Dr. Edward Hallowell, author of Driven to Distraction, says the ADHD brain is like a Ferrari with bicycle brakes: powerful but difficult to control. My ADHD makes me lose my phone, but it also makes me who I am, so if I'm going to love my life, I have to love my ADHD. And I do love my life. It's June 2022, and I'm having one of my best weeks ever. My friend Christina Aguilera, my neighbor, invited me to be one of her top-secret special guests at LA Pride, and as my crew moved my DJ equipment out the door, I was so nervous and excited I left the house without my shoes and showed up at a backstage trailer in a tank shirt, velour track pants, and socks, which was even more embarrassing when I accidentally went into the wrong dressing room. Some backup dancers were in there getting dressed and screamed for joy when they saw me. So, selfies. Obviously. I always try to do it myself—like hold the person's camera so it's angled down, which is important if you're tall, because it's so unflattering when the angle is up your nostrils or the person's hands are shaking because they're maybe nervous and a bit shy, which I totally relate to, so I did that with "Loves it! Loves it! Sliving!" and all the things, and then off I went in my socks, doing this thing my husband, Carter, calls the "unicorn trot": not fully running, more graceful than galloping, and less like skipping than dancing. I have a hard time going slow. So then I'm there at Pride with Christina and about thirty thousand other people, all decked out in rainbows and sparkles, dancing, laughing, hugging, having the best time during my set, which came right after Kim Petras, who sang at our wedding last year—this beautiful ballad version of "Stars Are Blind" and then "Can't Help Falling in Love" as Carter and I walked down the aisle—which is why that song brought tears to my eyes last week atBritney Spears's wedding when our gorgeous angel princess bride emerged, after all those nightmare years, and floated down the aisle in Versace (because Versace, please) with that iconic Elvis Presley song, which has been sung at millions of weddings in Vegas, where my grandfather, Barron Hilton, started the whole Vegas residency trend by having Elvis at the Las Vegas Hilton International back in 1969, paving the way for Britney and so many other groundbreaking performers to flourish in that format, a perfect example of how one person's creative vision sparks a cascade of genius that goes on and on into the future. Another perfect example: my great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton. Wait. Where was I? Pride! This crowd. Oh, my god. Energy. Love. Light. Unbreakable spirit. I'm behind the board. It's like piloting a spaceship full of the coolest people in the galaxy. My set is structured around iconic music like "Toxic" alongside a sick BeatBreaker remix of "Genie in a Bottle" by Xtina, Queen of the Night, plus a lot of other dope originals and remixes, which I should put up on the podcast or YouTube, because this set is so much fun. (Note to self: Make playlist for this book.) I was so hyper-focused on my set (note to self: add Ultra Naté to playlist), it didn't even hit me until I was halfway through that I had left my phone on the counter in that trailer where I took the selfies with the half-dressed backup dancers. Fuck. I'm trying not to say fuck all the time. I don't want to wear it out, because it's such a good word for so many occasions. Noun. Verb. Job description. Fill in the blank. Fuck saves the day. So fuuuuuuuuuuck! Because I feel naked without my phone, and I'm super paranoid about someone getting hold of it and blasting the contents all over the internet, which has happened more than once, so thank God for Cade—best friend, guardian angel—who went and located the stray phone after I killed my set, and then we all went to the after-party Christina and I hosted at the Soho House downtown. Now I'm home with my loves: Diamond Baby, Slivington, Crypto, Ether, and Harajuku Bitch, the OG chihuahua. Shout out to Harajuku Bitch! She's twenty-two years old. Multiply that by seven dog years; she's literally 154! She sleeps twenty-three hours a day and looks like Gizmo from Gremlins, but she's still here living her best life. I know one night I'll comehome to find she's fallen asleep forever. I'm so scared of that night, and I hate that random intrusive thought. Intrusive thoughts are my nemesis, cutting through my joy even when I've been part of an epic event with people who lift me higher than high and my husband is up in bed waiting patiently for me to take my bath and do my skin-care routine, which he knows I never shortcut. From the time my sister and I were little girls, our mom instilled in us the value of skin care; I always feel her with me in the soothing ritual. Skin care, if you're doing it right, means claiming a moment of tenderness in an abrasive world. You remove the mask—your brave face, your funny face, your enforcer face, your hard candy coating—and see yourself, cleansed and replenished, and it's like, "Okay. I'm good." You feel everything so keenly when you've just washed your face. Like a newborn feels that first sting of fresh air. Kim Kardashian and I were making frittata and French toast coated with Frosted Flakes for breakfast one morning, and she said, "I don't know anyone who parties as hard as you do and looks as good as you do." Skin care. Seriously. If you take nothing else from my story, receive this: Skin care is sacred. Most women who did coke back in the 1990s looked beat by the mid-aughts. That was a strong deterrent for me. I won't say I never tried it, but I wasn't about to sacrifice my complexion for it. Same with cigarettes. You may as well hit yourself in the face with a shovel. These days, my only bad habit is spray-tanning. My sister Nicky can't stand it, but I'm kind of addicted. Otherwise, Carter and I are big on wellness and skin care. We always say, "Forever's not long enough." Taking care of ourselves is something we do for each other out of love. We want our good life to last. After I put the frittata in the oven and set a cute little penguin timer, Kim said, "Now is the twelve minutes when we clean. Clean as you go is the rule." My only rule is skin care. Sunscreen is my eleventh commandment. You may be wondering: What does all this have to do with ADHD? Nothing. Also everything. And anything. All at once. ADHD is exhausting and exhilarating, and it's how God made me, so it must be right. Carter doesn't fully grasp what it means to be ADHD, but he's the first and only man in my life who made an effort to understand. Early in ourrelationship, he spent a lot of time and energy researching ADHD, which is the most authentically loving thing any man has ever done for me. Most people sigh, drum their fingers, and let me know how insanely frustrating it is to be sucked into the endless spin cycle of my life. Carter rolls with it. Where most people see a dumpster fire, Carter sees Burning Man. He gets frustrated, for sure, but he's not trying to deprogram me. Carter is a venture capitalist. M13, the company he founded with his brother, Courtney, is known for engaging with unicorns—start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars—like Rothy's, Ring, and Daily Harvest. Carter is a unicorn whisperer. He's sentimental and forward thinking, and he likes to be the boss, but he has a light touch. If we're in an 11:11 Media board meeting, talking about a contract, and I go off on a tangent about a better tool for impromptu IG videos and how that tool could be styled, manufactured, and marketed in a really fun, accessible way and I could promote them via cross-promotional content, and what if the nob was like a little otter or sloth or kangaroo— Carter leans to whisper in my ear. "Babe." Not in a mean way. Just to bring me back to center. A while back I was featured in The Disruptors, a documentary about extraordinary people with ADHD, including will.i.am, Jillian Michaels, Justin Timberlake, the founders of JetBlue and Ikea, Steve Madden, Simone Biles, Adam Levine, Terry Bradshaw, astronaut Scott Kelly, Channing Tatum —the list goes on and on. The Disruptors also features Dr. Hallowell and other psychologists and neurologists who've advanced the science of ADHD. The message of the film really flies in the face of the misconceptions and stigma. The structure and function of the ADHD brain are a throwback to a time when you had to be a badass to survive, find food, and procreate. (Visual cue: Raquel Welch as the iconic cavewoman queen in One Million Years B.C.) The frontal lobe—home of impulse control, concentration, and inhibition—is smaller, because the primitive badass had to react on instinct, without fear. Neural pathways don't connect or mature at the same rate, because it was more important for the primitive badass queen to be better at picking berries and killing saber-toothed tigers than she was at reading novels. Dopamine and noradrenaline, powerful chemicals that regulate sleep and facilitate communication between brain cells, were on a slow drip, because she had to wake up at the snap of a twig.I, like 5 percent of children and 2.5 percent of adults, am a primitive badass in a world of contemporary thinkers, a world that wants obedience and conformity. Even if we wanted to be the orderly people our loved ones want us to be, we don't have it in us. We must embrace who we are or die trying to be someone else. The benefits of ADHD include creativity, intuition, resilience, and the ability to brainstorm. I'm good at damage control because I'm constantly losing things, showing up late, and pissing people off. I'm good at multitasking because I'm not hardwired to concentrate on one thing for a big block of time. Because my attention span is limited, I don't see time as linear; the ADHD brain processes past, present, and future as a Spirograph of interconnected events, which gives me a certain Spidey sense about fashion trends and technology. It's easy to follow my bliss because my bliss is whatever interests me at any given moment. My brain chemistry craves sensory input. Sounds, images, puzzles, art, motion, experiences—everything that triggers adrenaline or endorphins—that's all as necessary as oxygen for the ADHD brain. I don't just love fun. I need fun. Fun is my jet fuel. The primary disadvantage of ADHD is that people around you are often inconvenienced, weirded out, or hurt by your behavior, so you're constantly getting judged and punished, which makes you feel like shit. Suicidal ideation is higher in people with ADHD. Self-loathing and self-medication are endemic. If the rest of the world says you're obnoxious or stupid or just not braining right, loving yourself is an act of rebellion, which is beautiful but exhausting, especially when you're a little kid. With that needy little kid always inside you, your life becomes an epic quest for love—or whatever feels like love in the moment. I was never medicated as a kid—never tested for ADHD, as far as I know. Even if you have the most wonderful, loving parents in the world (and I do), diagnosis doesn't always happen early, especially for girls who are good at hiding the symptoms. Treatment of ADHD has traditionally focused on squashing undesirable behavior. In the 1980s, people had just started talking about being hyper or being on "the spectrum." No one ever said, "Relax, little girl. There are many different kinds of intelligence." Instead, people told me I was dumb, bratty, careless, ungrateful, or not applying myself. And none of that was true. I had to be creative and workhard to fit in, but I'm naturally creative and hardworking, so I was in it every day, grinding away, trying to fit in, until I grew strong enough to say, "Fuck fitting in," which is what I intend to teach my children from the beginning, no matter what their neurodevelopmental profile happens to be. As an adult, I've been medication-fluid. When I was in my early twenties, a doctor explained what was "wrong" with me and put me on Adderall. That was a love/hate relationship that went on for about twenty years—me and Adderall—until Carter and I met with Dr. Hallowell. Dr. Hallowell said, "I've been trying to explain to people since 1981 that this condition, if you use it properly, is an asset composed of qualities you can't buy and can't teach. It's stigma that holds us back. Stigma plus ignorance. A lethal combination." I felt that lightning bolt you feel when someone speaks a hard truth you've always known but never heard anyone say out loud. "Our kryptonite is boredom," said Dr. Hallowell. "If stimulation doesn't occur, we create it. We self-medicate with adrenaline." ADHD can be a wellspring of creative energy, but creative energy's evil twin is a troublemaking compulsion. Want some adrenaline? Do everything the hard way. Get into train-wreck relationships. There are a million ways to screw yourself over for the sake of adrenaline. My imagination is infinite, but it takes me to dark places as easily as it takes me toward the light. Dr. Hallowell calls it the Demon, that snake that slithers into everything telling you that if it's bad you deserve it and if it's good it won't last. Of course, the Demon is a liar, but try telling that to my brain when it's craving a big bucket of deep-fried anxiety. "Your greatest asset is your worst enemy," said Dr. Hallowell. And my brain said, Fuck. "Tell me, Paris, how is your self-esteem?" "I'm good at pretending," I said. He said, "That's common among people who live with ADHD." Not "people who suffer from ADHD." Not "people afflicted with ADHD." People who live with ADHD. Some of us have discovered that ADHD is our superpower. I wish the A stood for ass-kicking. I wish the Ds stood for dope and drive. I wish the H suggested hell yes. I'm not bragging or complaining about it, just telling you: This is my brain. It has a lot to do with how this whole book thing is going to play out, becauseI love run-on sentences—and dashes. And sentence fragments. I'm probably going to jump around a lot while I tell the story. The Spirograph of time. It's all connected. I've avoided talking about some of these issues for decades. I'm an issueavoiding machine. I learned from the best: my parents. Nicky says Mom and Dad are "the king and queen of sweeping things under the rug." There is a hierarchy, and these are the rules in my family: If you don't talk about a thing, it's not a problem. If you hide how deeply something hurt you, it didn't happen. If you pretend not to notice how deeply you hurt someone else, you don't have to feel bad about it. Of course, that's bullshit, and what makes it even crazier: It's not good business. I come from a family of brilliant businesspeople. How can we be so bad at emotional economics? Relationships, professional and personal, are transactional. Give and take. For better or worse. You invest, hoping for a good return. But there's always risk. I love my mom, and I know she loves me. Still, we've put each other through hell and can't squeeze out more than a few words on certain topics. It's going to be hard for her to read this book. I won't be surprised if she puts it on a shelf for a while. Or forever. And that's okay. I'm trying to take ownership of some intense personal things I've never been able to talk about. Things I've said and done. Things that have been said and done to me. I have a hard time trusting and don't easily share my private thoughts. I'm super protective of my family and my brand—the businesswoman who grew out of a party girl and the party girl who still lives inside the businesswoman—so it scares me to think about what a lot of people will say. But it's time. There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don't want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for mistakes of their own. I want them to laugh and see that they do have a voice and their own brand of intelligence and, girl, fuck fitting in.
