Stacey Turis Here's To Not Catching Our Hair On Fire

In “Here’s to Not Catching Our Hair on Fire: An Absent-Minded Tale of Life Giftedness & Attention Deficit-Oh look! A Chicken!,” Author Stacey Turis refers to herself as “Twice exceptional,” which is an alternative way of describing an individual that is both “gifted” and has an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (AD[H]D) diagnosis. She explains that it is called twice exceptional because while part of her brain is capable of astounding intellectual achievements the other half is severely lacking, not at all productive, which often makes it difficult to navigate through life.
Stacy was coined “gifted” as a child and then later diagnosed with AD[H]D at age thirty-three. Before her AD[H]D diagnosis, she was misdiagnosed and medicated for
It took her 2 years to complete her autobiography, and throughout the book she sometimes goes off topic, and then returns later. Other symptoms implied are forgetfulness and frequent daydreaming. At a party, she forgot to watch the neighbors kid walk home and in mid conversation, remembered and ran to the front of the house, but at that point the girl had already made it home. She forgot to pay a ticket, a warrant was put out for her arrest, and the cops came to her house. While driving on the highway, she started to have one her “downloads,” and designed an entire yoga studio in her head. She said she could see every detail of the studio in her mind. That is until she was “yanked back to reality by cop sirens.” Apparently, the cop had been following her for 3 miles but she hadn’t noticed. Stacey Feels as though she has no concept of time, past of future. “I can handle onto about two weeks of my life, but any event after that gets lumped into the past.” She finds it difficult to think about, or focus on the future, which lead to forgetting important events such as holidays or birthdays. She works best from hour to hour and believes that her ability to live in the present is sometimes a good thing. However, she does have some insight into how being unprepared and procrastinating is bothersome to surrounding
The more e-mails received, the more she withdraws from checking them, the more it builds up, and “it just progresses this monster that terrorizes me dialing with guilt, shame, and anxiety, because I’m not on top of it.” As painful as those feelings are, she is simply unable to force herself to check the e-mail. In these types of situations, she looks for support and structure from her husband and mother to make sure she is held accountable for looking at the e-mail. She calls on her mother to help her prioritize a non-existent to do-list that she is too overwhelmed to create. Her mother is able to help her breaks it down into more manageable pieces, so that she is able to mentally participate in the prioritization