A Splintered Mind

Ever been so ADHD that you can’t see what you’re looking for, even when it’s right in front of your face? Given that ADHD has as many flavors as a bag of jelly beans, you might not all relate with ADHD tunnel vision. I, unfortunately, can’t say the same. If I had a jelly bean for every time something I was looking for was found right there in front of me, I could go into business and give Jelly Belly a run for their money. Today, the missing item was my iPhone. I got up from the table, left the kitchen, then wondered where my iPhone had gone. I went downstairs and searched for it. My daughter called it. I visited every room of the home as I retraced my steps all over the place. I imagine I traced paths just as comically convoluted as any you can find in Family Circus. Finally! Finally. There was one room I hadn’t visited. The kitchen. And there was my iPhone. The ringer had been turned off, but it was right where I had been sitting at the table, hidden in plain sight, ...

A lack of focus is the one common trait that all adults with ADHD seem to have, but focus isn’t as elusive as you might fear. The other day, a friend texted me out of the blue. He wanted a list of some of the things that I do to maintain focus. Initially, I panicked. I’ve been chronically ill since getting COVID–19 last October. I haven’t blogged in four months, so my ADHD advice muscles were all out of shape. Fortunately for my friend, I haven’t met a topic yet that I didn’t have an opinion on, so I worked up my courage and sent a list to him. Finding focus is a complicated issue for adults with ADHD . There are times when we have far too much focus and times when focus is as rare as a moderate during election primaries. Too much. Too little. This would be fine to work with if there was predictable rhythm to the pattern, but usually we find ourselves with too much focus on things we shouldn’t be doing (often called hyperfocus), and too li...

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 life gets me down. So what am I going to do about it? I’ve been way too sick to blog lately or post here. I mostly lay in bed and cough. It’s a party! But I did get some book writing in. One more chapter, and I’ll be ready to post it on Kindle Vella. Now I just need to design a fetching avatar for the book. I started feeling better yesterday…marginally. I had energy enough to remotely log into my four computers and setup SSH key pairs, moved some doge into a dedicated hot wallet, listed items on eBay, updated my dynamic DNS account to make sure my web and ebook servers were working, downgraded Calibre and DeDRM to fix the Mac glitch with Kindle 1.31.0 where the DRM keys weren’t passed to the new install, then upgraded them so I can make DRM-free backups of my purchases again, ignored the crypto-markets because they were depressing , worked on the impossible family jigsaw puzzle that will be the death of me before sickness ever takes me out, read a lot of books, ...

My life was briefly put on hold, thanks to a certain virus, but now I’m back, more cheeky & cynical than ever! So much for new beginnings. A week after my knee surgery, just as I was able to feel more human than sore, I became sick. Then sicker. Then sicker still. A quick visit to the InstaCare on a quiet Sunday evening ushered me into my new life of exhaustion and fatigue. I’ve had five or six COVID–19 tests since the pandemic began. They were almost beginning to feel routine. That Sunday night was no different. I showed up to pick up my pre-registered self-test, then opted to be seen instead because I felt lousy. I didn’t think I had COVID–19 because I was vaccinated, but I had something. I thought it was strep throat. I waited outside. They called me in when they were wearing their biohazard suit. I had my vitals recorded. They decided to test for Strep as well as COVID–19. I waited some more. I’ve been there before. Multiple ...

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...