A Splintered Mind

Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. (credit: Kendrea Johnson Family) Recently, I read about Kendrea Johnson, a six year old girl who allegedly hung herself with a jumprope. Her case has bothered me deeply not just because it was a senseless death of an innocent child, or because of the sadness she must have experienced by being put into the foster care system, or even just because the idea of a six year old struggling with suicidal ideation is so disturbing. I was bothered because I do not know how I could have helped such a child if I had been given the opportunity. “I’m sorry.” “I’m sad for what I do.” These notes, written in purple marker, were left behind. They break my heart. Her foster mother claimed she talked about jumping to her death out of a window because Kendrea claimed nobody liked her. She drew a picture at school of a child hanging by a rope. If the coroner’s report was to be believed, s...

It has been one month since I decided to train myself to be a writer . You may recall I was inspired by the output of other writers. I just didn’t compare well to their prolificness. I had all these great ideas covered in cobwebs in my head because I didn’t write fast enough. I wanted to take my writing to the next level and worried about all my downtime. Yes, yes, I am disabled and sick all the time. However, if I wanted to make a living as a writer there had to be some changes. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized there wasn’t much I could do about that downtime. It was due to disability, right? But there was a ton I could do about my uptime. How did I spend it? How focused was I? Was I watching too much TV? Playing too many games? Heck, did I want this book finished by my birthday or not‽ So I made some goals to start my days off right and got busy. A little over a week later I came across a blog post by Dave Farland on being prolific . This...

Just a brief break from book writing to mark this amazing date. Ten years online. I still can't believe it. Thank you for all of your support. I originally began this blog because a neighbor told me that ADHD didn't exist. She was a school teacher, and she felt that ADHD was just an excuse parents used to get kids out of doing homework. I was more mad at myself than her, however. I stood there gobsmacked instead of helping her understand how wrong she was. I was still ashamed then to tell people about my ADHD, but I was more ashamed of myself for not standing up to her misconceptions. I decided to start this blog to force myself to not be afraid of talking about my ADHD & Depression anymore. I also figured this blog would help me learn to be a writer, and maybe connect me with a community of people with similar issues. The blog has been a success on all three accounts. Not only am I no longer stigmatized by my ADHD or Depression, but I've vastly improved my writi...

I'm depressed today, so I will be listening to Christmas music mixed with dance music to lift my spirits. Videos that I watched last night still haunt me. I especially haven't recovered from watching an avant-garde biopic of Karen Carpenter done with grime, war footage, and Barbie dolls. I may never be free from its hateful snark. Thanks, IRC guy, for the recommendation. If I had only left it alone. I could have walked away, shaking my head, but unscarred. However, I then looked up “Karen Carpenter collapsed on stage” and watched final performances of hers where she looked like a poster child for third world hunger while smiling & singing. I saw interviews with her in complete denial. Then she was “suddenly” dead because of complications from anorexia nervosa. Yeah, the IRC guy's getting coal this year from me. That artsy documentary was horrible, but I also didn't need this distraction. I was freshly sixteen at the time, so I don't recall how I felt about K...

Today I was reading an article by Dean Wesley Smith about Pulp Speed . He talked about the golden age of pulp fiction where writers who were disciplined could write 1,000,000 words a year or more. That's only 2778 words per day he calculated, working everyday of the month. Of course, you might want to take the weekend off, so subtracting four Sundays & Saturdays from a thirty day month would mean you'd need to write 3788 words per day to get the same results. At 1000 words an hour, that's just under four hours of work daily—part time status. If you doubled that and worked an eight hour day, you'd double your output to 2,000,000 words a year—the equivalent of twenty 100,000 word books a year. The trick to the numbers, however, is that each book would have NO REWRITING. They'd all be submitted as first drafts. Apparently, you'd also do no research or plotting. You'd just sit down and wing it. Just the idea of that level of output & confidence is sta...

Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. I have been writing in a journal almost all of my life. In the beginning I wrote about movies I saw and my Superman trading card collection, but by the time I was a teen I learned that journaling helped me work out my moods, worries, and problems. Sometimes there was no more therapeutic a process I could do for my ADHD & Depression than hold an internal conversation with myself. This was the power of the journal: to provide a constructive environment for me to explore private issues and often resolve them. Here are six ideas for journals that can provide a constructive method of self-expression as a coping strategy: The Traditional Journal : Your local bookstore will usually have an entire wall dedicated to journals. You don't have to break the bank for a leather-bound, hand-sewn journal filled with handmade papers. An inexpensive notebook will do. You can even mak...

http://xkcd.com/386/   This past week I forgot my first rule of Internet engagement: Understand and acknowledge the other person’s feelings before disagreeing with their facts. When I follow this rule, more times than not the conversation goes well, even if we ultimately disagree. Yes, there are some people who just want to see the world burn, or more specifically, see you burn, but they’re in the minority. Most people on Twitter and Facebook simply feel just as strongly about their opinions as you do. This is why finding common ground with them before you disagree with them is so important. Unfortunately, every once in a while somebody says something that makes me stop and say, “Hold on now. That’s not right.” You might be thinking that this is just another example of Douglas writing about Foot-in-Mouth disease, and there certainly could be a case made for it, but I don’t get into flame wars on the Internet anymore. No, really. Stop snorti...