azurelunatic

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I was playing clickygames and I was thinking on the nostalgic insistance that modern amusements suppress creative output.

There's some degree of good point there. Time I spend matching little colored blobs doesn't translate into writing, or stone carving, or really any useful pursuit. ADHD brains seek stimulation. The colorful stories and drawings that I might have been making...

A phrase popped into my head: You presume control of the output.

Meaning, that rewind me thirty years, give or take, and contemplate my younger self. My options are limited. How am I entertaining myself?

Here is the big computer. There is the open WordPerfect document. What brilliant thing could I be writing?

On the other side of the screen, I double click and the King of Hearts joins his queen. Cards fly out and bounce. Solitaire.

Or I could be making a picture based packing list for a trip I'll never go on, and spend half the afternoon making sure the sprite representing the pocket squirt gun is pixel-perfect.

Those are vaguely constructive. What if I made a set of really stupid dangerous homemade weapons, including an envenomed dagger and a hazardous kind of taser? That's what good ol' Shawn did. So many bad possibilities. Useless is better than actively counterproductive.

If I make my own fun, pray it's at least as good as useless, not bad in a way that rivals that ass.

I submit that Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series has one of the better non-medical descriptions of the ADD/ADHD/attention focus problem brain's unwanted hyperfocus at work.

A crystal singer can become inappropriately, damagingly enthralled with a piece of crystal, focusing in on it exclusively, losing time, ignoring/unaware of bodily needs, schedule demands, and physical dangers. It can take external intervention to snap them out of it.

Crystal thrall is seductive, of course, but also terrifying. There's a chance of death if it happens at the wrong time.

Earth is not prone to quite the extremes of weather that one gets on Ballybran, and not everyone with attention focus problems is regularly in the way of life-threatening danger, but it's the same general idea. Attention gets snagged by something -- particularly when you're exhausted enough that the executive function has given up and gone to bed, or hasn't been woken up yet -- and there goes a half-hour doing clicky things on the internet, snipping off split ends, scrubbing up soap scum, or gods know what.

It's so lovely when you can just disappear into something productive and come out a few hours later, drained but buoyed by the flow state, and with something awesome to show for it. It is not lovely when you come back to your normal brain and realize you're half an hour later for bed than you were planning, but at least you don't have any more shoulder blackheads.

I'm sure the comparison breaks down, but as a 101 for someone who's never experienced that sort of problem, but has read the book, it's not bad.

Current Mood: thoughtful

( gross in a 7-year-old hilarity kind of way )

Current Mood: amused & grossed out

I've found that when I'm deepest in concentration, music will sometimes take up attention that I needed to use on whatever it was that I was trying to do. So from that, I tried concluding that actually music was a detriment to my productivity.

However, sometimes I found myself craving music when trying to get settled into a grove. At first I thought that it was only mood, but then I realized that it was more than that.

My brain needs the music sometimes to provide a distraction for me when I'm not settled into the deep kind of concentration that precludes any distractions at all. The music is enough distraction, and the right kind of distraction, that I can stay focused on the creative task at hand and not go haring after IRC, or that post I saw two minutes ago, or any of the other things that try to steal the bits of my attention when I'm trying to focus.

Music with a good solid structure is the best. I can't listen to unstructured music when I'm trying to sleep, and when I'm trying to concentrate, if I don't know the music or if I can't predict the structures of the song to some degree, it will distract me more than I plan to be distracted. Baroque is good. Things with the structure stretched out too far are bad. Techno is good. Techno that fuses a techno beat on a classical framework may have been made for the specific purpose of keeping my brain in one piece while concentrating. It's really lovely.

Current Location: 94044
Current Music: TMBG, "Hope That I Get Old Before I Die"

hcolleen and I were conversing in the car on our way back from work₁, and the subject of ADHD and how they're considering including it in the autistic spectrum came up as a topic of discussion. And like all good conversations do, it wound around.

From

hcolleen's background knowledge, and her observation of me, I present like a classic adult ADHD ... male.

*headdesk*

No, really. I have the scatterbrainedness. I have the hyperfocus. I have the wiggles. (She mentioned that females generally got socialized out of the wiggles. I got socialized out of them, but I'm trying to get back into the wiggling habit, because a degree of motion while I'm theoretically in one place is far better for me than just sitting still.) I'd started wondering if I had an undiagnosed and very mild bit of ADHD, or regular ADD, a while ago, but it never really got beyond wondering. I knew that I had unusual attention focus issues/capabilities, but it never really dawned on me that there was anything to it beyond me just being smart and easily bored/distracted if I wasn't completely into what I was trying to do.

I didn't think it was necessarily apparent to anyone else. Evidently it's glaring.

I have the ability to get drawn into a deep state of concentration on whatever it is that I'm doing, and completely lose track of time unless jolted out of that state. I have the massive multitasking, and sometimes being able to juggle it with minute control, and sometimes completely fucking losing it. I have the severe difficulty focusing when it's not something I have any desire to do, and slipping into doing something else and getting lost in it. I have the random anxiety problems exacerbating the issue when things get bad, and ... well, the depression is under control, and it's gone from being an anvil on a thread to being an anvil on a sturdy rope, but the anvil is still over my head, and I'm not Roadrunner.

It's not a diagnosis by any means, but ... it would make a lot of sense. I have to go wrap my head around the concept now.

Current Mood: stunned

2007.07.12 Strawberry lemon water.