This week I started reading a book called 4 Weeks to an Organized Life With AD/HD. Usually I turn my nose up at “self-help” books, as I find the whole genre a little too new-agey and wishy-washy to take seriously, but this one caught my eye. For the first 100 pages, I felt like the authors had written a book all about me. All my emotional and practical struggles were laid out before me in plain, simple terms. I have already found myself using what I read to explain to others the difficulties I face in everyday life.

4 Weeks to an Organized Life relies heavily on the left brain/right brain concept, and explains how in a left-brained society, creative, visual, right-brained thinkers lose out. When faced with a number of thoughts or tasks, it is difficult for us to put them in a logical sequence, prioritize them, and figure out the order of the steps between Point A and Point B. This explains well my tendency to get overwhelmed easily when I have to manage multiple tasks or even one task with multiple steps. I never even realized that skill of sequencing and prioritizing came naturally to most people.

I could go on about this forever, but the point is, those first 100 pages really got me. I was sure the four-week program that followed would help me get my life together. Then I actually started reading the daily activities.

During the first 100 pages I had been okay with being described as a “visual thinker” -- of course, I have an art degree, right? The activities in the second half of the book are all visualization activities. Creating a crystal-clear mental picture, the authors insist, is the key to harnessing the strengths of the AD/HD brain.

The truth and trouble with that is, holding a detailed image in my mind's eye is like trying to grip the edge of a cliff with my fingertips. It's why I fell in love with photography and battled with drawing classes in college.

When I try to visualize a scene in my mind, even if it is my desk at work, a place I see every day, I can't force the image all the way to the edge of the frame: it dissolves into white around the edges, what little remains in the center losing detail in bits and pieces as if I am trying to remember a dream.

What does come through crystal-clear is sound. As I'm “visualizing” a series of steps in a task at the office, eventually I lose the image completely. It falls away to reveal a complex world of sound: my purse hitting the bottom of the file drawer, the door latching as I leave, my footfalls as they go from hallway to stairs to hallway to sidewalk. Sounds, it seems, can be created in my mind with perfection every time.

When I think, I think in words, spoken by a voice in my mind. I talk to myself when no one is around. If I don't understand a text I am reading, I read through it aloud. There is always music running through my head. A great song will literally tickle my ears and give me chills, a sensation a piece of visual art could never fully evoke.

So what does this mean for me? In grade school I was frightened when I was categorized as a “visual learner” because I was hell-bent on becoming a famous musician. Perhaps I was labeled so because I typically need to see a concept written or drawn out to understand it: I cannot pull words together from the air as easily as I can read them. But all the same, I have to wonder why music always came so readily to me while I struggled to keep up with my peers in drawing and painting.

With AD/HD and visual thinking being almost synonymous, I find myself in the minority once again, unsure how to overcome my difficulties. Maybe it is my fate. My Meyers-Briggs is an INFJ: we account for less than two percent of the population. I suffer from AD/HD but the visualization strategies that help most people are powerless on me. I have a visual art degree but I don't think in pictures.

That is, unless I am looking through a lens. Then I see pictures all around me.