I was diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age, and have been doing battle with my attention span for most of my life. I had only read a half dozen books all the

I was diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age, and have been doing battle with my attention span for most of my life. I had only read a half dozen books all the way through when I graduated from High School, despite reading at a college reading level before I was out of elementary school and having started hundreds of them. The few books that I had read included Les Miserables and War and Peace, both of which I binge-read over a period of a few days, barely allowing myself to eat and rarely allowing myself to shower while I read them. The other ones were Frindle, Tangerine, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and Catcher in the Rye. They were completely consuming. My addiction to video games was so intense and so severe that they were outright banned at my house. I was terrible at school, skipping more than half of my classes, but tested in the 99th percentile for standardized testing, learning a lot of what I should have learned in school by deduction as I was taking the test. That allowed me to get into college, which I later dropped out of, electing instead to buy a one-way ticket to China unsure if I would ever come back. Basically I was either 0% engaged in something or 110%, and if I wasn't engaged it felt like no matter how hard I fought I couldn't force myself to care. The turning point came when I was living in eastern Ukraine serving a Mormon mission. As per the mission rules, the only books we read were scriptural, we only used a computer for 30 minutes a week to email home, and in my particular mission I spent 90% of my time, every minute from 11 AM to 9 PM (except for a one-hour dinner) walking around, talking to people in the streets. I don't know if it was age or that I was finally rid of the many stimulants I used to have, but my mind just slowed down. I concentrated on everything, and, perhaps especially because I was speaking Russian, I could literally recall every word of every conversation I had. I sat down in the mornings and studied the intricacies of the Russian language for an hour straight without blinking an eye. I read the Old Testament cover to cover; something that would have made me literally pull my hair out just a year earlier. Then I went home. I got an iPhone, I got on the Internet, and it all came back. I try to limit the stimulants, (I've become very minimalistic), and I usually spend a lot of the morning with a calmer mind, but... I work online. I love the Internet. And I haven't yet been able to calm my mind like it was for those two years. It may be a matter of self-control - it probably is, but learning to program is incredibly painful. 10 minutes at a time sometimes with an incredible number of stops and starts. I don't know what the answer is, nor do I pretend that I can project my experience onto some greater understanding of what ADHD is, how to defeat it, or if it needs defeating, but the experience of feeling like I could finally do all the things I wanted to do because I didn't have anything else to stimulate me was fascinating, and it may be valuable to someone else.