Inside Roz’s Head: ADHD in Three Acts

Act I: Ahab — The Captain Who Mistook Obsession for Purpose by Mark E. Paull (though Roz will pretend she wrote it)

Inside Roz’s Head: ADHD in Three Acts –

Act I: Ahab by Mark E. Paull (though Roz will pretend she wrote it)

Inside Roz’s Head: ADHD in Three Acts

Act I: Ahab — The Captain Who Mistook Obsession for Purpose

by Mark E. Paull (though Roz will pretend she wrote it)

(They said it’d be easy. “Just moderate a panel,” they said. “Three neurodivergent characters you already know.” I said yes. I always do. That’s how I end up with post-its on my forehead and fictional men from different centuries giving me migraines. The kind that settle behind your eyes like bad decisions. The kind that make you question every life choice that led you to this moment, sitting in a bathrobe at what passes for a conference table in the landscape of your own skull. The coffee’s gone cold twenty minutes ago, just like my initial enthusiasm for this particular Tuesday. But here we are. Duty calls. Or maybe it’s just the nicotine habit demanding attention, a constant, low-grade hum beneath the larger, more dramatic hums of the fictional guests. It's always something.)

ROZ: (Holding a cigarette with the ash still clinging to it) You ever try running a group session in your bathrobe while holding a cigarette with the ash still clinging to it like hope? Welcome to my Tuesday. A typical one, honestly. Less whales, usually. More existential dread and the faint smell of burnt toast. But today, we’ve got nautical themes. Because of him. The captain. The one who couldn't let a large, pale mammal just be.

(Let’s start with the captain. You know the one. Leg like driftwood. Eyes like black ice. Carries around his trauma like a harpoon he refuses to drop even at lunch. You can practically hear the sea shanties of his internal suffering, the mournful, repetitive ones. He smells like salt and unforgiveness, a potent combination that frankly does not pair well with lukewarm coffee. Every line on his face is a latitude of grievance, a permanent map of every perceived slight and cosmic injustice. He’s a walking, talking tempest, convinced he's the main character in a tragedy nobody else signed up for. And my job is to see if we can find the quiet eye of the storm. Spoiler: it’s usually just more storm, maybe with a brief interlude for dramatic staring contests.)

(He won’t sit down. Of course not. Sitting would imply stillness. Rest. A lack of immediate, all-consuming purpose. He’s just standing there, gripping the metaphor like it owes him rent. It’s a nice metaphor, don’t get me wrong. Solid. Dramatic. Gets the point across about being singularly focused to the point of self-destruction. But you can’t exactly unpack your emotional baggage when you’re clinging to the luggage itself like it’s the last life raft and yelling at it about cosmic injustice. I offer him a chair. It’s a perfectly good chair. Upholstered. Supportive. Designed for the weary and burdened, i.e., my usual clientele (myself included, sometimes). He declines. With a look that suggests the chair is somehow complicit in the whale incident. Of course he does. Ahab doesn’t sit. He looms. He paces the perimeter of my consciousness like a caged predator, radiating an energy that suggests any sudden movement might result in dramatic pronouncements about destiny or, worse, passive-aggressive sighs about the quality of the metaphorical seating arrangements.)

ROZ: (Puffing gently on the cigarette, smoke curling like a parenthetical) So, when did you first notice your entire life had become one giant, monomaniacal Google search? You know, searching for 'whale AND vengeance AND destiny' and ignoring all other results? (I watch him for the flicker. The crack in the facade. The tiny, involuntary twitch that tells me I’ve hit something real beneath the layers of brine and bluster. The kind of twitch that says, "Oh. Right. That.")

(He winces. That’s a start. A small one, like a single drop of fresh water in the vast ocean of his accumulated rage. But I’ll take it. Like watching a barnacle detach. Progress is progress, even if it’s measured in millimeters and minor facial contortions.)

(He won’t meet my eyes. Still scanning. Always scanning. He’s already looking for white walls and bigger prey, probably mentally calculating the square footage of the room for potential whaling expeditions. My office (or this mental construct of it) is sparse for a reason. Less distraction. Less fodder for elaborate internal narratives about persecution or grand quests involving office furniture. I swear if there were wallpaper shaped like marine mammals, he’d be halfway through a soliloquy by now about the tragic taxonomy of cetaceans. The air crackles with his restless energy, the unspent kinetic force of a thousand leagues of furious sailing compressed into one highly agitated man in my metaphorical living room, eyeing my ficus tree with suspicion. He’s looking past me, through me, searching the very fabric of reality for… what? Justification? A new target? Probably both. It’s the classic hyperfocus flip side: the inability to just be in the room, to focus on the small, inconvenient, necessary task of talking about your feelings instead of plotting your next symbolic conquest.)

ROZ: (Leaning in, not kindly) You know what your real problem is? (I let the question hang in the air, heavy as a kraken’s tentacle, or maybe just my own exhaustion.)

(He flinches. They all do. It’s the therapist equivalent of hitting the brakes suddenly when your passenger thought you were on cruise control. Forces you to confront the fact that you’re moving, and maybe too fast, and maybe directly towards an iceberg of your own making.)

ROZ: (Voice dropping slightly, cutting through the metaphorical sea spray and the faint smell of salt) You’re not chasing the whale. You’re chasing the feeling you had the first time you thought catching it would fix you. (The siren song of the quick fix. The belief that the external achievement is the key to internal repair. That the big win, the grand conquest, the vanquishing of the white whale, will silence the small, persistent ache inside. That’s the real Moby Dick, isn't it? The one in your chest.)

(Boom. There it is. He blinks, hard. Like he’s surfaced too quickly from a deep dive he didn’t know he was on. I’ve said something he didn’t expect. Something that bypassed the carefully constructed defenses – the peg leg, the scar, the whole tragic backstory™ – and landed somewhere vulnerable. Probably the first genuinely uncomfortable truth he's heard since 1851. Before the leg. Before the obsession consumed everything. Before the whale became the distorted, monstrous answer to a question he hadn’t even asked himself properly yet: What am I without this wound?)

ROZ: (Taking another slow drag from the cigarette) I know obsession. Mine’s nicotine and post-its. Yours is saltwater vengeance. Different packaging, sure. Less harpoons involved in my daily routine, typically. But the engine driving it? The relentless, tunnel-visioned pursuit of a single thing, convinced it holds the key to everything else, even when it's actively destroying you? Yeah. I recognize the wiring. (We’re not so different, Captain. Just different coping mechanisms for the same frantic internal energy, the brain that latches on and refuses to let go, even when the target is just another version of your own unresolved pain.)

(He shifts. Good. He’s hearing me. Or at least pretending to process something other than nautical charts. Maybe the pretense is the first step towards the real thing. He’s not storming out yet. He hasn't tried to harpoon the ficus. These are wins. Small ones, measured in tiny increments of not-fleeing.)

ROZ: It’s not the whale. (Watching him squirm just a little more. The hook is in deeper now. Reaching past the blubber, aiming for the soft, messy stuff underneath.) It’s the brain. The one that locks on like it’s solving a puzzle but forgets to ask if the puzzle still matters. The one that’s brilliant at the hunt, at the hyperfocused pursuit, but terrible at the pivot. Terrible at reassessment. Terrible at realizing the rules of the game changed three acts ago and you’re the only one still playing with the original instruction manual. (It’s the ADHD brain, in its terrible, magnificent, relentless glory. The focus is a superpower, until it blinds you.)

AHAB: (Mutters low, defensive) I admitted it already. Yes, yes, I said it. I’m stubborn. I’m obsessive. I fixate. (The Holy Trinity of neurodivergent doom, framed not as a struggle, but as a badge of honor.)

ROZ: (Snorts, a short, sharp sound) You fixate like it’s a sport. You weaponize it. You romanticize it. You wrapped it in monologues and passed it off as destiny. (You took a neurological trait and built an empire of ego around it. You made your bug into your feature, your fatal flaw into your brand identity. You built your entire existence around the intensity of your focus, even when that focus was aimed squarely at your own destruction. You turned a symptom into a saga. And now you’re trapped in the epic you wrote, pace-for-pace with a chair that offends you.)

(He frowns. The lines on his face deepen, like new cracks forming in an old sea chart, showing uncharted territories of discomfort. I almost feel bad. Almost. But not enough to stop. Not when we’re finally getting somewhere that isn’t just rehashing the highlights reel of his grudges.)

ROZ: (Flicking the ash slowly, watching it fall like miniature snowflakes of past regrets) You know what’s worse than being wrong about the whale? Being right… and realizing it didn’t help. (The emptiness after the victory. The dawning horror that the target wasn’t the answer after all. That you destroyed yourself, and often others, for something that couldn’t fill the hole you were trying to patch with saltwater and fury. That’s the real Moby Dick. The one you can’t harpoon, because it lives inside you.)

(Now he looks tired. Not broken. Not defeated. Just profoundly, bone-deep exhausted from the sheer weight of chasing meaning with a spear instead of a question. Exhausted by the performance. Exhausted by the sheer, relentless effort of maintaining the obsession, the anger, the all-consuming focus. The energy it takes to stay angry, to stay locked onto a single, external target, is immense. It drains the life out of you. It leaves you hollowed out, a shell of a man defined only by what he hunts.)

ROZ: (Voice low, almost a whisper, cutting through the lingering metaphorical salt spray) You ever think, that maybe you didn’t need revenge? Maybe you just needed permission to stop. (Permission to drop the harpoon. Permission to sit down. Permission to let the waves just be waves, not personal insults. Permission to just… be. To not have a grand, all-consuming purpose dictated by a past injury. To not have to fight. To just exist, maybe even in a bathrobe, holding a metaphorical cigarette.)

(Silence. Even the ocean in his eyes goes still. The metaphorical waves recede. For a moment, there's just... water. Flat. Calm. Unused to the lack of turmoil. It’s the longest quiet I’ve experienced in my own head all week.)

ROZ: (Breaking the silence, leaning back slightly in the chair) That is the first honest thing you’ve said all session. (The admission of not knowing how to stop. The vulnerability beneath the bluster. The crack in the granite that feels like a breakthrough.)

(He nods, slow. The rigidity in his posture eases just a fraction, like a sail being lowered.)

AHAB: (Voice quiet, stripped of its usual bombast, sounding almost… human) I dreamed last night. That I let it go. The whale. The ship. Everything.

ROZ: And? (Holding my breath, waiting for it. The punchline. The twist. The inevitable return to the narrative.)

AHAB: I woke up crying.

ROZ: (Inhaling, holding it, letting it burn in the lungs. Blowing out a plume of smoke that drifts between us) That wasn’t grief. That was your nervous system realizing it’s allowed to rest. (Allowed to disengage from the high-alert, fight-or-flight setting it’s been stuck on for decades. Allowed to stand down. It’s a shock to the system. A good one. Like remembering how to breathe after holding your breath underwater for too long, or like realizing your shoulders weren't supposed to be permanently somewhere around your ears.)

(He sits with that. Doesn’t fight it. Doesn’t argue. Doesn’t launch into a counter-monologue. Just... considers it. It’s more stillness than I’ve ever seen from him. More presence. The silence isn’t empty; it’s pregnant with possibility.)

ROZ: (Reaching for her pen again. Tapping the page once. Final question for Act I.) Captain?

AHAB: Yes?

ROZ: If you weren’t chasing it anymore... who would you be?

(He blinks. Once. Twice. His mouth opens. Closes. The question hangs in the air, vast and unknown as the ocean itself. The identity he clung to, the identity of the hunter, the avenger, the man defined by his pursuit, is gone. Erased by permission and exhaustion. What’s left beneath the barnacles and the salt spray?)

AHAB: I don’t know. (The hardest, most freeing confession of all. The dropping of the anchor. The surrender. The beginning.)

ROZ: (Smiles, not the smug kind. The kind that says: Welcome to Act Two, darling.) Good. That’s where we begin. (The part where we figure it out. The part where the real work begins, building something new in the space left by the absence of the old obsession.)

(What comes next... You've met Ahab, the man who couldn't stop chasing. But he's just the first spiral. This isn't a one-off. The rest of this series dives deeper into ADHD, neurodivergence, and the beautiful, chaotic wiring of the human mind—through characters you thought you knew, until Roz got involved.)

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What comes next...

You've met Ahab, the man who couldn't stop chasing. But he's just the first spiral. This isn't a one-off. The rest of this series dives deeper into ADHD, neurodivergence, and the beautiful, chaotic wiring of the human mind—through characters you thought you knew, until Roz got involved.

The Architect Who Couldn't Stop

Next up is the ancient Egyptian builder who’s still tweaking the specs on his pyramid 4000 years later. Yes, you read that right. Four thousand years. He shows up smelling faintly of sand and existential dread, unrolling blueprints that look suspiciously like they’ve been revised since breakfast. Again. Is it perfectionism? Or just another elaborate, millennia-long way to never actually finish anything? You know the type. The project isn't done, it's just... temporarily abandoned while they brainstorm V2.0. Roz, who believes in things like deadlines and not adding a third sarcophagus purely for acoustic optimization, brings out the ultimate weapon: the humble, terrifying tape measure. Someone's about to learn about boundaries. Probably not him.

He’s frozen mid-air, halfway out of a plane, boots on the edge, gravity waiting like an unpaid bill. One hand gripping the doorframe, the other twitching near the release cord like maybe—just maybe—this time he'll do it.

He’s not scared. That would be too clean. Too simple. No, this is worse. He’s living in every possible outcome at once. The chute opens. It doesn’t. He lands safely. He vanishes. Someone claps. Someone cries. Someone back on the ground says, “Well, at least he tried.”

Stuck in a loop of what-ifs, where analysis paralysis meets actual, literal paralysis. ADHD meets trauma meets 15,000 feet of unprocessed emotion.

His eyes are blank the way only overloaded systems go blank—when you’ve run all the simulations and none of them make you feel safe enough to move.

Roz lights a cigarette, leans just far enough out the door to let the wind slap her across the teeth, and studies him like a dropped timeline. Not a patient. Not a soldier. A question.

“You waiting for God, gravity, or a therapist with better boundaries?” she asks.
No answer. Not yet.

Roz considers her options.
Lecture him? Won’t work.
Soothe him? Not her style.
Shove him? Tempting.

Because some people need a gentle nudge.
And some need to be kicked out of their own holding pattern.

He’s the latter.

And she’s not wearing a parachute either.

👉

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But before we go...

Look, my loyal reader. I know how it feels. Another subscription? Another writer with a cigarette and a God complex trying to sell you something? Maybe. But if reading about Ahab's exhausted eyes or my post-it pile cracked you open, even a little—if you saw yourself in the relentless chase or the desperate need for permission—if the sheer, exhausting relatability of the internal spiral hit you like a rogue wave—Then maybe toss five bucks my way so I can keep the lights on and the spirals coming. This isn’t just words on a screen. This is the inside of a brain that doesn’t quit, trying to make sense of the chaos with humor, honesty, and entirely too much caffeine. It’s the sound of someone saying, "Yeah, me too," in a voice that doesn't pull punches, while also asking uncomfortable questions. You pay for the next acts. You pay for the Architect and the Paratrooper. You pay for future interviews with Salvador Dali, Michelangelo, and maybe your reflection on a Tuesday at 3AM (spoiler: it looks tired, get some sleep). Roz is just getting started. And she's not out of post-its yet. This isn't corporate content. It's survival, filtered through sarcasm and somehow landing on something like hope. It feels worth paying for because the writing earns it. Because the connection is real. Because maybe, just maybe, seeing the inside of my head helps you live a little easier in yours. Think of it as a co-pay for your soul.

👇 Click below. Roz ain’t done talking.