Poetic Focus™ — Entry 15: Look Again Before You Decide 🧠

Look Again Before You Decide 🧠

If you're new here... I'm Cary Stillwell, and this is Poetic Focus... a grounded morning practice in gratitude, identity, structure, and becoming.

A few years ago, I lost far more than I ever thought I could. After a misdiagnosis and years spent fighting my way back to myself, I began rebuilding... one habit... one structure... one day at a time.

These reflections aren't from the mountaintop. They're from the middle of real life.

For the ones rebuilding.

The ones waking up.

The ones learning to trust themselves again.

For the thinkers.

The feelers.

The nonlinear minds building a life that actually fits who they are.

I am so happy and grateful for deep breaths.

Honestly, I don't take enough of them.

So I'm breathing this morning.

And I'm going to commit to remembering to breathe when I take my 50-minute breaks and stretch.

Because apparently even after all this talk about habits and structure and taking care of ourselves, I still have to remind myself to do things as basic as...

Breathe.

I'm not perfect.

I know you know that, but I think it's important to say it out loud.

Because I can remember going through hard things and listening to people who were a few steps ahead of me in forming their good habits.

And sometimes, instead of inspiring me, they made me feel defeated before I even started.

They made it sound so automatic.

Wake up at five.

Meditate.

Exercise.

Drink the water.

Journal.

Breathe deeply.

Think beautiful thoughts.

Meanwhile, I was over there thinking:

Good Lord.

Can I just get through Tuesday?

And thinking about that this morning reminded me of a woman named Dr. Lynn Weiss.

God rest her soul.

Dr. Weiss was a PhD and an author who spent decades writing about adults with what was then commonly called ADD. Her books included Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults, The Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults Workbook, A.D.D. and Success, A.D.D. on the Job, A.D.D. and Creativity, and Embracing ADD.

Embracing ADD was the most important one for me.

When I met Lynn on the trail, it had not yet been published. She still had one chapter left to finish.

She finished that chapter, published the book, and that book became the catalyst for what came next.

And what I remember so powerfully about her work was that she wasn't interested only in handing people a list of deficiencies.

She was interested in how people actually lived.

How they organized.

How they managed time.

How they worked with distraction.

How they created structure.

And how people could understand attributes that were causing difficulty without reducing an entire human being to those difficulties.

That perspective mattered enormously to me.

But here's the part I had almost forgotten.

By the time I found Lynn's work, something had already begun shifting in me.

I had been questioning my ADHD diagnosis for maybe six months.

And I remember thinking—and I'm pretty sure I said it out loud more than once—

“If I have ADHD, then everyone in the world must have it.”

I wasn't saying that because I thought nobody had ADHD.

I was saying it because I had finally begun looking carefully at myself and thinking:

This list doesn't describe me.

And yet I had spent nearly a decade believing that it did.

I had learned the symptoms.

I had watched for them.

I had explained myself through them.

And over time, I had begun living inside an identity that had been handed to me by someone I considered an authority.

That realization has stayed with me.

Because when someone with credentials gives us a name for who we are—or what is happening inside us—it can feel enormously convincing.

Sometimes that name is accurate and profoundly useful.

But when it isn't, the consequences can reach much further than the words on a piece of paper.

A diagnosis can influence what we notice about ourselves.

What we expect from ourselves.

What we excuse.

What we fear.

What we believe is possible.

That is why I believe labels deserve both respect...

and scrutiny.

They can provide language.

They can provide access to help.

They can help someone finally understand an experience that has confused or frightened them for years.

But they should never relieve us of the responsibility to keep asking:

Does this actually describe the human being standing here?

Around that time, I happened to pick up one of Dr. Lynn Weiss's books.

I didn't know her.

I had never met her.

I just found her work, and something in it resonated with the questions I was already beginning to ask.

And then, not long afterward...

my dogs introduced us in the woods.

I was walking them through the woods in Houston one day.

They were off leash.

Yes.

I was breaking the rules.

But they were extraordinarily obedient dogs, which is why I noticed when they suddenly stopped listening to me and headed directly toward this gray-haired woman walking along the path.

They didn't jump on her.

They didn't bark.

They just gathered around her feet.

Hovered there.

Like they knew something I didn't.

And maybe they did.

Because that strange little meeting in the woods became one of the early turning points in the way I thought about labels, habits, identity, and the possibility that there may be more happening inside a human being than a list of symptoms can explain.

Much later, I would come to understand that ADHD was not the correct explanation for what was happening to me.

And I think that actually makes this story more important.

Not less.

Because I studied that diagnosis.

I studied the list.

I learned the symptoms.

I recognized myself in some of them.

Of course I did.

And somewhere along the way, without consciously deciding to, I began incorporating some of that language into the way I understood myself.

This is who I am.

This is why I do that.

This is what my brain does.

This is what people like me are like.

And that is where I think we have to be very careful.

I'm not saying diagnoses are bad.

I'm not saying ADHD isn't real.

I'm certainly not saying people shouldn't seek professional help or take medication that is appropriate and helpful to them.

I am saying something much narrower.

And, I think, much more important.

A label may describe something about a human being without explaining the whole human being.

And a list of symptoms should never be allowed to become the entire architecture of someone's identity.

Lynn and I eventually became friends.

We started a group called RADD — Rethinking Attention Deficit Disorder.

It grew out of the work surrounding Embracing ADD.

We held meetings.

Made slides.

Gathered people into a little conference room at La Madeleine.

And talked openly about things people were often ashamed to say out loud.

She had this idea about people helping people.

Someone who had figured out a useful habit or structure reaching back toward someone one step behind them.

Peer to peer.

Habit to habit.

Human to human.

Not becoming the label.

Not gathering around indefinitely to recite everything that was wrong with us.

But asking:

What helps?

What structure supports me?

What environment brings out the best in me?

Where am I struggling?

And is there also some capacity inside this trait that I haven't learned how to direct yet?

Those questions stayed with me.

Because sometimes a trait we experience only as a problem in one environment may also contain a capacity worth understanding.

Intensity can be exhausting.

It can also fuel extraordinary persistence.

Sensitivity can hurt.

It can also allow us to notice what other people miss.

A mind that moves rapidly between ideas may struggle enormously in some environments and make connections no one else sees in another.

The existence of capacity doesn't erase difficulty.

And difficulty doesn't erase capacity.

Both can be true.

That distinction matters to me.

Because I do not believe we are served by romanticizing struggle.

But I don't believe we are served by assuming dysfunction before we have bothered to understand the person carrying it either.

Before intervention comes understanding.

Before deciding what something means, get curious.

And before allowing a diagnosis, a professional opinion, a school report, a difficult season, or anyone else's interpretation of you to become your identity...

Look again.

What else is here?

What support is needed?

What structure would help?

What habits make life work better?

What environment allows this person to function well?

What needs treatment?

What needs accommodation?

What needs accountability?

And what might simply need somewhere useful to go?

That, I realize now, is part of what Lynn gave me.

And in a very real way, some of what she was trying to do all those years ago is woven into the work I am doing today.

The Wake Up movement isn't about ADHD.

It isn't about convincing people that diagnoses are wrong.

And it certainly isn't about positioning me as the person with everybody else's answer.

I'm a writer.

I'm a storyteller.

I use the specificity of what happened in my life to ask people to look again at theirs.

To make room for psychology.

Psychiatry.

Research.

Lived experience.

Habits.

Structure.

Environment.

Responsibility.

And human individuality...

all in the same room.

Because the question should not always be:

How do we make this person more normal?

Sometimes the better question is:

How do we understand this human being well enough to help them build a life that actually works?

That's the conversation I want to help bring into the mainstream.

Not the worship of labels.

Not the rejection of them either.

The understanding of people.

Whole people.

Complicated people.

People whose struggles are real and whose capacities are real too.

And maybe that's why this came to me while I was thinking about something as simple as taking a deep breath.

Because this morning I need structure too.

I need the timer that tells me to stand up.

I need the break.

I need the stretch.

And apparently...

I need to remember to breathe.

That doesn't make me defective.

It makes me a human being still learning how to build a life that supports the person I actually am.

So today I am so happy and grateful for deep breaths.

For habits I haven't mastered yet.

For strange meetings in the woods.

For extraordinarily disobedient obedient dogs.

And for Dr. Lynn Weiss.

God rest her soul.

A woman who helped me begin asking a question I am still asking today:

Before we decide what something means about a person...

have we taken the time to understand the person?

Breathe.

Get curious.

Look again.

And build from there.

Wake up. Build anyway.