My father isn’t a work of fiction... He’s better
Ruby Heyward reflects on the ADHD she inherited from her dad, researcher and inventor Philip Heyward.
Those who haven’t met my father might compare him to a work of fiction, or a poor reproduction of Doc from Back To The Future, with his crazy-peppered, unkempt hair and crazy ideas. Walk into his lab and you’ll see TV monitors, vine-like cables and a hodgepodge of homemade apparatuses, reminiscent of a postapocalyptic lab or a scene from The Matrix.
His name is Philip Heyward and he is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Otago, and a physiologist of the brain; a detail I would use to win an argument on the playground as though a PhD is hereditary.
Growing up I would bring friends to his lab to breathe in from the helium tank and make silly voices. I’d play with his microscopes and look at the headless mice in the fridge with a squeamish stomach and I would marvel at his curious collection of vintage science equipment and dried animals.
‘‘I’m thinking about getting a boa constrictor or an iguana, just to give it a wow factor,’’ he said recently over the phone, which makes choosing a Christmas present easier for me this year.
He’s always been gifted. As a baby, he was given sewing machine parts to play with. As a child, he would get in trouble for taking devices apart and putting them back together. Grandma used to tell him, ‘‘the phones never worked the same since you messed with them’’.
Now, he spends his time playing with physics, chemistry and biology. His latest toy is the dahlia project, an endeavour in which he and a team of scientists across different departments are using extracts from the flower in a treatment to cure diabetes.
Up until recently it has been hush-hush, but it’s now patented in Canada, the European Union, and Mexico. It has meant that for the past few years, our backyard has been a field of dahlias, much to my mum’s delight.
Dad was diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in his late 50s, while accompanying my brother, who has severe ADHD, to a specialist. It was a hugely positive experience for him. ‘‘It was a big relief to know there’s not actually anything wrong with me,’’ he said.
I may not have inherited his PhD or ability to use science to cure the world, but I did inherit his ADHD. Well, technically I have Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD).
ADD/ADHD affects 1 in 20 New Zealanders and is hereditary. It is on the spectrum of autism and like many things of this nature, it is more complicated than it seems. ADHD is not just being distracted by a squirrel, or an ability to sit still.
For me, ADHD means having deep passions; the ability to hyperfocus on things, which is good when I’m focused on an essay, but bad when I play The Sims for six hours; obsessing over new topics and interests then forgetting about them, which leads to having a plethora of half-baked skills.
It also means I tend to zone out or daydream during class or meetings. I’m impulsive, which can make for a fun conversation. I’m forgetful, messy, and cannot function without a planner. I can have a sensory overload, so if someone chews loudly beside me I become engrossed by it. And I don’t always pick up on social cues. If I don’t have a phone, keys and wallet basket; I won’t have keys, a phone or a wallet for very long.
Where my dad has collections of record players, speakers, vintage gardening tools, prehistoric cameras and radios, I have thousands of Polaroid photographs, quirky socks, more plants than I have space for, every piece of broken china I have seen on the beach, and paintbrushes upon paintbrushes.
Funnily enough, people with disorders like ADHD are more likely to marry someone with the same condition, with or without diagnosis. Like my father, my mum wasn’t diagnosed until her mid-50s. At parties, her laughter fills the room. You’ll hear her before you see her. She is creative, messy, and has a million different projects going at once.
Sometimes I feel like the devil on my father’s shoulder, begging him to grow out his bushy beard (a staple feature of his since teen-hood) and plait it like a Viking. Mum says she’ll chop it off, a threat that is thrown around when his hair starts looking like a nice spot for penguins to hide in.
Women and girls go largely undiagnosed with ADHD globally, partly due to gendered socialisation and how this affects its presentation differently in boys and girls.
I think my ADHD went undiagnosed for so long because it was so tame compared to my brother who practically bounces off the walls; mine was more internal.
I also got good grades in high school, was in scholar programs, won an NCEA art scholarship, and went on to graduate with a double major in communication studies, and film/media studies from Otago University with a high GPA. I made the awful mistake of conflating ADHD with inability and unintelligence.
We exist on a spectrum with different strengths, weaknesses and severity of the disorder. Not to say having ADHD is not a daily struggle, but people can be successful and wonderful while being neurodivergent, with or without good grades. I mean, you just have to look at my dad.
ADHD has given my father flexibility and the ability to jump from one idea to another. It has given colour to his work; marrying science and creativity. An example of this is the polarised microscope he is building from scratch. It is made of bits and bobs he has collected over the years, including an old scavenged piece of equipment used to hold cat spines during cruel experiments.
My dad’s colleagues often remark on how creative his experiments and creations are. They are impressed by the rate and quality of his ideas, but in the same breath note his lack of followthrough. Time management and abandoning projects once they ‘‘aren’t fun any more’’, is one of the drawbacks of ADHD. That, and the prejudice and assumptions that come with the diagnosis.
The very helium tank I would play with as a child was a remnant of an abandoned project to shoot fluorescents onto brain cells so precisely as to avoid damaging the membrane.
Dad and I laugh about how we are always labelled as weird or quirky by others (‘‘linear thinkers’’ my dad calls them). ‘‘What does quirky even mean? It’s always a little bit of a shock,’’ he asked. I always wonder ‘‘What is it that I do or say that is so strange?’’ People often say: ‘‘You don’t seem like you have ADHD.’’ Well, Susan, what should I look like? Is forgetting what I am saying mid-sentence and misplacing everything of value I own not enough for you? I often find that people can either dislike us with ADHD solely due to our eccentricity, or love us for our unreplicable zest.
Dad recently told me about his paperwork piles, which one of his PhD students, Maddy, describes as near avalanche and ‘‘about to crush the poor man’’. Dad says once the paper is on the floor or you can’t remember what’s in the pile, it is not of interest any more. I am the same when it comes to the book I am reading, a painting I am doing, or the ukulele I’ve picked up once.
But this very ability to jump around ideas is how he became involved with the dahlia project.
When attending a lecture about treating diabetes with a rare Chinese medicinal plant, he approached the speaker with the idea of finding a readily available botanical source. He identified an abstract solution straight away: dahlias.
‘‘My favourite experiment was the result of me pissing about and being creative. Strategic, methodical pissing about, mind you,’’ he said, as he recounted travelling up and down New Zealand collecting dahlias from flower shows.
‘‘I tried many experiments to extract the compound. But one day I just jammed a jar full of petals, filled it with ethanol, and sealed it.’’
This ‘‘pissing about’’ was used for more than 1000 experiments. ‘‘It took the chemistry department, and food science department months to replicate it because they were going about it the correct way.’’
I have always said that in another life, he would have been an artist, specifically a sculptor. But Maddy pointed out that ‘‘science done right is an art form’’.
‘‘The issue with science is when people hold onto their opinions and only explore things that support them. You have to be able to recognise the bigger picture and be willing to be flexible,’’ Dad says.
Maddy says the things Dad does well are not necessarily rewarded. ‘‘He’s too weird and cares too much about people to be successful in the traditional, business sense.’’
Dad thinks we need to celebrate neurodivergent people.
My father is not a work of fiction. He is better. He is the sort of person who makes life fun and interesting, even if it’s not always by choice. To say it is all down to his ADHD would be far too easy and would deny him the credit he deserves.
We exist on a spectrum with different strengths, weaknesses and severity of the disorder. Not to say having ADHD is not a daily struggle, but people can be successful and wonderful while being neurodivergent, with or without good grades. I mean, you just have to look at my dad.