A Splintered Mind

This has been a tough year for me. I’ve kept my struggle mostly secret because the drama that ails me relates a story that I cannot share. The results of it are fairly obvious to those who observe me day to day, however. I’m less cheery; I’m more stressed; my sleep is horrible; I’m way behind in my writing; my finances have thrown up a white flag; I don’t find relief in social media anymore; and my real social life has evaporated like water in the hot, Utah sun. The most unfortunate aspect of the drama is that the more stress I encounter, the worse my Tourette’s becomes. Still! During all of this, I fulfill all my duties as a dad, and plug forward. There is always a dawn on the other side of the darkness. I believe that completely, but these days I don’t have extra energy or time for writing books or articles. I thought I had a handle on things, albeit my life was full-time daddy work and no freelance, but then I woke up a few days ago an...

I have to admit. I haven’t been the most punctual of guys. I’ve tried, but I failed a lot. Last Tuesday, I had an appointment to meet a counselor at my daughter’s school. I left on time. I maneuvered through traffic like I was in the Indy 500 (without breaking the law!). I arrived early! Two minutes early! Then I reminded myself to put up the sunshade before getting out. I’ve written before about the effect sun-heated cars have on my noodle. So up went the sunshade. Is this the right way? No, it’s upside down. Wait, I should really put up the side window shades, too. There. Looks great! No overheating for me! By the time I walked through the door, however, I was two minutes late. Dang, foiled by ADHD again! Some of you might be thinking that two minutes is hardly LATE. It’s certainly not the latest I’ve ever been. With my Tourette’s and my super awesome ADHD organization, I’ve been known to push a courtesy fifteen minute grace period into the sixteenth minute and beyond. I’v...

I've got a new blog going up soon, but I came across something tonight that I felt compelled to share with you. Over on The Passive Voice , PG wrote about the turmoil his family has been going through due to the suicide of his son and the death of his brother — both within the same few weeks. Any death in the family can be devastating. I recently stood over the grave of my brother on Memorial Day, teary-eyed with a tight throat, even though its been nineteen years since the car accident. We don't forget those we loved. His son's suicide has pushed PG beyond the limits of his strength. Then he lost his brother to cancer. What a difficult time for his family. And yet, despite all of that, he put together a blog with such fabulous advice, I was in awe of his stamina. His blog post gives advice on words of comfort, discusses preparation for deaths in the family, and includes a stirring passage on mental illness. I was just thinking today about the need for a will now th...

Do you have a lot of bookmarks on your browser? What about open tabs? I just love them. I like to keep dozens of them up at any give moment, to go along with my hundreds upon hundreds of bookmarks. Don’t want to forget anything, right⸮ Just now I discovered that my daughter had been on my computer again and had closed yet another window filled with dozens of tabs. There was the usual moment of panic, followed by a loud, wailing sound very much like the sound Luke Skywalker made in that movie where he met a long lost relative. All my research! Gone! Doesn’t she realize I use open tabs like a ToDo list on my browser?! Then it hit me. I was finally free. I try to keep my problem under control, but tabs and bookmarks are just so easy to make! There I am, watching a show about detectives in Shetland, when suddenly I’m looking up Shetland on Flickr, researching the LDS community in that area, reading a Shetland article from 2009 about a twenty-three year old girl going on ...

Does living next to greenery offer benefits to your mental health, or is something else at work? Last month, the headline “Access to nature reduces depression and obesity, finds European study” caught my eye. All I had to do to feel happier and fit in my pants better was surround myself with trees? I felt silly. Here I was using cognitive behavior therapy techniques, exercising, and working on my sleep schedule. Instead, I should have been sitting in a bush all day. After all, that’s what it implied in the news. Look at what they were claiming: Middle-aged Scottish men with homes in deprived but verdant areas were found to have a death rate 16% lower than their more urban counterparts. Pregnant women also received a health boost from a greener environment, recording lower blood pressures and giving birth to larger babies, research in Bradford found. See? The babies know all that verdant abundance matters. Just being near the plants made a difference! Ther...

Healthline Every once in a while, out of the veritable blue, an announcement arrives in my inbox that stands out from the noise. Usually, I receive spam from desperate, out of work infographic makers or eager guest bloggers who pretend to read my site, then think I want their guest post about their experience herding yaks. The other week, a guy asked me if I still posted on my blog these days, offered to guest blog for me to promote his book on depression, then told me that I could really use it. Yeah, not a great pitch. DELETE Then today I discovered that Healthline had featured me in their yearly list of top depression bloggers again. There I was listed with sixteen other fantastic bloggers. I am humbly grateful, and also excited to learn about new bloggers. I hope you will be excited to learn about them, too. There isn’t just one way to write about overcoming depression. We need more voices to fight stigma and reach people who still struggle. Inside this new list of The ...

If there is one attribute of ADHD that embarrasses me the most, it is my inability to remember names. Like many adults with ADHD, I have problems with short-term, or working, memory. I forget what I’ve heard all the time, unless I make an extreme effort to force the information into long-term memory. When it comes to social events and names, I’m simply horrible at it. I still remember an incident in college where I saw somebody I recognized from a quarter mile away. I made way across the quad, rushed up to them making waving motions, and promptly forgot their name mid-sentence as I said, “Hey… (insert awkward silence here) ”. He even called me on it rather unkindly. Yeah, that was embarrassing. To be honest, I’d probably still be embarrassed about it, except I’ve forgotten his name again. Oh, well. I thought days were far behind me because I’ve become more adept at redirecting the conversation until my memory caught up. There used to be d...