Kaelan Saley - What/Why/How

Kaelan Saley
2/28/15

            For my digital storytelling project, I am going to choose my identity of a person with ADHD. Throughout my life, there has always been a constant battle with my ADHD, as well as with the stigma that surrounds the condition.

            My experience as someone with ADHD has always been a struggling balancing act. Even when I was a young child in elementary school, I had constant issues with both students and teachers. My teachers all known that I was intelligent ever since I started kindergarten at age 5, and they would always remind me of that. However, they all also had issues with my behavior and my inability to sit still in class, and how easily I was distracted in class. The students would tease me, and make fun of me because I would talk fast and stutter as a result of my condition. Living with ADHD at that age, before I was ever diagnosed, made it difficult to connect with other people who were my age, and I would always end up being closer with the teachers and staff at the school than with the students. After I was diagnosed and given prescription medication to treat it, I began to see an entirely new benefit to having ADHD, which was my ability to think faster and respond quicker than everyone else. At the same time, however, I began to see the increasing stigma against students who had ADHD in my own school. Other students who did not have the condition would treat myself and others diagnosed with ADHD as cheaters, people who used their condition to gain an advantage over them in school. However, that was never the case, and as a result, it continued to alienate me from the rest of the students.

            Another issue that I experienced with having ADHD that I plan to talk about is my dependence on my medication in order to succeed. Throughout high school, I would often find myself questioning if I had taken my medication in the morning before going to school. Often, I felt as if I needed it in order to do well, and if I didn’t take it, I would be unable to do well on anything that I would do throughout the day. Another struggle that I had was students harassing me, trying to buy my medication from me because they thought that it would help them do better on the SAT and ACT, as well as on AP Exams. Even though I never sold it to them, they would keep asking and trying to pressure me into selling it.

            Now that I am in college, I am able to deal with ADHD better because of the different community that we have here. The fact that people accept me for who I am and allow me to live with my condition has helped me become more confident as a student and a person. I have started to reduce the dosage of my medication in order to cut it out of my life, and my network of friends in college has helped me make progress in doing so because of their massive support.

            In my digital storytelling project, I intend to show the way that ADHD has affected my life through interviews with myself, my parents, and my childhood friends who have always supported me. In addition, I plan to use pictures of me as a young child with audio placed over it to tell my story.

What Why and How

Ed Park

2/26/15

My digital story telling project will be on my identity as a reserve Army Sergeant and Arendt’s concept of action and its relation to the Korean Military. Arendt, in The Human Condition, talks about the Vita Activa and one of the three important activities of the human condition: Action. The basic condition for action, as Arendt argues, is the concept of human plurality, which can be described with equality and distinction. This notion of plurality, in which everyone is equal yet distinct from each other, and that no one can ever be “me” is completely unthinkable in the Army.

My experience in the Republic of Korean Army defies this human condition. In such rank-based society where everyone has to follow orders given from the commander regardless of what one thinks and feels like doing, opinions do not matter and one’s decision to deviate from the norm can lead to a greater problem for the nation. Every soldier has to follow the same rule set and governed by the Ministry of National Defense. In this manner, every soldier is trained to be equal, but even within this rank-based society, hierarchy exists between soldiers based on when they entered the Army. After living in this kind of society for two years, which has been a huge part of my life, I could not disagree more with Arendt’s human condition of action.

In my digital story telling project, I will talk about when I was once labeled as a “soldier” not as my self and how it defies the human condition of action that Arendt argues in her book. The reason why I want to do my digital story telling project on this topic is to inform people of the different dimension I took when reading about the philosophy of action. I will incorporate some personal tales and few cases of how things can go wrong when an individual is forced to live, eat, and fight as everyone else against one’s will.

During my time of service, my specialty was driving. I was a first class driver for the Commanding General of Sixth Corps. When I was a private, one of my senior soldiers went AWOL one night because he could not handle all the pressure from his seniors. His senior soldiers would keep him up all night scolding him for what he has done wrong that day, make him eat things that are not edible, and hit him if he did not eat it. There is absolutely no sense of justice or morality and whatever my senior soldiers told me was right was right and told me was wrong was wrong.

            Through my experience in the military I have been able to learn patience and the bigger society outside the realm of school. I have also been able to experience Korea’s hierarchy-based society, where the younger person (lower rank) has to give in and do as told by an older person (higher rank). These lessons I have learned will help me in the future and after going through these difficult two years, I feel like I became more mature and grew up both mentally and physically.