new challenges

I am starting my own business...wowsers!

Sure. I am 60 years old, I have a daughter just started college, another four years behind her. I have a good job with good pay and good benefits. Hey, I think I'll become a consultant.

An accountant I talked to about handling my books argued with me about the wisdom of doing this but his wisdom was all dollars and cents and lacked sense or even a sense of what was at stake for me.

This raises a lot of issues for me, of course, but I want to comment on the ADD piece of this--and it's actually only one ADD piece of this, for me.

It's about transitions.

Everyone knows ADD is about attention span and impulse and all that. But few appreciate how much it's about the difficulty of making transitions. A therapist I know, who works with children, told me that ADD and ADHD folks make transitions like drivers shift gears without a clutch.

The truth of that is something I contend with every day. Short attention span and impulse control--sure, sure, sure. But I linger, sometimes, with a project, rather than move on to another. That's often as big a challenge for me.

The whole thing about starting a business--especially a one person business--implicates all the difficulties created by being ADD.

It's not about the dollars and the cents. It's about the sense, and the sense of it. It's about a lifetime of self developed therapy that takes the oddest forms, at times.