A Splintered Mind

Saturday - Entry 19: Sitting in the library, I'm listening to As Tall As Lions and watching as the patrons hustle and bustle about quietly. I'm finally feeling better after one of the nastiest 24 hour bugs I've experienced in a while. I haven't had energy to do much since the bug hit me square in the face yesterday morning. I was caught up in its tornado of exhaustion and did the only sensible thing I could think of: sleep. Very rare for me. Now I'm up & about again, and I've been thinking a lot about a conversation I had with the Leprechaun the night before I became sick. I had shared a journal entry with her to help her understand where my head has been lately. Upon finishing I looked up and noticed she was crying. I was surprised. I had thought the entry to be positive and affirmative—an honest assessment of my life. She told me with teary eyes that none of it was true. My self-assessment was rubbish, apparently. I know adults with ADHD can have inacc...

I warn you ahead of time that this is a geeky blog for a limited spectrum of my readers. What? You aren't all bloggers and writers? I've discovered a new text editor for the iPhone and iPad that I wanted to share with my fellow writers who have ADHD. It's called Byword . If you don't write for a living you may not appreciate why I am so excited about this app, and since I am writing for a living I need to be quick about today's entry. Here are a few highlights: iCloud sync. There are a lot of text editors out there, but most sync to Dropbox. But if Dropbox were to ever go down, I want an alternative service to work with. Since Byword syncs to iCloud, this allows me to still sync documents between my iPhone & iPad. If I had a Mac that wasn't ancient, I could sync it all to the Mac version of the app as well. Dropbox sync. If iCloud ever goes down, Byword can also sync to Dropbox, which means that my work flow doesn't have to be altered too d...

Friday - Entry 18: Today America's children learned that there really are such things as monsters. I had just pulled away from my daughter's elementary school when I turned on the radio and heard the news about Newtown, Connecticut. My heart simply dropped, leaving a numb hole in its place. The assembly I attended was for the NOVA awards, a program to discourage drug use and, ironically, violence. It has replaced the DARE program here in Utah. It stands for Nurturing Opportunities Values Accountability . There were several policemen there to give out the awards to the happy, excited children. My daughter was thrilled to see me, but then even more thrilled to have her name called and be given a certificate. She stood high on the stage, beaming at the crowd in her excitement, and shivering with excitement as she crumpled her certificate ever so slightly. I was apparently the only parent to show up with a camera for my girl's class, so the assembly waited while I snapped som...

I'm not sure how it happened. People tend to think I'm organized. Well, not people who actually know me, but still. People. Perhaps it is my neatness that impresses them, or my task lists and follow-ups. Perhaps it is the way I can talk about my problems with such laser focus. (See Four Shortcuts to Taming Your Inner ADHD Worrywart to see why I'm usually so good at that.) Or maybe they're just deluded. What they don't realize is that I have a fatal flaw. As a graphic designer and artist, I organize two dimensions with skill. Even in the third dimension I excel at enforcing order over chaos—or should I say I anticipate chaos and plan accordingly. For example, when I move to a new home, all my boxes are color coded and numbered. I have a two dimensional list that summarizes all their contents, and the colors let me know which room to tell the movers to place the boxes in the third dimension. Some may not call that organized; they may think it's obsessive compuls...

Sunday - Entry 17: I awoke this morning inside a snow globe. Its contents had settled all over the Salt Lake Valley around me. The horizon was a wall of clouds in every direction, thinning at the top. My daughters and I drove to church circumferenced by these clouds, and I waited for the sudden moment when the world around me would be violently shaken again by some celestial child eager to see the snow in speckled commotion. Inside our church we were safe from the illusion outside, but returning home I could see that outside was still inside a wintery sphere. I would keep an eye on the snow globe throughout the afternoon, wondering when the illusion would end, but the sky was filled with clouds from horizon to horizon—gray, thick, and foggy—as if caused by the breath of colossal observers peering in. The girls packed and prepared for their switch to their mother's, interrupted only by homework and bickering. We ate dinner; we laughed; and I attended to their computer issues. Perfe...

It's 12:53am. The children are in bed, yet I cannot tuck myself in bed, too. Something is bugging me. In fact, a lot of somethings are bugging me. They bug me so much that I might be compelled to go off for a walk into the night, talking out loud to help sort out my thoughts, trying to figure out what is wrong. And how to fix it. I might start making lists. Long, detailed lists. And plans! Let's not forget the plans. Intricate things sprawling from notes to calendars. I may even decide that unique reminder alarms will need to be employed. I can get AppleScript to text me at the appropriate time and open up a prompting photograph right over whatever it is I'm distracted with on my computer. Yeah, and iCal needs a series of complicated alarms going off every 3 minutes to make sure I don't forget. And specialized sounds. I should make them memorable and annoying. Then there's the taser… Over the top? Perhaps. What I'm describing is the adult with ADHD...

Tuesday - Entry 16: I was watching a Japanese movie and was struck by the main character's tenacity in conversation. Despite the drama, interruption & chaos all around her, she was not side-tracked. Long after I would have forgotten why I was in the room, never mind what we were talking about, she grabbed someone by the arm and said, "As I said." Then she made her point. Jesus walking on water was not nearly as miraculous. Getting to the point is one of the hardest aspects of conversation for me. I am constantly lacking the laser focus needed to be concise. I know that those that I admire have minds like traps—their thoughts grasped firmly and their purpose clear—but for me getting to the point sometimes requires a profound amount of effort, and even with effort I am not guaranteed to clearly make that point. Perhaps that is why watching people stay on point, even if they are fictional people, inspires me. There are three aspects of ADHD that I wish I could master:...