fit in, until I grew strong enough to say, “Fuck fitting in,” which is what I intend to teach my children from the beginning, no matter what their neurodevelopmental profile happens to be.
As an adult, I’ve been medication-fluid. When I was in my early twenties, a doctor explained what was “wrong” with me and put me on Adderall. That was a love/hate relationship that went on for about twenty years—me and Adderall—until Carter and I met with Dr. Hallowell.
Dr. Hallowell said, “I’ve been trying to explain to people since 1981 that this condition, if you use it properly, is an asset composed of qualities you can’t buy and can’t teach. It’s stigma that holds us back. Stigma plus ignorance. A lethal combination.”
I felt that lightning bolt you feel when someone speaks a hard truth you’ve always known but never heard anyone say out loud.
“Our kryptonite is boredom,” said Dr. Hallowell. “If stimulation doesn’t occur, we create it. We self-medicate with adrenaline.”
ADHD can be a wellspring of creative energy, but creative energy’s evil twin is a troublemaking compulsion. Want some adrenaline? Do everything the hard way. Get into train-wreck relationships. There are a million ways to screw yourself over for the sake of adrenaline. My imagination is infinite, but it takes me to dark places as easily as it takes me toward the light. Dr. Hallowell calls it the Demon, that snake that slithers into everything telling you that if it’s bad you deserve it and if it’s good it won’t last. Of course, the Demon is a liar, but try telling that to my brain when it’s craving a big bucket of deep-fried anxiety.
“Your greatest asset is your worst enemy,” said Dr. Hallowell.
And my brain said, Fuck.
“Tell me, Paris, how is your self-esteem?”
“I’m good at pretending,” I said.
He said, “That’s common among people who live with ADHD.”
Not “people who suffer from ADHD.” Not “people afflicted with ADHD.”
People who live with ADHD.
Some of us have discovered that ADHD is our superpower. I wish the A stood for ass-kicking. I wish the Ds stood for dope and drive. I wish the H suggested hell yes.
I’m not bragging or complaining about it, just telling you: This is my brain. It has a lot to do with how this whole book thing is going to play out, because I love run-on sentences—and dashes. And sentence fragments. I’m probably going to jump around a lot while I tell the story.
The Spirograph of time. It’s all connected.
I’ve avoided talking about some of these issues for decades. I’m an issue-avoiding machine. I learned from the best: my parents. Nicky says Mom and Dad are “the king and queen of sweeping things under the rug.”
There is a hierarchy, and these are the rules in my family:
If you don’t talk about a thing, it’s not a problem.
If you hide how deeply something hurt you, it didn’t happen.
If you pretend not to notice how deeply you hurt someone else, you don’t have to feel bad about it.
Of course, that’s bullshit, and what makes it even crazier: It’s not good business. I come from a family of brilliant businesspeople. How can we be so bad at emotional economics? Relationships, professional and personal, are transactional. Give and take. For better or worse. You invest, hoping for a good return. But there’s always risk.
I love my mom, and I know she loves me. Still, we’ve put each other through hell and can’t squeeze out more than a few words on certain topics. It’s going to be hard for her to read this book. I won’t be surprised if she puts it on a shelf for a while. Or forever. And that’s okay.
I’m trying to take ownership of some intense personal things I’ve never been able to talk about. Things I’ve said and done. Things that have been said and done to me. I have a hard time trusting and don’t easily share my private thoughts. I’m super protective of my family and my brand—the businesswoman who grew out of a party girl and the party girl who still lives inside the businesswoman—so it scares me to think about what a lot of people will say.
But it’s time.
There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don’t want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for mistakes of their own. I want them to laugh and see that they do have a voice and their own brand of intelligence and, girl, fuck fitting in.
Part 1
Never regret anything, because at one time it was exactly what you wanted.
MARILYN MONROE
1
People told me it was stupid to go skydiving the morning after my twenty-first-birthday party in Las Vegas, but back then, I didn’t care, and now I know they were wrong. If you want to go skydiving the morning after a Level 9 rager, go for it. Your twenty-first birthday is prime real estate for stupid, and a lot of stupid things you do in your twenties lay the foundation for wisdom later on. As you wise up, you realize that all the stupid things you didn’t do—those are the regrets. My twenties were like, damn, girl. Leave no stupid behind. Love the wrong men. Hate the wrong women. Wear the Von Dutch.