by Hannah Hart
I was quiet. It didn’t feel right to accept her praise, but I didn’t have any way to refuse it except to say, “Thanks, but it doesn’t feel like accomplishment to me.”
“Does anything?”
The clock on the wall showed that we had only ten minutes left. I was hoping to get out of this with a prescription in my hand, so I pushed past her question in an effort to save time. I didn’t want to spend another $400 for two hours of talking.
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“First I’d like you to read a book called Driven to Distraction. It’s very well written, and written for the adult ADHD mind. It has a series of case studies from successful people who late in life found themselves sitting in rooms like this one, expressing that same sense of failure and emotional disregulation.”
“Is that what I’m doing? Haha. Okay. I’ll get that book. Anything else?”
“I’d also like to give you a prescription for Adderall. Ten milligrams. Take half a pill a day, and see how it makes you feel and for how long. It’s a medication that acts instantly, so if you have a negative reaction, don’t panic because it will leave your system within a few hours.”
That sounded scary. “What kind of reaction?”
“Adderall is a stimulant, so some find that it makes them . . . more agitated. Fidgety.”
“MORE fidgety than I already am?? Ha! I don’t want that!”
She was writing on her prescription pad. “I don’t think you’ll have that reaction. Stimulants focus the mind with ADHD. I’m anticipating that you’ll be just fine.”
“Like having a cup of coffee and taking a nap.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It’s like how sometimes you have a cup of coffee and it like . . . wakes you up enough for you to realize you’re sleepy. So then you go and take a nap.”
She laughed. For the first time in the session. It felt nice. Like I could finally relax.
“Well, that’s an interesting analogy . . . We’re out of time. Let’s book an appointment for next week and check in then.”
“Okay. Thank you.” I stood and shook her hand. It was an exciting thought, that maybe my thoughts could be more contained. That maybe I did need a little help and that it was okay to accept it.
I went on the Adderall long enough for her to confirm that my ADHD was real (because it made me sit still instead of bouncing off the walls), but it was really difficult for me to take a pill several times a day. I had been raised with an incredible stigma about doctors and medication, and popping pills to be “normal” was hard to accept. I told my doctor, and she switched me to an extended-release medication called Vyvanse.
Vyvanse sucked. It blunted me emotionally and hurt my kidneys and was just not good. I wasn’t excited, I wasn’t motivated. I was just . . . flat.
So I went back on the Adderall with less judgment. Finding the right dose took time, but eventually I got into a rhythm that I could sustain.
But what was even more helpful was the book. Driven to Distraction changed the way I viewed my brain and my life. It showed that my brain wasn’t broken, and that brought me great relief. It was just a brain that didn’t do very well in our current education and employment structures. But it wasn’t my brain’s fault.
And I think that thought, “This is all my fault” or “I’m just being weak,” keeps people from talking to therapists or psychiatrists to get the support they need.
But it’s not weakness. It’s strength.
It takes strength to allow yourself to seek help. To seek allies. To get the support you need. It’s like adding a quiver to your bow. If you were taking aim at the goals in your life, you’d stand there and fire as many arrows as it took to meet them, right? And what if you realized that the arrows you were firing sometimes broke apart midflight and went all sorts of directions? You’d wish you just send them in one, right? That’s the way I like to think about getting the help I need for my ADHD.
If you feel as if your own arrows are misfiring or that life has given you only so many arrows, remember that change is possible but will take time. Remember we all process at different speeds. It’s neither 0% nor 100%.
1 You can’t write a 200+-page book in one sitting. You can’t plan a 10-week tour in one sitting. You can’t film a 90-minute movie in one sitting.
NO JUDGING
I survived the environment I grew up in by training my brain to function by “surviving,” a state of extreme awareness in which I was constantly inputting information and making judgments to protect myself and my loved ones. But as I grew older and entered the “thriving” stage of my life, I encountered a problem: the habit of hyperawareness followed me, and I became, well, very judgmental.
There is a lot of judgment in the world around us. The Internet is a place that’s full of judgment because the Internet is full of people. People who, from one computer to the next, spend their time commenting on and communicating with and judging other humans. The Internet can also be a wonderful place to meet people. I’m glad to have lived through the dawn of online dating, watching as the stigma of meeting your partner through a website or an app has slowly faded away. And I’ve met some great people because of the Internet—in particular, my friend Grace Helbig.
You know how sometimes you meet someone and you become friends almost instantly? Like the connection is so raw and organic, it’s as if you’ve already known each other for a lifetime? Like the two of you are speaking a secret language and you suddenly feel so blessed to have someone in your life who gets you?
That’s not how it was with me and Grace.
Grace and I were first introduced when I was living in New York. Her friend Michelle (another online content creator) had reached out to me and asked if I wanted to get dinner with the two of them. There weren’t many other YouTubers in New York at the time, so I gladly accepted the invitation.
From what I remember of that dinner, we ate at a French restaurant on Park and 20th, and Michelle did most of the talking. Grace was quiet. Tall, blond, pretty, and honestly kind of shy. I remember being surprised because I would have thought that someone who looked like her would have had natural confidence. Instead, here was this smart and quietly funny person with poor posture who clearly let the alpha in the conversation lead. She was a beta. Or so it seemed.
As the dinner drew to a close, I felt decidedly “meh” about Grace. And I felt that my judgment was final. My attitude was, if someone isn’t going to make the effort to draw me in, then I’m not going to be bothered with drawing them out. If you had told me that this person would eventually become one of my closest friends and business partners, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told me that this person and I would go on to have some of the most cataclysmic fights I’ve ever had in friendships, I would not have believed you. If you had told me that one night I’d drive this person to a hospital to get stitches in her forehead because she’d fallen down some stairs, I wouldn’t have believed you. And if you had told me that another night we’d play Carnegie Hall together, only to find ourselves laughing so hard we cried after one of us (Grace) peed on the other’s favorite hat, I would have listened politely and then muttered an excuse as I walked away from our conversation.
But that’s the thing about judgment. If you give your initial opinion of someone too much weight and accept it as fact before really taking the time to really get to know someone, you risk missing out on a lot. I’m glad I didn’t let that happen with Grace. I was wrong about her when we first met. I never expected that the shy girl across from me at the dinner table would become one of my favorite people to turn to for advice or for a lively debate. I never thought that this seeming “beta” of a babe would turn out to be one of the most open-minded and supportive people I know when it came to listening to opposing ideas. Today our friendship is categorized by periods of extreme work, extreme play, and extreme understanding. Understanding is incredibly important in a friendship. Grace is probably the person in my life I am
most comfortable admitting my mistakes to.
Good thing, since Grace and I have made more than our fair share of mistakes together.
Grace and I had been filming together in Vancouver for five weeks. The project was Electra Woman and Dyna Girl: Rebooted!, a modern remake of a series from the 1970s that no one has ever heard of. Well, I shouldn’t say no one, but whenever someone has heard of it, I’m surprised. My literary agent, Jodi, for instance, is a fan of the series and was excited to hear that the remake was happening and that the story had been given a modern twist. The original series involved spandex, go-go boots, and the generally accepted sexism that was common for the era. But Grace and I were determined that our reboot wouldn’t involve any of those things. We eventually won our battle, but only after holding the project up for two days as we rewrote scripts until 4 a.m.
Shooting the series was an ambitious project: fourteen-hour days, week after week, learning stunts, memorizing scripts that were only just finalized, and finally maintaining each of our separate businesses while operating out of Canada for six weeks. But Grace and I share an intense work ethic: we both like to muscle through projects no matter the cost. Health? Pfft. Mental wellness? Pfft. If we can walk away, we’re fine.1
During our final weekend of filming, Grace and I had a lot of steam we needed to let off. Which is how I explain the events that occurred on the Night of the Tattoos.
Before I get into what happened, I should tell you that Grace had no tattoos before that night, but I had gotten my first tattoo when I was twenty-four. That was back when I was going through a period of intense depression and would spend all day lying on my friend’s couch staring at the ceiling. It was just after I had moved to New York for a fresh start in a new city. (But I could not find the drive to make the most of the opportunity. I had plenty of ambition, I just had no ammunition. It was as if I could see my target, I held my gun, but I had no desire to pull the trigger.)
In those days I could talk about the things I wanted to do, and that would excite me; I could work alongside a friend and feed off her motivation, but when left to my own devices, I just couldn’t put my money where my mouth was. For instance, at the time, I wanted to try to write a novel. I could see the ideas in my head, outlines even! I had a laptop and I lived in Brooklyn, where coffee shops were in abundance. I had everything I needed, but every morning when I woke up, it just seemed easier to stay in bed and daydream rather than to live my dream. In order for that pattern of behavior to change, I decided I needed to get a tattoo.
My thinking was not that if I got a tattoo it would be the answer to all my problems. Rather, it would serve as a symbol to remind me that I was in control of my own desires and could make things happen. I wanted to put a symbol on my chest that would remind me to get up and start the motions. At first I thought it would be a rhythm symbol or a bass clef, something music-related to keep tempo with my temperament. But I wasn’t a musician, and besides having a strong affinity for music, I couldn’t claim that any of those symbols would hold any deep significance for me.
What symbols were important to me? The symbol of the cross crossed my mind—freshman year of college, I’d worn a silver cross around my neck and lived in the straight-edge dorms (meaning no drugs or alcohol allowed). That was also my final year of repressing/denying my homosexuality.
Clearly a cross wouldn’t do. I spent many a couch-ridden morning contemplating the decision. I realized that I didn’t want a symbol from my past; I wanted something that signified my future and would give me the motivation to start moving in the right direction. Then one day it came to me: a play button! I wanted to put the movie of my life into motion. I wanted to start making things happen. A play button would be perfect! Something I could push as many times as I needed to. Something that would set things back into motion, no matter how hard it was for me to get off the couch.
However, being the balanced and even-natured person that I am (not), I thought I might drive myself insane with the constant expectation of activity. So naturally, I decided I needed a pause button, too.
Before making that lifelong commitment, I did my research on the best tattoo shops in town. I realized that it wasn’t going to be the most intricate piece of art, but I’m a bit of a hypochondriac and I wanted to get it done in a place that was clean, classy, and safe. After about a month of deliberation (even going so far as to draw the symbol on my chest to make sure I liked it), I finally went to a tattoo shop on Smith Street in Brooklyn to get a consultation. About a week after that, I went in for the tattoo. It was a cool, controlled, and calm experience that was a definite marker in my life. I felt proud and rational and free of any doubt that I had made a good decision.
Getting my second tattoo with Grace, however, was the opposite sort of experience.
On the Night of the Tattoos, Grace and I were both in conflict with our significant others. Grace’s conflicts with her boyfriend were always very loud and passionate, as is the nature of their relationship. My girlfriend, Francesca, and I were also in conflict, but the kind of conflict that’s quiet—the quiet of two people who know that something is about to go terribly wrong. The quiet before an earthquake. Except who knew if the earthquake was going to bring forth a volcano and who knew if that volcano would destroy everything we had built. Francesca and I had said our quiet, conflicted good nights, and Grace’s boyfriend had booked an early flight from Canada as a spontaneous act to prove a point in an argument with her.
As I said, it had been a bit of a rough trip.
So the evening found us decompressing over bottles of white wine and Motown music in the hotel-apartments we stayed in during the shoot. We made kale chips and were lying around commiserating about romance while steadily getting more and more drunk. We may have had a little more wine than was good for us, but I will give us this: we have always been very good at looking at each other’s relationships objectively while being completely subjective about our own. It’s so easy to talk through those conflicts because we’ve never had the added pressure of being in love with each other.
Oh, maybe I should say something about that.
As a giant, raging lesbian, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I’ve never had a crush on Grace Helbig. Isn’t that wild? I mean, it’s pretty natural to assume that after all these years I’d be secretly in love with her. And trust me, I’d tell you if it was true! Or at least I’d try to cleverly allude to the fact that I was—but I’m not. Maybe it’s because she’s a Libra and I’m a Scorpio. Maybe it’s because we’ve always just been buds. We’ve been drunk together many times, and we’ve never once made out! Isn’t that nuts? And we’re both the type of people who love to make out when drunk. Grace’s explanation for it would be that she’s straight, but I have plenty of friends who are “straight” who I’ve smooched! Grace has always been like a sister to me. Like Naomi. Unfortunately for Grace and Naomi, I can be a bit of a bully sometimes, which leads me back to how we ended up getting those tattoos.
Despite the fact that both of our relationships roughly resembled cyclones, my (drunken) sense was that we were actually both pretty grounded. I was expressing that to Grace when it hit me: this was exactly what my next tattoo should be about: groundedness! I wanted something that would remind me to stay grounded. Grounded in fame. Grounded in my expectations. Grounded in what was important to me. And I needed the tattoo now. I immediately started googling symbols for staying grounded and decided on the alchemy symbol for “earth”—perfect! I like geometric shapes, and, frankly, I was being drunk and impulsive.
I showed the symbol to Grace, and she agreed. “Okay, then, let’s do it!” She was sitting on the floor with her back against the couch. I was lying by her feet idly examining her toes.
“Yeah? Okay, yeah! But I don’t think anything will be open at this hour.” I searched on my phone for “Vancouver Tattoo shops that are open right now.” Naturally, since it was 11:30 p.m., nothing turned up.
“Oh, come on, there has to be so
mething. Here, let me call the concierge and see if they know.”
“No, dude, tattoo shops aren’t like that. They are real shops, and they close at seven or something!” Despite saying that, I had decided to start calling random numbers of tattoo shops I’d found on my phone to see if, by some miracle, someone might pick up.
Both our searches were in vain—although while calling the concierge Grace had managed to order herself another martini and me a vodka soda—and we were very close to giving up. That’s when my phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Did you just kick the door?” The man on the line sounded very bothered.
“Excuse me?”
“Who is this?”
“Uh—Hannah?”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing—oh! Wait! Sorry, but do you do tattoos?”
“Yeah, I do. That’s why I asked if you were just trying to kick down my door.”
The conversation was confusing. But then again, I was drunk, so everything was oscillating between being extremely clear and extremely vague.
“No. We are at our hotel. I’m not kicking your door. Look, I’m just trying to get a tattoo done before I leave town tomorrow.” A lie, but I wanted to create a sense of urgency to justify the late-night call. “And I’m just hoping you will do it. It’s a simple geometric thing. Won’t take long.”
“I’ve closed my shop. Sorry, but I—”
“What if I paid you a stupid amount of money? Like double the cost of what you normally charge.”
“For what exactly?”
“A triangle. With a line through it,” I said, describing the symbol of earth.
“And you would pay me—”
“Double whatever your standard rate is.” At that point I could sense him coming around, and I needed to be incredibly confident in my decision. Despite its spontaneity. Despite the hour of night. Despite the ridiculous amount of money I was willing to pay.