A Splintered Mind

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...

  I wanted to jot down a few things before going into the weekend.   First, I'm in the last stretch of my book's final draft. I have had a devil of a time with this one particular chapter on using faith or meditation to overcome suicidality, but I'm finally making progress with it. In the end it has become one of my strongest chapters. Finishing this book is what I'm supposed to be working on instead of blogging and breathing, so your patience, please. It will soon be done.   Second, as much as I use social media to let my hair down, so to speak, I try to share useful links. I also collect them all here in one place . If you read this resource in Flipboard's app, you can read my comments on each link. I cannot fathom why Flipboard disabled comments in their web version. I have complained multiple times to their customer support, but my complaints fall on deaf ears. Perhaps, however, the comments could be evidence of my pathological logorrhea, or pithy in...

ADHD Autopilot Errors It isn't unusual for ADHD to help me out with its upsides. For instance, I sometimes rely on ADHD's penchant for distraction to alleviate Depression . When writing here, however, I tend to focus on the outlandish goof-ups for laughs. This is why today's event was so unusual. An ADHD mistake that worked to my benefit? I'm still astounded. It all began last Friday. I replied to an editor at PsychCentral after she emailed me to let me know that the recent interview on Depression was posted. I thanked her for including me in their article. I then offered to answer any questions on Depression that they might have in the future. I was so pleased with myself. Not only had I sent out a “thank you” within an hour or two of the email, but I pitched my talents—something that is typically difficult for me. It was at that proud moment that I noticed the editor had already asked me in that very email if I would like to answer some more questions on Depression. ...

I was contacted in September to contribute to an article for PsychCentral . The questions I was asked were “What did/does depression feel like for you? How would you describe it?” Margarita Tartakovsky, an editor at PsychCentral, put together a group of nine authors and bloggers who write about Depression to answer that question. I was thrilled to be included in such a project–not just so that I could contribute, but because I knew that people who suffer from Depression needed to know that they weren’t alone. With so many different voices describing a common condition, there was bound to be a perfect description in the collection for different people to relate to. The article posted yesterday, and it’s terrific. I knew of no other participants besides Deborah Serani whose book I had recently reviewed. So I was pleased to see Therese Borchard in the list. I’ve blogged about her before. Her work on the necessity of faith to fight depression always fas...