Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where there are other things to love. I had a tiny epiphany the other night, when I was asked, once again, how I was adjusting to life in Western Kansas. I have never known quite how to answer that- I miss Colorado, and I miss who I was there. But I am a different person here. It's the only way I can survive the change, by changing myself. It is so hard to explain in a one-line sentence, when all the asker wants to hear is that I love or hate it, and either answer sounds insincere and does not explain how I feel. But I heard myself saying, enthusiastically, that I love it- I love different things about my life here than I loved in Colorado. Then I realized how true that is- and how simple of an answer. I don't hate it here. I am me here, just as I was me there, because the older I get, the more I come to realize that the true me is not defined by what I do, but the enthusiasm with which I do it.

Hiker, mountain biker, runner, skier, snowboarder, friend, wife- these are not who I am, but what I do. Who I am is a soul who loves beautiful things created by forces larger than myself, is connected to other beings, human and animal, through bonds made stronger by a unique ability to understand minute gestures, is driven by a strong urge to prove myself and therefore invites challenge, who loves change but hates uncertainty, who hates waiting and loves surprises. I have a personality that enjoys role-playing, and the physical ability to indulge it- I have pretended to be a mountain bike racer, a ski bum, a park rat, a career woman, a sports-industry insider, a super-wife, a gardener, a farmhand, an artist, a writer, a yogi, a heavy equipment operator, a welder, a health-care professional, an activist. Some of these things I have done well, some not so much. But all of them, I have done pretending that they defined me, if only for as long as I did them. Does that mean that those things are not me? No. They are me, because they are what me delights in doing. However, leaving those outdoorsy, adventurous people that I was in Summit County behind does not mean that I am not remaining true to myself, or that I must now hate living in a place where I cannot indulge my fantasies of being those people. It simply makes room to be other people. The mixing of many people, constant growing and experimenting and discovering is what truly makes me, me.

Do I sound psychotic and unstable? I am suddenly a bit fearful that I do. I have come to realize lately that perhaps other's minds don't work the way mine does. Many of the things I have always been hard on myself for, such as my complete inability to remember what I am doing for long enough to finish it, I have fought for years as a lack of discipline. But my memory has been jogged lately, the memory of me in school, how even back then I simply could not focus on any one thing for longer than a few minutes. How it drove my teachers nuts that I could not work on my math until I was finished, then move onto English, then to spelling, and so on. I had five books on my desk at once, changing subjects at ten minute intervals. If the slightest distraction was happening, someone tapping a pencil, rattling a desk, I simply could not focus on the task at hand. When my teachers reached their wit's end and sent me to the library to study, as a punishment for my lack of self-discipline, I was relieved- in the absence of distraction, I could focus on finishing my studies. My SAT scores indicated that my language skills were at a high-school graduate's level in third and fourth grade, while my math skills lagged behind where they should be for my age and education level. This alerted my parents and the therapists they hired to analyze me to the fact that I was a special-needs student. In the end, they put me on Ritalin during the school year, which left me pleasantly zoned and studious, able to block distractions and focus on finishing my work, which was suddenly flowing from my fingers at an amazing pace, long pages of penmanship, worksheets filled with algebraic diagrams. For the first time since I could remember, I was not taking home piles of homework, not fighting all evening with the distractions at home while I forced myself to finish it, not spending more time coming up with creative ways to not finish than simply finishing it. The margins of my worksheets were no longer filled with doodles, geometric shapes, curlicues, leaves and flowers and kites and faces of Victorian-era beauties with high hairdos and ruffles and cleavage. On the days that I seemed especially distracted, my teachers often asked me, in the middle of class, if I had taken my pills. It's probably a testament to the character of my classmates that I had any friends at all.

All of that background is to illustrate this- adult ADD is a scary and terrible and wonderful thing. It means chaos and spontaneity and fun and chagrin and frusteration and guilt. It means waking up in the morning, washing dishes and putting away groceries from the night before, and suddenly finding oneself elbows-deep in a batch of homemade ricotta cheese by 9 in the morning with no plan of how said cheese is going to be used before it spoils- it just needed to be made because several half-gallons of milk were tasting a little too sour to drink and were needing to be taken out of the fridge to make room for groceries bought last night. It means going online to look up ways to use ricotta cheese, and finding oneself blogging instead while a beautiful ball of creamy ricotta sits on the stove waiting to be stuffed into homemade pasta that I have suddenly lost interest in making. It means that in the meantime, I have batted a tennis ball across the yard for Andy to chase, soaked chia seeds in a glass of soymilk (my daily source of Omega 3's), juiced a grapefruit and made an over-easy egg and two slices of toast for Bobby, packed Bobby's lunch and contorted myself into strange shapes to fit through the crawlspace window to turn off the water to the house so Bobby can fix a plumbing issue. It means that I sit here in my yoga clothes, which is as close as I got to doing yoga this morning. For Bobby, it means that he comes home to the house being rearranged on a regular basis, which infuriates him but makes it feel all shiny and new and exciting to me. Sometimes his clothes are neatly folded, and sometimes they are dumped into his dresser drawers. Sometimes I feed him lavish meals, and sometimes I can barely manage a thrown-together taco. He says he still loves me, but he had no idea I was this crazy when he married me. Back then, all he saw was constant entertainment, fun and spontaneity, and now he never knows what to expect, which stresses him out. It puzzles him that I can manage to mix myriad colors into one cohesive picture, bring the illusion of nature's beautiful chaos and crash of color out of five tubes of paint- red, blue, yellow, black and white, but I cannot spread one gallon of premixed paint on a wall without getting stressed out and in a hurry and ending up with it in my hair, on the floor, and everywhere it should not be. I have been banned from painting walls.

To say that there has never been a small amount of experimentation with herbal self-medication to help with this problem would be a lie. I have lived for almost a decade in a small hippie mountain town that has led the way in promoting natural medication over synthetic prescription drugs. I have many friends who chose to treat chronic pain, insomnia, and other maladies with small amounts of organic, all-natural, home-grown THC over drugs mixed and touted by pharmaceutical companies. I have also just paid the bill for the one time my health-care provider thought I needed prescrition drugs- a $250 anti-nausea pill because the pain of a miscarriage had me thinking I might vomit- a perfectly normal reaction to pain. In hindsight, knowing what that little cherry-flavored bit of pill would cost, I would have chosen to vomit for free. That little experience has lessened my trust of for-profit healthcare a bit.

My observations on the results of such experiments are mixed- when I have desperately needed to get something done, say, an entire house cleaned in a short amount of time, a very small amount has worked like absolute magic. I zone in on what I should be doing just as I did when I was a kid on ritalin. Suddenly, making order out of chaos is soothing for the soul. But if I overdo it just the slightest bit, I become manic. My attention span is shortened even more than normal, and I spin from one thing to the next. My personal theory on mind-altering substances, any mind-altering substances, whether created in a lab and called something like percocet, created in a distillery and called something like rum, created in a field and called something like coffee, tobacco, or weed, or created in our brains and called something like endorphins or a runner's high, these are all things that can be beneficial in certain applications, but not as a permanent fix. Recent research shows that MDMA, or ecstacy, when taken by someone with autism, can help him feel empathy and relate to the people around him. Nobody is suggesting that someone with autism be high on ecstacy all the time. It is decidedly bad for the body. However, those who have tried it say that the memory of that feeling helps them fake it and bring their behavior in line with those around them, making them more approachable, more socially functioning, which made it worth doing once. Do I approve of taking drugs, legal or illegal? Not particularly. But realistically, we all accept on certain levels that our brain chemistry is whacky enough to need chemical, medicinal help, whether it is help waking up in the morning, help scrambling pain signals from our bodies, help seeing the positive side of circumstances. Even the food we eat affects our brain chemistry, simple carbs and sugars lighting up the pleasure-sensors in our brains. We do not know why we like certain foods, but our brains know-they are drugs.

I am thinking about this, and therefore it is what comes out of my fingers while blogging, because I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about how our minds work, and how everyone tends to judge those around them based on their own experience of life. If someone who, above all, values order, someone who hates change, someone who can focus on one task in the middle of loud chaos were to live with me, we would judge each other harshly. I call those people obsessive compulsive, rigid, boring. They call me undisciplined, flighty, manic. But it seems that if we could all just accept each other's unmedicated selves, learn to adapt and make changes to accomodate everyone's strange hang-ups, we would be a much more loving and open-minded society.

And now, I have a messy kitchen, a bowl full of fresh soft cheese sitting on my stove waiting to be used, and various other projects. I do love it out here in the country- it is as quiet as the grave in this house. It is a beautiful, windstill day outside, perfect for a run with Andy later, and I have all day to fail, then fix. With nobody watching my process, I can spend hours down the rabbit hole that is the internet, becoming distracted by everything from cheese-making to youtube, and still have time to have the house looking as though super-wife lives here by the time B gets home. We took yesterday off, in the howling wind, and stayed in the house recharging our internal batteries before braving the weather and venturing to Garden City for groceries, so today B is having to work a bit to make up for it.

Until later, my faithful few. Thank you for staying faithful during my entire month's absense from the blogosphere.