Somewhere inside my own head, I knew there was something going on. I was curious. I thought deeply about things. I wanted to understand things. But I couldn’t seem to demonstrate that intelligence in the places where I was supposed to prove it.
And at the very same time that I was struggling so badly with education, I was learning all kinds of things. Just apparently not the way I was supposed to. Music and electronics fascinated me from an early age. I wasn’t casually interested in them. I wanted to understand them.
With music, I learned harmony, arrangements and even how to sight-read for singing without any particular difficulty and I was composing piano sonatas. As a kid in Florida, I traveled and sang in churches with established groups like "Friends" and performed with other trios, quartets and ensembles.
Eventually, in 1976, I auditioned along with about 100+ other singers and was selected to become the lead tenor of the Trevadors Quartet, based in Nashville. From Nashville, we traveled through what I remember as at least a dozen states, performing regularly in churches and recording our music on vinyl album.
At the same time, there was electronics. I wanted to know how things worked. I wanted to understand the components, the connections and what was happening underneath the surface. That fascination never really went away.
When personal computers came along, I took them apart. I built them. I learned how they worked. Then I discovered programming, and suddenly I had found something that seemed almost perfectly designed for the way my mind worked.
There was always something to investigate. Something interacted with something else. A system behaved in a certain way for a reason. If something didn’t work, there was a reason for that too. And somewhere in there was a solution.
That’s what could consume me. Not the problem. The solution.
I could investigate something deeply, think about it from different directions, take it apart mentally or physically, understand how the pieces interacted, and become completely enthralled with figuring out how to make it work.
Looking backward, I can see that same pattern almost everywhere in my life. Writing. Music. Electronics. Computers. Software. Mechanical and electronic systems. The interaction between one system and another. Give me something that genuinely captured my curiosity and I could go extraordinarily deep.
And here’s the part that amazes me today: I had no formal education in any of it. I taught myself.
My first serious software application in the early 90s became "The Vendors Gallery", an extensive inventory, point-of-sale and vendor-management system for crafter and antique malls. It handled individual vendor inventory, sales, weekly vendor payments, store charges, space rentals and year-end 1099 reporting. Some installations operated across networks of PCs and multiple locations.
If I remember correctly, that first major program eventually grew to somewhere around 9,000 lines of code (yes, 9,000 line-by-line code). Businesses throughout the Pacific Northwest used it. I built a technology business from the ground up and eventually sold it.
And what began with taking things apart and wondering how they worked became a career in computers and software development that spanned more than 40 years.
So now, at 68, I find myself looking back at that kid who supposedly couldn’t learn. And I have to ask: Couldn’t learn?
Apparently, I spent my entire life learning. I learned music. I learned electronics. I learned computers. I learned programming. I learned software development. I learned how complicated systems interact. I learned how to build a business. And today I’m still doing it. I’m writing songs, producing music and using technologies that didn’t even exist when I began this journey.
I wasn’t incapable of learning. Quite the opposite. I was an intense lifelong learner who couldn’t function particularly well inside the institution specifically designed to teach me. And maybe nobody ever taught me how I learned. That’s the contradiction I’m only now beginning to understand.
There is a word commonly associated with ADHD that I’ve been learning more about: hyperfocus. I’m not diagnosing myself. I don’t know yet whether I have ADHD (they didn't have that diagnosis then as a child), and that’s something a qualified professional would have to evaluate. But I’m asking the question.
Because when I look backward through that lens, parts of my life that once seemed completely contradictory begin to look different. Maybe my difficulty wasn’t simply paying attention. Maybe it was controlling where my attention went.
Tell my brain what it was supposed to care about, and sometimes it seemed almost impossible to make it cooperate. Give it something that genuinely fascinated me—a piece of music, an electronic device, a computer, a software problem, an interaction between systems, something that needed a solution—and apparently there was an entirely different person inside there.
And once that mind locked onto finding a solution, getting me to concentrate wasn’t the problem. Sometimes getting me to stop was.
That realization makes me look differently at the child I was. For most of my life, the question was: What was wrong with me? Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe a better question would have been: What was happening inside me?
There’s an enormous difference between those two questions, especially when you’re a kid. Because if you’re struggling in school while everybody around you seems able to do what you can’t, you don’t necessarily conclude that your brain may work differently. You conclude that you’re failing.
Maybe you’re lazy. Maybe you’re difficult. Maybe you’re not trying hard enough. Maybe you’re not nearly as smart as you thought you were. And if you hear those messages long enough, they can become part of how you see yourself.
That’s where this story becomes about something more important than my résumé or even ADHD. It’s about what happens to a human being who spends years believing there’s something wrong with them without understanding why they struggle with things that seem so easy for everybody else.
That can hurt. It can damage your sense of worth. For some people, that pain can eventually lead to depression, hopelessness and even thoughts of suicide. And that’s one reason I’ve decided to talk about it.
Maybe you’re my age and you’re only now looking backward and asking some of these questions. Maybe you’re 40. Maybe you’re 20. Maybe you’re a teenager sitting in a classroom right now, knowing somewhere inside your head that you’re capable of more than your grades or your behavior seem to suggest.
I understand that feeling. I’ve been there.
And strangely enough, I think I may have already written about some of this before I understood what I was writing about. I wrote a song called You Are Who You Are.
I turned the idea into the story of a gunslinger, but underneath the character was a much simpler thought: You are who you are.
That doesn’t mean you can’t change. It doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your choices. And it certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t things about ourselves that we need to work on. But maybe understanding who you are should come before deciding what’s wrong with you.
It has taken me 68 years to begin asking some of these questions. That’s where the title of this first blog comes from: Living and Dying with ADHD.
I’ve already done a lot of the living part. The dying part? Someday this restless mind of mine really will become quiet.
But not today.
There are still songs I haven’t written. There are still things I want to understand. There are still problems that need solutions and ideas that I haven’t chased far enough.
And maybe, after all these years, I don’t need to spend whatever time I have left trying to make this mind behave the way somebody else thinks it should. Maybe I should understand it. Maybe I should use it.
This is my first blog, and I hope you’ll come back for the next one. I want to talk more about the stories behind my songs, but I suspect we’re also going to discover some stories about the person who wrote them. Some I understand. Some I’m apparently still figuring out. And if any part of my story sounds a little like yours, I hope you’ll come along with me.
In the meantime, please explore my music. Some of it is serious. Some of it is funny. Some comes from experiences I’ve carried for decades, and some apparently comes from parts of myself that I’m only now beginning to understand.
Maybe you’ll hear a little of your own story in there too.
Thanks for spending some time with mine. And please explore my music.
- Hadley Price
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