A Splintered Mind

Here's a live Twitter search I've been experimenting with. Many people comment on AD/HD in their daily lives on Twitter. Some accept it; some deny it. Some mock it; some praise it. I've filtered the search to leave out the several million blog posts so you should be able to get a good idea of what real people think about the subject by looking over the stream. It's likely not work safe, but any attempts to filter out cuss words have them posted in bold at the top of the page when you "Join the conversation". It made me laugh out loud. So terribly NOT what I had intended. You can reply to the tweets in the stream by hovering your mouse to the right of the tweet's time stamp. I've found some great tweets to reply to this way. You can also log in to the comments below using your twitter account. Click on Sharing Options and make sure Twitter is selected. Let's get some constructive conversations going about AD/HD. There's still a lot of mi...

Despite what others may think of me in my local community and family, I am not the mess I used to be. I have come a long way. I have still a long way to go, but I am happier and better and more productive today—more so now than in any time in my life. I take no medications, and in truth shun them. They made my life worse. I live in fear of side-effects and worry about my readers who write about the cocktails they take to deal with all the side-effects yet they still are no better off for them. Mental illness is a difficult malady to overcome, yet there is hope if we can find focus and motivation to tackle it. The other day I received this email and felt my reply to it might help other people who suffer from Panic Anxiety Disorder. I give this advice hoping that somebody can climb out of the hole they are in the way as I was able to do. As usual, I recommend seeing a Cognitive Behavior Therapist, but, as is the case with the author of this letter, not everyone can afford the services: I...

Most of my day is spent ticking or driving and sometimes ticking in between driving. I am the full time parent and so the onus of driving the clan around lies on me. This can take a lot out of me neurologically. My wife might argue that I spend more time reading news than ticking or driving, but I'm going to ignore her. I ask that you do, too. On days that I'm not ticking or driving, I can be found examining my navel. It's not necessarily a pretty one, although it's clean, but I do spend a lot of time looking at it while trying to figure out how to do things better. Actually, that whole navel gazing image is wrong. When I am deep in thought I am usually staring off vacantly above me to the left, or I'm pacing back and forth looking slightly forward. Truth to tell, I really can't see my navel anymore, but I'll just work with the expression since wall gazing has awkward but truthful connotations. Sometimes people email me and I reply to them using the incredib...

Ah, do you smell it? The scent of The Hunt? Do you hear the crisp, cool clacking of the keyboard, and feel the eyes darting over the glowing screen seeking out clues… Nothing thrills my AD/HD mind more than the solving a puzzle in The Hunt. As an art geek of sorts, I love pen & ink. I write notes with an old school fountain pen. I prefer the skritch of metallic nib on paper over the tactile-less glide of stylus over pad. Maybe one day soon I'll take my art gear and go out and actually draw something again. When I came across the Dux Variable Precision Sharpener and successfully hunted it down, I set off a chain reaction throughout October which found me seeing things in a movie or show and hunting it down. Do you ever find yourself suddenly doing something over and over again? AD/HD can affect me that way sometimes. It's not obsessive compulsive; It's thrilling. I love the hunt. For instance, during the Castle Halloween episode I saw the remnants of an ink bott...

Looks like I finally have an excuse to ditch Blogger comments and switch to Disqus . I've really liked their hooks into social media but wasn't sure about the fate of older comments. Thanks to the wonder of Twitter, though, a random, wistful comment about Disqus to a friend caught @disqus ' attention. They've answered my concerns and so here we are. I'll test out their service on newer posts and consider converting older posts if things work out. I know that from my experience with Dad-o-matic that the conversion doesn't always work (or @paisano methodically deleted all my old comments while laughing maniacally–you never know). In the meantime, please reply to this post and try to break things. I'll make it easier for you. Do you celebrate Thanksgiving? If so, what are the highlights for you? I love the food, the food, and the food. Conversations after dinner are always a highlight, too. And then there's desert. I find the lovely chaos of the holidays...

Ideally, this is a short entry because I'm supposedly working as much as I can on my novel. We'll see how that goes. The spirit is willing, but the mind is weak. You may not have caught it earlier, but I was asked to review a book for ADDitude Magazine . That review is now up on their site (See Trainwreck - My Life As an Idoit ). It's short & sweet and hopefully not shared here too late for Claire, who won the book a few weeks ago. Give it a read and let me know what you think of it. Speaking of winning things, I'm giving out free books here.

If there is one hallmark of AD/HD , it is the lack of impulse control. Put a group of people with AD/HD in one room and their symptoms may vary, but this hallmark is one thing they all share in common. Over the years I've learned to laugh at my AD/HD fueled moments, especially the impulsive ones. I had a chance to recall one a few weeks ago when an author friend was asking readers if they had ever lost control of themselves around a celebrity. I'm usually fairly cool around celebrities and I have my AD/HD to thank. There was one time I lost it around a celebrity. Once. The experience was so embarrassing that I have been calm and collected around them ever since. However, first there was that ONE time… It was 1989 and I was heading back east for World Con in Boston. My flight out of SLC hadn't opened for boarding yet, so I wandered around the airport and walked right past Michael Keaton.

Lucy Talikwa has been selected as last Friday's winner. She can pick any book from the following picture then email me her mailing address. My contact info is at the bottom of the page. Please continue playing along if you haven't won. I can count the participants on one hand, so you're bound to win something sometime. More books will be coming soon. The point of the contest is for me to lure you into visiting my blog to leave comments. If this is all too greedy and capitalistic for you, you can always choose not to receive a book. Then I get comments AND I get to keep the book. Isn't that great? As for Michael Keaton, I do apologize for not getting to that last night. Look for that story first thing tomorrow morning. It's all queued up and ready to publish.

I won't be posting today's article on time. I've got my nose in a book—my own! Work I did in the later chapters of the rough draft changed the story a bit, so now I'm reworking the first chapter. Then onwards. Of course, it took me three hours of distraction before I got to this point, but we won't dwell on that… The article I had planned to write was about AD/HD and the tendency to obsessively worry. Instead, I'll write something tonight that's lighter and much more fun: Embarrassing AD/HD Impulses. Wait until you read what I did to poor Michael Keaton. In the meantime, take a look at the tinwhistle collection I've started for my kids. Thanks! Update 11/11/09 11:13:57 PM: Edited for excessive use of the word "later". I have removed the offending occurrences and flogged myself with a thesaurus as punishment.

Hard day today. I had plans. Big, beautiful plans. Instead I spent the day ticking. Then company arrived and there went my plans like leaves in the wind. I managed to check off two of the six things I needed to do today, but there was so much more that needed to be done. I was powerless and sat there stuttering, and twitching, and unable to be productive. Days like these try my will. It is so difficult to keep my spirits up. In fact, I'm struggling with Depression as I type this. The first stage is to recognize that I'm depressed. The next stage is to decide if I have a reason to be. Well, I had a reason. I blew time out the window like smoke while I sat there and ticked all day. In the past I wrote about how one must, at this point, analyze whether one is feeling an appropriate amount of sadness. After all, it is perfectly human to feel sad after you lose a big game, get dumped, lose a favorite loved one or pet, get audited, lose your house in a freak sink hole, make a mistake...

This is a photo of my kitchen sink in all its chaotic glory. Fortunately for us, this is an aberration. How could we function with a sink like this on a daily basis? So glad it's only every other day. Ha! You think I'm kidding. No, now I'm kidding. I must admit, however, that last night the sink looked just like this, except without all the artsy high contrast. And it wasn't so blue. At any rate, I discovered to my amazement that every utensil & cup in our home had migrated to the sink and gathered a sedimentary layer of sticky food on their journey. I had no choice but to run a load in the dishwasher. As I braced myself for the tactile onslaught, I mused what it would be like if my life was as easy to correct as a cluttered sink. With a healthy dose of AD/HD , my world often looks just like this sink to the outside observer. Especially since I have that charming tendency to open my mouth and reveal far too much about my life than is comfortable for most peo...

Almost exactly one year ago I made a discovery: I suffered from Winter Depression , otherwise known as Seasonal Affective Disorder. As I detailed in “I Wondered What Was Happening” , I had been on the lookout for a change in my behavior once Autumn rolled in. Then I forgot about it. (Ah, blessed ADHD ) When Daylight Savings Time began I had a rocky week. Most of us do. The shift in our sleep schedule is like experiencing jet lag without all the exotic scenery. At first. I thought I was just having a hard time adjusting as usual, but by the end of the first week I remembered what I was supposed to be on the lookout for: Winter Depression. I was moping, moody, miserable, morbidly sad…and all for no reason that I could think of. The only thing that made sense was that I was sensitive to the lack of light. That should be an easy enough to prove or disprove, I thought. All I needed was more light. People online recommended visiting a tanning salon for treatment. I was skeptical, but decided...

Here is a creepy photo I took with my iPhone. I love how menacing a common school hallway became with a bit of a tiltshift effect and toy camera coloring. Continuing the creative writing practice I started two weeks ago, I invite you to play along. The photo practically begs you to ask the question: What danger is awaiting at the end of this hallway? I'll start: Stewart gripped his Glock tightly as he slipped up the stairwell to the fifth floor. Today he was going to end it. He'd take back his life and put an end to the people who tormented him. He had it all worked out. He'd burst through the door like a ruptured pipe and spray hot metal at everything that moved. Nobody would blame him. People might even thank him. Who knew who else these ratbags had been torturing.

Congratulations, Icy . You’ve won an autographed copy of “Heck Superhero” by Martine Leavitt. Send me your mailing address via email and I’ll wrap the book up and send it to you. With one last Halloween hurrah I'll share some photos with you. I'll be changing the colors here back to their normal greens and blues later today, and Halloween 2009 will be officially over for me. I must say that I was disappointed. I posted all those photos and a writing excerpt and you people were off gallivanting around in costume instead of sitting around reading my blog. You have some nerve. Don't worry, though. My family hasn't read any of it either. I have to admit, it was the most enjoyable Halloween since my Leprechaun was born in 1998 on October 30th. We brought her home in a trick or treat bag. (If you're lucky, my wife will let me post the photo here for you to see.) Then Halloween 2009 arrived and she turned eleven, pierced her ears, and dressed up as Laura Holt from Remingt...