Pay Attention: A Senior Listener Lyric Photographic Diptych by Natalie Rockhold (2017)

My lyrical essay, “Pay Attention,” describes the daily experience of a person with ADHD. I learned from my interview subject that many people don’t understand the struggle it takes for someone with an attention deficit disorder to focus, and make them feel bad for something they can’t control.

My essay narrative illustrates many small examples from my interviewee’s life in which others don’t understand what’s going on in her head. I also touched on the topic of medication, including the lines “Would you get rid of it if you could?/ One little swallow and you’d be free/ But what if you’re not yourself anymore,” to show the difficult choice that many people who suffer from mental health issues have to face. I chose to focus on a specific passage in which I describe the thoughts she has internally while someone externally is telling her that she never pays attention to them.

My interviewee described that she often felt overwhelmed living with ADHD, comparing it to trying to focus on every person in a crowded room or a busy street. I chose to represent this by taking a long exposure photo of my subject staring at a saturating the lights of cars while keeping the rest of the photo black and white. For the typography side, I decided to put my excerpt inside the outline of my subject, because it’s an internal struggle for her. I chose a font that was scratchy and textured, to show the way these thoughts are rough and unwanted inside her head.