A Splintered Mind

In which Douglas contemplates natures and somehow segues into cleaning out his mailbox and wondering how spammers find him. I found a bit of paradise in the city two days ago. I've lived in this apartment for six years and never once realized how very close I was to the Jordan River Parkway - a scenic bike trail that meanders along the Jordan River across the Salt Lake Valley heading south to join up with the Provo River 25 or more miles away. I feel pretty stupid about it, to be honest. I was up before dawn and on a whim I decided to go hunting around in the dark for that Parkway I kept hearing about for years. You know, because looking for bike trails is what everybody does at 4am. Well, they do if they have ADHD . At any rate, off I went prepared to drive around warming the Earth in a pointless scavenger hunt. Less then five minutes later I had found my Parkway. I didn't feel stupid yet because there was nothing to see. There was a path that led off in both directions into ...

I'm busy working on my chapter novel/wicked big picture book and came across this eye opening article by Philip Dawdy over at Furious Seasons during a break: New ADHD Study Pimps ADHD Workplace Screening Drug maker Eli Lilly funded a study that recommends mandatory ADHD screening and treatment (i.e. medicating) at the workplace in order to improve worker productivity. After all, we ADHD guys are costing the company money through lost hours of brainless ADHD spinning. The study says so. You know, because only ADHD people get bored and play Solitaire at work, chat at the water cooler, text message, surf the web, do email, take long lunches, etc. Philip breaks the study down and explains why it's a bad idea with questionable legitimacy.

Winding up the month, I take a look at one of my ToDo lists that induces more terror than self-satisfaction. As I've detailed here for the past month, people with ADHD have a tendency to pile on projects. Over time it becomes necessary to prune these projects before they take on a density that threatens to collapse into a black hole. People with ADHD aren't really any different than most people, however. We all find the excitement of a new project exhilarating. Opportunities abound in life to start new projects while we trudge along with our current ones. Blogger Chris Brogan recently wrote about this problem with his post "Saying No" . Chris described how he had to clear off his plate to make room for the most important projects. That involved telling many people "No". Saying "No" to others is not difficult for me, however. It is saying "No" to myself I fail at spectacularly. Hallowell and Ratey described the process succinctly: 4. Ma...

So far this has been an excellent project to undertake. For those who have not been following along all month, I have decided to do something about my Multi-Irons Syndrome once and for all. I have deliberately picked two projects — one paying, one private — and set them as the ONLY projects I will allow myself to work on. This is a very difficult task for somebody like me with an ADHD brain so terrified of tedium that it commits me to at least 39 new and exciting projects each and every morning before I've had my breakfast. As I make mental notes of when I become distracted, what caused it, and what type of distraction it was, I've identified a few more distractions in my life to add to the list. Each one plays its part to block me from success. My goal is to figure out how to manage these distractions so I can get busy doing what I want to be doing: It is really difficult just to pick ONE task to work on. Here I am considering what I want to do with my life and how I'm ...

Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. Just why am I so adamant against psych meds in the first place? Since I was in elementary school until I became disabled at 25, I used psych meds to regulate my life. I started with Ritalin and moved up to Cylert in college. In my early twenties I had a great deal of faith in modern psychiatry. I wanted to fix my head and they promised to give me the tools to do it. The tools they gave me, however, came in bottles. I was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD , a Panic Anxiety Disorder , and Depression . I took various psych meds for the Anxiety , but none worked. For Depression I took various meds like  Wellbutrin and  Paxil over a period of time that I cannot recall completely. The drugs made me quite loopy and disconnected. I'd acclimate, they'd up my dose. I'd acclimate, they'd up my dose. Soon I was taking the max of a particular drug so they'd swit...

A cautionary tale of the dangers of side-effects and drug cocktails... Thanks to Philip Dawdy's Furious Seasons I've had a bit of reading lately about the ills of side-effects from psych meds and worse, the difficulties of coming off those meds. I'll follow this post up with some personal anecdotes of my own. In the meantime, I'd like to share these links with you as recommended reading. Philip shared with us the story of Molly over on the Soapy Water blog who has written about her trials having her son misdiagnosed with Bipolar Depression and given the anti-psychotic Abilify . Of particular import is Molly's entry in response to Philip's where she details how she feels the Bipolar symptoms were caused by side-effects from his medications. I highly recommend reading their own words. The comments from other parents on Philip's article are worth reading as well. Another story from Philip's blog that I found interesting was the account of author Dan Sa...

In which Douglas contemplates his binary navel. One thing I noticed now that I've mentally put my blog on the back burner is that I am awfully dedicated to something that doesn't do anything for me. I refer, of course, to earning money, the universal validator of purpose and relevance. However, if I wanted to blog for money, I certainly wouldn't blog here. I know you folks don't click on the Google ads. If I just wanted money, I'd update my Bear Grylls blog which earns money through Google ads and Amazon.com affiliate purchases each and every month. But I don't update that blog. Instead I blog here. That doesn't sound smart. Why do I blog here? Frankly, I feel like I've got a free lemonade stand on the side of the Information Super Highway. People expect the stand to be there when they feel like dropping by. They also expect the lemonade to taste the same as the last time they visited. If my current lemonade has a faint hint of Depression and they were...

There is a lot of material to cover, so I'll cut right to the crash: The Miley Cyrus' scandal is distracting me . Now, don't go closing the browser window. This isn't one of those typical "Oh my heck and biscuits! Miley's nekkid!!!" posts. Still, you may be wondering what the Miley Cyrus scandal has to do with ADHD . I can answer that with two words: Hyperfocus and Worry. OK, technically that's three words, but one of them isn't very ADHD specific. At any rate, those two words have everything to do with ADHD and how it affects me. Couple those words with other ADHD words like "easily" and "distracted" and you begin to understand what a fix I can find myself in. Miley Cyrus' penchant for saucy photography isn't news to me. I've been following her career for some time now and discovered her naughty side this past January. Here in the Cootey household we have four beautiful girls who, like many other American girls...

Just a quick note to let you folks know I qualified for a scholarship to the BYU's 9th Annual Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop . It's a five day workshop featuring hands on critiques with authors and editors. There will be agents there as well. I'm fairly excited about it. Now I really have a fire under my fanny to get Benjamin Fudge done. I'll also need to finish a few more chapters in my middle grade novel. All that while doing a site redesign for a client. What a lot of work. It's a good thing I already designated May to work on only Benjamin Fudge and the website redesign. Otherwise, I'd find myself furiously working on the novel to the detriment of my client. This month's experiment seems to be working.

In which Douglas discovers the wheel and wonders what to do with it. I wrote a blog two weeks ago that struck terror into my heart. My favorite flaw had reared its ugly head again, like a perennial popping up out of the muck every Spring. I had Multi-Irons Syndrome (MIS). However, instead of just quitting a bunch of projects only to add more back over time as I usually do, I decided I would do something different. I'd tackle this MIS once and for all and chart my progress here. My first step was to clear my schedule a bit so I could focus on the problem. I did this by quitting Irish whistle lessons and prewriting articles for the rest of the month and scheduling them for automagic publication. Then I picked two irons from the fire that I knew could be finished within a month and set about to accomplish them. One iron was a paid assignment. The other was a personal goal. This time, however, instead of letting my ADHD mess things up on me, I would take notes and see what obstacles ...

When project creep has taken over, it is important to isolate which projects are truly the most important While I prune and whittle away at the colossal To Do List of Doom that is my life, I have reaffirmed three main goals that I want to spend my free time on: Music: Music is well in hand. I have no professional aspirations for my pennywhistle playing and so I am content to plug away at it when I can carve some time out of my schedule. I also play the fife a little bit - just enough to keep my embouchure in check. It's not a problem because they share the same fingering and are in the same key. I strive for daily practice, but never spend more than an hour between the two. Although there are many, many instruments I'd like to play, I am forcing myself to focus on just the two. It's torture, but I'm determined and the results speak for themselves. My skill grows in quantum hops, skips, and leaps. Drawing: Drawing is still something I keep meaning to write about here, b...