My Life in Crazytown: How I Turned ADHD Into My Superpower (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781946458537)

Richard Lowe was born into a war zone that looked like a family.

His father tried to kill him before he was born. Nearly succeeded again at nine months. By six, Richard had survived the closet, learned to map his father's moods the way you map exits in a burning building, and understood that the people who were supposed to protect him were the ones he needed protection from. His mother's response to all of it was to pretend it wasn't happening.

Most kids who grow up in a house like that become one of two things: casualties or survivors. Richard became something else. He became a systems thinker.

The hypervigilance that kept him alive became his ability to read people and situations that others couldn't decode. The hyperfocus his parents tried to medicate and punish became the engine that drove decades of professional achievement. The emotional distance that made relationships difficult made him exceptional at his work. By twenty he was Vice President of Consulting. By forty he was running the technology infrastructure for Trader Joe's. By sixty he was a successful ghostwriter who finally had the vocabulary - ADHD, autism, C-PTSD - to explain why his brain had always worked the way it did.

Welcome to Crazytown is not a recovery memoir. There is no forgiveness, no tearful reconciliation, no healing arc. It is the story of a child who built a survival system out of the wreckage he was handed and then, slowly, discovered that the wreckage was the most valuable thing he owned.

This is Volume One, covering birth through age nineteen - the years that built everything that followed.