Everything Everywhere All at Once, ADHD, and the Will to Live
I bought the DVD.
It’s been at least 15 years since I’ve purchased a DVD, but it was clear from the moment Ke Huy Quan ate chapstick that I was going to need my own copy. I laughed, I cried, but lots of movies make me laugh and cry and I don’t feel the need to take them home with me. The difference was that this film helped me begin to value a part of myself that for 41 years has been the source of my greatest confusion and heartache.
The experience of watching the film struck my personal resonant frequency. Like when you are singing in the shower and find that one pitch that makes the whole room vibrate. My head was the bathroom tile, and the movie was belting my secret note. My neurodivergence was undiagnosed, and filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka — Daniels) had just given me five words that were the most accurate description I have encountered for what my brain feels like all the time: Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Their utterly bananas, transcendent, now Academy Award-winning film couldn’t have come at a more crucial moment. Not just for me, but for millions. A host of recent studies show the suicide rate is 2–5x higher for people with ADHD. As I type this, the US is in the midst of a grueling, months-long shortage of Adderall, the single most effective ADHD treatment, resulting in job losses and a tailspin of psychological comorbidities for many. For people who are neurologically susceptible to overwhelm, the modern world is a treacherous place and the inner world is a chaotic one. What the film does so brilliantly is give us too much, and insist that within the whirlwind we can–we must–find a way to lead with love. The more we don’t know what hell is going on, the more we must be kind.
***
EEAAO (for a fleeting sense of brevity) follows two main conflicts. In the more macro conflict, Evelyn, the film’s protagonist played with stunning versatility by Michelle Yeoh, leads an unfulfilling life until her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is temporarily inhabited by a version of himself from another universe to enlist this universe’s humdrum version of Evelyn to fight against Jobu Tupaki, a nihilistic being so powerful that it threatens the entire multiverse. In order to rise to the occasion, Evelyn must learn to “verse jump” –tap into versions of herself from alternate universes — in a way that imperils her very psyche unless she can allow herself to contain the infinite absurd permutations of her own potential.
The other conflict is more domestic. Evelyn and Waymond are immigrants from China. They own a laundromat. They are being audited by an unsympathetic IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) because Evelyn cannot separate her many hobbies from business expenses. Her family is falling apart as Evelyn’s dispassion for her life threatens to push away her sweet-natured husband whose general levity and liberal application of googly eye stickers to laundry bags earn him more disdain than delight from her. She is unable to accept her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu) for who she is, hesitant to embrace her same-sex relationship and messy, modern ennui.
There is so much here that rings my ADHD bell. One of the hallmarks of ADHD is difficulty knowing where to start, so I’ll start where the film does. “Laundry and taxes, laundry and taxes.” These are the two tasks Evelyn is consumed with in the very first scene. Later, it is the distillation of her contempt for the soul-crushing cycle of drudge work that defines her existence in this universe — and ours.
Ding! There’s that ADHD recognition bell already!
There are days when I am overcome with grief that life is nothing more than having to remember to brush my teeth every day. My father (who I suspect may be undiagnosed ADHD as well) neglected his teeth through much of his life. His past five years have been a rolling parade of increasingly expensive and painful dental procedures to correct for his lifelong rejection of drudge-y maintenance. So I reach for the toothbrush, and I despair of the bleak cycle of this again and again and again until one day, mercifully, I die.
It’s not a thought I could transcribe for you here. It’s a heaviness. A heart-weight. As I lean on the bathroom sink for support and stare into the sullen reflection of me that guards the medicine cabinet, it occurs to me that none of the wild excitement I’ve experienced in my life makes this moment any less drab. No matter what thrills comprise my days, no matter how high my highs, every evening I must return here, staring, dirty-toothed, sad–or be punished with cavities like my father. Nothing can save me from this.
One facet of ADHD brains is we are driven by novelty, by interest, by excitement. And we are repelled by activities or situations that do not spark those qualities. This restless neurology is a daily challenge to my greatest, achiest desire: a simple, reliable existence with love in it. Not just love of a partner or a family, but love of myself.
New love is exciting. Love over time is mostly just chores. Parents don’t brush their kids’ teeth because it’s fun or novel. They brush those tiny chompers because they love the tiny people they belong to. Brushing my own teeth, feeding myself — they are fundamental acts of self love. They are rudimentary for many. Not for me. I have quietly feared that, like Evelyn, I would be forever doomed to push loved ones away until I learned to enjoy, or at least endure, my drudge work.
When Waymond says “In another life I would have liked just doing laundry and taxes with you,” I wept with recognition. I am both the “I” and the “you”. If it is a life worth pining for, it is a life worth living. Apply googly eyes as needed, you know, to keep it fun.
…
It is not just the movie itself that speaks to my experience. It is the making of the movie.
Daniel Kwan has talked publicly about how the process of making this film led him to his own ADHD diagnosis. He connects this to his career-long tendency toward maximalism in filmmaking. In a twitter thread from April 11, 2022, he says “in a world where there is too much to process, maybe maximalist art is essential to meeting this moment.”
The multiple universes of EEAAO function like the branches of an infinitely dense decision tree. If you stayed with your family in China instead of eloping to America, a whole new universe is created to accommodate each path. If you had followed your passion for sign spinning instead of becoming a laundress, there is a universe for that. There are universes in which the conditions never coalesced to support life on this planet. Probably most of them. Over the course of the film we are constantly, dizzyingly thrust in and out of other universes. Dozens. More. Opera singer universe, prisoner universe, piñata universe. Before you can ask how we got here we have already left for a dazzling new universe or, perhaps, to revisit a familiar one. You might not–you will not–remember every fleeting image, but they impact you, they affect your journey, and they accumulate. There seems to be a track, a consistent something guiding you through the everything but it is hard to put your finger on what. And the mask over your nose is wet because you have been sobbing in this theater for you don’t even know how long.
Ding.
I am also drawn to maximalism. Like, gravitationally. It’s not that I crave endless complications. It’s that I am aware that endless complications already exist and am driven by a ceaseless need to include. Or, by a bottomless fear of having left something out.
“Not a single moment will go by without every other universe screaming for your attention. Never fully there.” So says the film’s antagonist, the omniversal Jobu Tupaki as she invites Evelyn to see what she sees. Jobu has put everything–everything in the universe, that is–on a bagel, thus creating a physical manifestation of the psychic angst of a consciousness that does not filter. A sort of black hole of overwhelm. Jobu Tupaki, we learn, is Joy, the daughter of the alpha universe’s Evelyn. Alpha Joy verse-jumped too hard, broke open, and now inhabits all universes at once. But because her consciousness is always everywhere, she is never, truly, anywhere.
Ding
***
(I raved about Everything Everywhere All At Once to a friend. After she saw it I called to see if she loved it as much as I did. “I… liked it,” she said. “Honestly it felt a little too ADD for me. It was just a lot.”
“Huh!” I said, eyes wide and brain furiously processing the implications of this perspective.
I was diagnosed with ADHD three months later.
I don’t know if neuro-typical people would enjoy experiencing the world the way I do. It is a lot. I can barely handle it half the time, and I’ve been practicing for decades. But to see my experience of the world so skillfully, so vividly, so compassionately rendered on screen–I can see how it might be too much for some. For me, it was profound.)
***
“You’re capable of anything, because you’re so bad at everything.” This, Alpha Waymond says to Evelyn, is how he knows she’s the one. Her endless string of failures in this universe means that she is directly adjacent to endless universes in which she is skilled, successful, powerful. If only she can begin to tap into them. She is composed of infinite unfulfilled potential.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
For neurotypical brains, an “important” task triggers a filtering mechanism that dims any subordinate information not directly related to the task. This is a tremendous aid in prioritizing one’s efforts. In ADHD brains, no such filter exists. The more important the task, the more information will be summoned to the tip of your brain. Just in case you need it, you know, to solve the big problem. Everything you’ve learned, from Everywhere you’ve learned it. All at Once.
Before I learned the term “executive dysfunction” and how it affected me, I only ever knew to respond to my own perceived lack of accomplishment with inward shame and outward apology. I am smart, I am imaginative, I am capable, and in tightly structured environments I am an unstoppable work machine. Without those structural supports, I am lost. Competing visions for how to proceed multiply and overwhelm me. My inertia resets to zero as a defense. It’s not that I don’t know enough to move forward. It’s the opposite. The more I learn, the more alternate universes appear before me, the more impossible it is to unglue myself from my spot. In a culture that exalts individual accomplishment, it was hard for me to locate self worth in a sea of self sabotage. I did not know how to offer myself compassion. I did not know why someone so useless, so broken, would deserve it anyway.
***
A brief word on “the will to live”.
Since writing this phrase into the title of this essay, I have seen other people with ADHD utter it as well. As in “ADHD sometimes depletes my will to live.”
I have never reached the make a plan or take action phases, though a tragic and disproportionate number of us do every year.
But I have experienced a willingness to let nature reclaim me through my own inaction. To lie still, let my mind continue to wander everywhere but here, immune to hunger and inert to thirst because these feelings are present and I am not. To stop fighting against my internal dysfunction in order to accomplish what is never enough anyway. Even if I brush my teeth, I still need to do my taxes. Even if I do my taxes, climate change is still happening. All of it equally present right here, right now. Which is why I’m everywhere else, ready to let nature reclaim the part of me that remains on the couch, lying, still.
***
From existential disappointment to facing down the abyss to embracing her own messy, multi-faceted self, the most affecting part of Evelyn’s journey is her relationship to Joy. Without ever mentioning ADHD, Daniels tell a moving, recognizable story of the pains of undiagnosed, inherited neurodivergence. The epic fight scenes between Joy and Evelyn through space and time, the mutual attraction to the nihilistic bagel of overwhelm, the reactivity and mess and their deep, unbreakable connection–it all summoned an inchoate flood of feelings and memories around my own relationship with my mother.
My mom has been my greatest champion. And, at times, her desire to protect me from my idiosyncrasies and guide me toward what she viewed as a safer, more conventional life has resulted in unintended cruelty and terrible fights. I waited months before I shared my diagnosis with her. I didn’t know how she’d react, and I was too sensitive and shaky to risk a judgmental response. While I can only guess about my dad’s neuro-status, it was my mom who listened with rapt attention and, eventually, revealed her suspicions about being ADHD herself. She has been trying to save me from her own torments.
My work to accept myself for who I am has already started to work on her. After decades of mental discomfort, my mom told me recently that she started therapy and is getting help for the first time in her life. She’d spent decades face to face with the bagel, never knowing or believing there was help available.
ADHD is something we get from our parents and give to our kids. By leading with love and acceptance, healing can travel up and down the generational ladder as well. As Alpha Waymond says to Evelyn at their moment of greatest peril, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind.” It is how I hold my mom’s hand and help her step back from the abyss that has called us both by name.
***
“If you’re someone who thinks about everything that’s wrong with the world and how we can fix it and you feel lost…” — Daniel Kwun, on the Dec. 6, 2022 episode of the Scriptnotes podcast.
“If you want to make our society more just and more fair and you don’t quite know where to start…” — from the opening of my TED talk about the power of local level democracy, Nov. 7, 2021, eighteen months before my diagnosis.
Every day I feel as if I am confronted with the choice put to Evelyn by Alpha Waymond. I can take this moment to live up to my ultimate potential, or I can lie here and live with the consequences. Like Evelyn, I sometimes choose “lie here”. It’s how I cope with feeling lost.
The structure of the film mirrors my own inner conflict: a dizzying dance between the cosmic and the domestic. When the neural-divergent drive for excitement invariably tips into the overwhelming Everything of the Bagel, how can I know where to start? Well, with those poppy seeds and sesame seeds and all–why not start with a toothbrush? It turns out that performing a simple act of loving maintenance calls you directly to the present. It’s a big multiverse and you learn something new every day. Sometimes you learn it all at once. And if you miss it the first time, well, that’s what the DVD is for.
