It happens like this every day, always at the same times of day, and I am never wrong. But none of this much matters, unless I make one point: For the longest time, everything felt off. Or rather, everything in me felt off. Like a film playing in slow-motion, with its subtitles sped up. My mind would stall and surge, slippery with short-circuits, prone to laser-beam intensity one day and languishing the next.

I often struggled in school, was told I could and should do better, yet unable, believed myself intellectually inferior (peculiar only because of the precocious reading habit that was my sole sustained engagement). Jobs, internships, myriad extracurricular pursuits -- each of them thrilling upon first prospect -- fizzled-out early and often. No one saw anything too out of the ordinary. I was just "lazy," "irresponsible," "a careless student," "disorganized," and always in the throes of some procrastinated chaos. And because I'd never known any different -- it's not like I made things difficult for fun -- I believed that it was ultimately nothing, that this was just who I was and would be forever on. Passionless, aimless. unmoored.

The classic conception of ADD, the acute characterization, is that of a child on turbocharge: prolix and chatty, a blur of fingers and kneecaps; she will be running a marathon even when she is seated and still.

But I have never been an earthquake of activity. I don't hop fences or collect speeding tickets. I've never broken a bone or run through pane-glass. My frenetic energy, my fragmented focus, is manifest inward. It's marking 26-Across in 30-Down, in the Sunday puzzle, unnoticed and in pen. It's MetroCards misplaced, essays turned in late, library books long overdue. It's hundreds of dollars paid to collections agencies for forgotten overdrafts that started as single digits, and credit cards lost so often that the banks believe it is fraud. It's multiple concurrently-kept day-planners, and not one of them ever current. It's running out to the store for batteries and coming back with blank notebooks and tea.

As errors go, mine were far from exceptional. We are all overwhelmed. We all get distracted. None of us is privileged with an excess of time. There is nothing especially sympathetic about a girl who cannot keep a deadline. The problem is hers alone.

When I am 19, I have my first taste of cocaine, and soon things look not so bad. Because cocaine is so self-gratifying -- it's all you want and need and feel is important in the world -- and gratification is just about all I'd been looking for, I believe I have discovered my antidote. Daily, hourly, for many months, I carefully maintain this not high but level-feeling state of being. Each line sharpening my sight, I am made more consciously and comfortably present. And I have no intention of stopping this new, novel form of self-treatment. It seems almost too easy. And too easy not to let go.