A Splintered Mind

(These AI images make me laugh. Yes, I know the calendar is messed up. Allow me my silly moments.) I’ve decided to think dramatically about my obstacles in my first attempt to blog about my new condition with a sense of humor. Honestly, there hasn’t been much to laugh at. For example, I got distracted playing Chess on Duolingo the other day and gave myself Post Exertional Malaise (PEM). First, I noticed the headache, then I noticed that I was panting, and then I realized that I was dizzy. It was just chess! But I lost track of time, got caught up in it, and overtaxed my brain. Stamina spent. Crash incoming. An entire day wasted. It’s hard to laugh about things like that. I had big plans to implement. Instead, I watched TV—until that gave me a headache, too. Every day I have lists, but I rarely make it to the end of them because of the drain cognitive, physical, and even emotional events have on my stamina levels. Chronic fatigue is complicated. That’s whe...

I joined the Midori Traveler’s Notebook (TN) club this past Summer. I missed the big blogging heyday about them around 2012 to 2015 when the Internet seem to explode over this nifty little notebook system, but I was all about digital back then. I loved my iPhone and didn’t feel a need to go analog. Recently, though, I noticed some artists doing inspiring things in their TNs, and I thought this could be the kick in the pants I needed to fit sketching back into my life. I started small with one notebook insert with a leather cover. Only when I noted that I was actually using it, I invested in more inserts. The only feature it was missing for me was a ToDo list insert, but nobody made one. And thus I began my journey yesterday into DIY Notebook Hell. With ADHD as my guide, I boldly discovered blog after blog of incredibly ornate notebook inserts that people made for themselves because the official ones were just “too expensive”. Since you can get official ones fo...

I pull back the curtain a bit today, revealing a deep, dark secret about myself—a secret so dank, surely I’ll lose the last three readers I have. I’ve been reading far too many Japanese light novels lately. It started as a form of research, but now I actually like the darn things. I can’t get enough of them. They’re my personal Pandora’s Box. I opened the beautiful, ornately engraved box, saw the plentiful wonders inside, and now I can’t shut the lid. Is this an ADHD obsession, or a newfound joy? I can’t tell, which is why I’m troubled. Have you seen my Goodreads timeline? I read almost all escapist manga and light novels these days. I know I’ve been struggling with depression lately, but it’s embarrassing! I’m sitting here wearing a Fair Isle style, wool sweater, a designer, long-sleeved, henley shirt, and Izod tech pants, not a 1-ply t-shirt featuring Sailor Moon with chip crumbs all over my belly. How will my ...

I’m run down and sick, so I’m posting something positive every day this week until I lift my spirits. There is a reason I’m depressed. It’s more than having major and persistent depression disorder . I’ve had a surprisingly cruddy year. I have to admit that I’m frustrated because my coping strategies are failing me. This is the sort of year that could only happen to a protagonist in a dark comedy. I’ve already written before how I was severely sick for seven months before the pandemic began. This feels like slow death sometimes. I’m so isolated from others, I’m forgetting how to be human. Here’s my calendar since May. I think it’s a bit much: May: I began running to lose weight and get in shape, but tore my right meniscus in my knee. I know its a torn meniscus, but insurance demands I do physical therapy first. Thus ends my newfound hobby, as well as my summer of longboarding before it began. June: Babying my...

Sometimes external forces can induce depression. They can induce panic. They can control how you see the world if you let them. I’ve got surgery coming up this week, so I’m getting my blogging in early. I want to work on my current novel when I start to come out of the anesthesia. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m watching the crypto market implode…again. I decided to get into crypto last Spring—two days before China cracked down on Bitcoin miners and the Chinese banks that did business with them. I had only invested $10. It was play money, to be honest, but what a lesson that was for me! China’s crackdown caused the market to crash. That $10 became negative in just two days. I laughed. There I was. Mr. Moneybags. The Crypto Guru. All because I was so entertained just twenty-four hours earlier when my $10 had gained 50¢ in value. The main character of my book made and lost a fortune in crypto, so I wanted to understand that world bette...

A new beginning that looks an awful lot like the old one. When I set out to explore fractal art, I face a confusing array of controls & parameters. It has taken me years to develop the eye to select the best cropping, the most flattering palette, and the most interesting settings, then present them in a pleasing manner. Without this discipline, the fractal is an utter mess with no focus. By making a few poorly chosen decisions, the same mathematical location and the same color palette can appear completely different—and far less appealing. Of course, anybody with the time and desire to learn the software can produce pleasing images. It isn’t as if I received a PhD in advance fractal art, traveling to distant lands to study with the Mandelbrot masters before writing my doctoral thesis on the societal implications of sliders versus number fields and how they subvert the patriarchy. However, as I was exploring a particular fractal set the other day,—tweaking the parameters t...

Sometimes the best kind of journal is the one that you shred, light on fire, then cast its ashes to the wind. Last January, I woke up severely depressed one morning. At first, I didn’t realize what was happening. I just knew that I had no will to move, no will to eat, no will to do anything. I felt interred with heavy, suffocating sadness. Mmm, that sounds rather dramatic, doesn’t it? The moment I realized I was depressed, I grabbed my iPhone and began dictating a blog entry to Siri as a coping strategy. However, it was all in the same vein as that emo sentence above—nice and juicy with just the right amount of adverbial angst and self-indulgence. We should all be grateful that I deleted every single word of it. Normally, I avoid blogging or posting on social media while under the influence of Major Depressive Disorder . Despite my efforts to sound upbeat, depression affects my narrative voice and mental outlook. Fortunately, hindsight gained from experience keeps me from em...

Sometimes we can be so fixated upon the finish line that we miss how far we’ve already come. © Alan Watson Featherstone   Ah, if I hear another commercial on the radio with a smooth-talking announcer earnestly pretending their company cares about me during these “unprecedented times”, I may puke. I’ve moved way beyond that acid reflux-ish moment where my stomach’s contents race to my mouth to voice their opinion. I may not be able to hold them back next time. Between you and me, I’m a little worried about it. I’m still making payments on my car. So I’m not going to talk to you as if you just woke up next to Rip Van Winkle and need me to explain what COVID–19 is. I’m just going to write from my heart about how this pandemic has affected me, and maybe you’ll be able to relate: I feel like my life has been sealed in a cocoon. This is a funny thing to write because I’ve never before been so product...

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a support group out there for adults with ADHD who have an open tabs addiction. ¹ Hello, my name is Douglas Cootey, and I’m a hard core tabs junkie. Maybe this seems like a first world problem. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “What’s the big deal with several hundred open tabs?” If that’s how you think, you might need to join me at that meeting. In theory there’s nothing wrong with lots of open browser tabs. I did things that way for years. If I found a web page with a great project or article I wanted to refer to later, I’d keep the tab open and leave it with the other saved ToDo tabs. The problem I ran into, however, was although ToDo tabs helped me not forget important data, I had so many tabs open in my browser I couldn’t find what I needed. Just as ToDo lists can get long and unmanageable, ToDo tabs multiply until they become noise—no longer useful as resources or reminders. Yes, you’ve got web pages open for that funny self-surgery with tweez...

22K Pageviews? Not bad! Have I mentioned I was sick for a long time at the beginning of the year? I may have mentioned it once or twice ¹ . Well, while I was down for the count, my editors over at ADDitude Magazine were counting pageviews for an article I wrote for them a while back . Apparently, I hit 22,213 pageviews for that article alone. They told me all about it last February while I was slightly inconvenienced. I just recently discovered their post when I had to use carefully placed demolition charges and a pick axe to catch up with my email. I know my mother wasn’t reloading that page over and over again as she wardrived from free wifi network to free wifi network all around town. Not only would she not think of doing that, she wouldn’t understand what I just wrote! Instead, I can only assume that there was a sizable amount of people who were interested in The Reinvented Chore Chart That Actually Motivates My Child It was a fun article I wrote about how I f...

I’ve been rethinking the purpose of my blog lately. Haven’t I written enough on ADHD & Depression ? I don’t write exclusively about either subject, which turns some readers off, so I’ve never had the meteoric rise of some bloggers who target one or the other subject (although with ADHD bloggers & YouTubers, they usually blaze through the sky then disappear after awhile). Writing about comorbid conditions isn’t sexy, though I think I look pretty good in my newest jeans. Seriously, though, it’s hard to compete with Facebook. Remember when RSS, not Facebook, made the blogosphere go round? Heck, who even uses “blogosphere” anymore? It makes me wonder where I should be putting my focus. The first blow to my blogging schedule was getting sick last Fall for SEVEN months (I cannot write enough about how disruptive that was to my life). Then COVID–19 arrived just as I was getting better, and my learning disabled daughter needed e...

I picked up particulate respirator masks so that I can go outdoors again. I’ve apparently developed asthma due to the pollution in Salt Lake Valley and the California forest fires. It’s why I’ve been so horribly sick since September. I’ve been a near complete shut-in.  Alas, I overdid things yesterday. I looked like a dork in my mask, but I happily ran errands all over town. I also worked out on my treadmill, exercise bike, and did twenty minutes of aerobic activity. Unfortunately, I forgot to use both my inhaler & nebulizer. My lungs are burning again, and the cough has returned. 🙄 I feel so feeble. I kinda hate this.  I don’t regret my busy day, especially going to the library for a writing session. That felt great. I’ll just have to make sure I use my inhaler and nebulizer faithfully. No skipping days! My coping strategy for today is to:

Just a quickie update for you this weekend. I recently received an award for depression blogging . I even had to send off a headshot. I’ll write more about it when their post goes live, but in the meantime, I realized that I haven’t been blogging about depression much this year. I wanted to let you know why. I’m cured! Nah. Wouldn’t that be great? No such luck for me, however. I still struggle with mild depression daily and occasional heavy bouts when most inconvenient. What really has me distracted is my latest book project. I’ve dug through the past fourteen years of articles and collected the best articles I’ve written on ADHD and ToDo lists . That’s the theme of my next eBook. I hope to have a first draft finished by the end of next week. Some of the articles stand as is, but many need to be updated or rewritten (For example, how about this one? Three Simple Ways to Prevent Your PDA from Becoming a Paperweight ). As I update or write...

2018 was a good year for me. Thank you all for reading my articles, sharing them with friends, and supporting me over the years. This blog, A Splintered Mind, has been tackling ADHD and depression with attitude and humor online for fourteen years now. It is the longest project, aside from parenthood, of which I have remained consistently engaged. In the past year, I have been spotlighted in Esperanza magazine , had blogs published at ADDitudeMag.com , had an article published in ADDitude Magazine’s Fall issue , and was selected to participate in a blogger advisory panel. 2018 was busy, but it all came together in the Fall. The event that took the most effort was the blogger advisory panel—even more effort than trying to get a decent portrait for Esperanza magazine that didn’t make me look like a doofus. That project involved all of my smiling daughters giving me encouragement on a bright summer day. I felt so awkward doing a photoshoot in a public park, as if I’m a lo...

For the past week, I’ve been stressing out over an upcoming event: my return to the dating pool . I can’t say that my swim went well. First, I paced back and forth on the pool deck, eyeing the water suspiciously. Then I stuck a toe in, but quickly retreated to a safe distance. Wet! It was much too wet. Then I shook myself off, scheduled my swim, awaited my moment, and dressed for the occasion. I even took a selfie to send to my daughters before I took the plunge. In the photo, I’m so nervous in my bathing suit, I don’t recognize the man looking back at me. There’s something wrong with his face. He doesn’t look anything like me. It might be his rigor mortis smile, or the overly pink complexion moments before he begins to steam from apprehension. Whatever is ailing him, it doesn’t matter. Life managed to keep him away from the water 35 minutes before he was scheduled to dive in. The school gave me a call seconds after I took the selfie. My daughter was ...

This month, no, my life isn’t going as planned. It brings to mind a certain poem: ❝But, Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain; The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! ~ “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough”, Robert Bruns, November 1785 I know. It’s not the most upbeat outlook, and Steinbeck repurposed it better, but life certainly does have a way of uprooting our carefully built nests. In response, I could get frustrated, or I could get creative. I chose the creative solution, even if it feels a bit bleak—even for me. ~Dˢ ⁂ New blog posting later tonight.

I was recently contacted by a college student who requested an email interview. I share the answers below because the interviewer asked excellent questions. If you follow my blog, then you’ll already know that I have been diagnosed with Clinical Depression (Major Depressive Disorder) , Adult ADHD , and Chronic Tic Disorder (Tourette’s) . What you may not know is what I get out of blogging about my experiences with these conditions. This was the one of the questions the interviewer asked that made me think. Why on earth do I do this?

❝Nothing like ADHD and a good fight to the death to make time fly.”   – Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, Book 1)  

“But a sanguine temper, though forever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. It soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.”   – Jane Austen, Emma, ch.18