A Splintered Mind

Ever since it was first released, I have been a big fan of Letterpress for iOS . I have found it perfect for my ADHD. It’s mentally stimulating; the board can change drastically turn by turn; it’s a constructive pursuit to help me unwind; and it gives me an endorphin boost from the competition. Letterpress is like weaponized Words for Friends. Fans of Scrabble will feel at home since it uses the same dictionary, but points are allocated differently, and you can steal your opponents letter tiles. As in chess, strategy is important since to win the game you need to have the higher score when the last letter is played. I won’t bore you further with detailed game mechanics of a game you may never play. All that is important to understand is that I take the game seriously, and I have a lot of fun playing it. When I first started playing I quickly paid for the full version so I could have ten games going at a time. I didn’t get a lot of work done then, but I sure got good at the game ...

In the last journal entry that I shared with you, I wrote about a recent epiphany where I discovered I had inextricably linked goal making with my self-esteem. It was an obvious problem once I drew attention to it, but I was surprised at how long I had been cluelessly operating under such a destructive thought process. How could I like myself if I only liked myself if I was working towards goals? There would always be more goals because if I finished a goal I would immediately be unhappy and restless. I needed a new goal for focus and purpose. I placed all my self worth on success and only success. I had become addicted in a way to ADHD’s hyperfocus, needing more and more goals to find clarity. It was exhausting, but how to train myself out of it? First of all, having goals isn’t the problem. Goals are good things to help motivate us to improve ourselves, and improving ourselves will benefit us by uplifting our quality of life. But only being happy if goals are being met can dri...

Most of the time, people talk about adult ADHD as if it is a curse. We all know the horror stories. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you’ve read more than a few horrifying tales of ADHD woe with me as the terrorizer and victim. Fortunately, ADHD has its upsides . Sometimes a distraction leads me to discover things I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. Case in point: my Kobo mini isn’t affiliate-linked with my local bookstore. This is a big deal. Kobo was supposed to rise from the ashes of the Google Books failure and be the ebook savior of independent brick & mortar book sellers nationwide,. On the surface it seems simple enough. People buy a Kobo ereader from a local bookshop, and that bookshop gets a percentage of every book purchased with those ereaders. Unfortunately, there’s a big catch. One day when I was supposed to be pumping out freelance assignments and doing the laundry, on a whim I called Kobo when I couldn’t link my Kobo Mini to my local boo...

As I was getting my Gmail inbox down to zero last month I discovered a nifty folder where I stored emails that I wanted to blog about. Of course, I completely forgot about them once I put them in there. A lot of my plans have been sidetracked because of my car accident last Spring. They were pretty good plans, too. I was thinking of writing a book, posting embarrassing videos of myself on YouTube for internet fame, finding Brigham's gold in the mountains, and tagging Sasquatch. I dream big and fall hard. So you shouldn't be surprised that I didn't publish an excellent correspondence I had with reader Sandra J from the UK. Here is the conversation I had with her about coping with Depression without meds. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the correspondence. Can you relate with her? Do you have different advice to give her? ⁂   Hi there I'm reading your blog. I have a question. Imagine yourself at one of those lowest points, when meds are not really workin...