charlotte désirée lorenz

For as long as I can remember, there has been this thing I do.
Without any warning or apparent reason, I burst out with a scream, a loud squeak.
With it, I release excess energy. Even though keeping it in feels unsafe, I have learned to indulge in these bursts only when I’m on my own.
I have always had a lot of energy, even more as a kid than today. Sometimes, before bed, my mother would let me run two or three laps around the house in my pyjamas to let it out (which I loved). “Comme une folle,” she would often say. Like a crazy female. (Of course, “comme un fou” sounds less organic, craziness still being a stigma pinned on difficult behaviour that would be considered enigmatic or bold in men.)
Crazy is such a weird word. I feel like there was a time when crazy was desirable, exciting. Crazy was fun. When I was a kid, Britney was “crazy” and it wasn’t yet something to pity or fear. It was something to “spice up your life”. For as long as I can remember, I have been called crazy on various occasions by people I knew well or had just met. It wasn’t something I tried to be, but it felt like a compliment most of the time, so I took it.
Then, along with the world, “crazy” started sounding different. More and more, men said it about women, about me. I came to hate it, feeling that it was meant to ostracise and shame us.
A couple of years ago, I got an ADHD diagnosis. Now, no longer crazy, I found that these four letters had entrenched me in a whole new discourse I never fully understood or cared about. Yes, more and more people get diagnosed with it. This, to me, seems only logical, as the difficulties subsumed under ADHD are a result of, a reaction to, the way we live in this age of attention as currency. I have therefore learned to see the impulses it creates as resources. Maybe what we have come to call ADHD is our only way out. Maybe understanding, embracing, enjoying the chaos, following the white rabbit, could be the antidote to the life-denying, inhuman and isolating conditions we have created.
Crazy, I tell myself, might not be so bad after all?

is part of an ongoing reflection on artistic representations of adhd perception.
Out of a collection of found images, doodles, notes, links and sounds, a map emerges: a cartography of impulses and interests, related to the subject or not at all. High culture meets low, quiet meets loud, everything carries the same weight, the way my attention moves through the world. Each element is an inspiring impulse, a burst of energy, a squeaking sound.