thinkythink

I forgot what I was going to post about

I had a little bit of a breakdown the other day. I had the intention of posting several times a week, and I couldn't think of anything to write about. It felt like a writer's block kinda thing, if I thought of myself as a writer. But I know that in all creative pursuits, it's best to just keep on keeping on- ok that holds for other pursuits as well, maybe anything with a goal. It's best to sit down and just write something to keep it going, keep the writing primed in the mind. But I don't want to just publish anything, even if I don't have illusions that what I'm putting out is some kind of earth-shattering work of literature; I don't want to dump any old crap out there. This didn't really help my sense of frustration. I had to get to the bottom of something...
And in those moments, talking to someone about what's going on is helpful. Some call this verbal processing, where you figure out what you need to know and do and clarify by conversing. I might say for me at times it's more of a research expedition, and now is one of those times. I have to fling frustrations at my sweetheart husband's ears in order to blurt out that
#1 I wrote a list the other day of some topics I needed to cover in writing- online or not, just the stuff I aim to capture specifically about the inattentive experience.
#2 The cat peed on the list.
#3 Sticking to that list isn't going to keep me writing, it's stuff to cover, but this blog has several themes I work back and forth from. The themes are getting progressively distilled, but linear writing, as though I started with a book outline and wrote only from there, just dumps all of how I am out the window. I have to have some choices and some spontaneity, especially if I want to get the experience set out there.
#4 I forgot about number 3. That was stopping me. I thought I had to write only from one predetermined list. "Had to" means "decided to."  In other words, I forgot that I had not decided that I should only write from my scrawled-out and peed-on list.

#5 I'd already written a post. Yesterday. In my head. I forget what it was about. I forgot that I had it in my head.

#6 Come to think of it, I've written a bunch in my head lately. I forgot that this was happening. I forgot what they were about. The cat peed on my brain.

#7 Something else has changed... I am not able to grab the laptop and write stuff down for a few minutes. What's changed? Apparently it's not my number or type of ideas, but rather my ability to get them typed up before the disintegrate into the background mental noise again.

So what's changed?

#1 I feel like I'm more tired, which might be true, but I can't be more sleep deprived than when my babe was a newborn.

#2 I feel like I'm forgetting more. That is possible but I'm not so sure.

#3 Dearest baby G. is crawling. I can't sit on the couch and watch him play on the floor anymore. I could for a while. That meant I could grab the laptop and get this: type my ideas. I had simplified systems, emailing myself stuff I needed to remember, for example. And typing blog entries, at least in draft mode, very quickly. Or emailing those ideas to someone. Now, no sooner have I commenced typing that someone has turbo-crawled to the couch, pulled himself to standing, and I find little fingers wiggling all over the keyboard and jaws descending upon the monitor. Laptop closes, hurries back to its currently safe location, with cord tucked behind the cabinet.

I guess it wasn't writer's block after all.

There are some downsides to the immediacy of our information culture, but a definite upside is the ability to express an idea in a tiny little precious bit of time available. I guess it's time to adjust my strategy, though. If parenting is teaching me anything, with emphasis on the present tense because I'm surely no expert, it's how to find grace in flexibility. Rapid flexibility.

A Sense of Personal Space

I recently returned from Montana. My husband was working at the  National Folk Festival in Butte, and we attached a vacation to that trip. I've never spent time in the Rockies before and I have to say that it is in some ways culturally more foreign for me from most places I've been. During the festival, a friend pointed out something that helped me to understand why I was feeling so out-of-context: people give each other a lot more personal space ther than they do back East (or in Europe for that matter.) I suppose that in a place where there is so much physical space in your surroundings, well, people aren't used to being all crowded together.

I knew that "crowded" was a relative term, and in the Netherlands, one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, I learned strategies to deal with people being so crowded together that they would bump into each other all the time. This bumping-into was something I couldn't filter out for my ADD, so it exhausted me. On Saturdays at the Utrecht market, you can get caught in a sea of people that is comparable in Boston only to the crowd walking to the fireworks at First Night or on the Fourth of July, with the difference that then, you're swimming in a group with a common destination. At the market, everyone was trying to get off at their own stop along the way as it were, in the form of a flower or cheese stand, for example, or a bank. I think that it is a cultural crowd-coping mechanism in the Netherlands to just ignore other bodies as you travel from point A to B. I finally started holding my arms up to my sides, as a sort of shield, and when people walked into them somehow it got their attention and they'd apologize and give me an inch more of room. Plus, bumping into my arms is less tiring than bumping into my torso somehow.

Just as the Dutch are headed in different directions in their busy swarm at market, at the folk festival in Butte it seemed that people were just not accustomed to swarms of people at all. And so a far smaller number of people seemed to constitute a crowd and, in a narrow street, cause a pedestrian traffic jam.

But away from the crowd, I seemed to keep bumping into people. I wasn't picking up their cues at all; they needed me to wait longer (yeah right, wait?) for them to pass through the door or finish at the buffet before I came along. Go slower, take my time, and perhaps imagine giving them the amount of space they'd need if they were on horseback and not on foot.

Once I assimilated this fact (I didn't exactly get used to it on my short trip), I loved it out there. I miss the wide open already.

Doing in your head before doing in the world

I want to talk about an inattentive experience I'm having today. It's been a long while, luckily, since I've dealt with this one, but I must have just the right mix of fatigue, estrogen (big effect on the AD/HD), and piles of stuff to do. From working with my clients I think it's an experience a lot of predominantly inattentive type folks have, and maybe some non-ADD folks as well, but it's something with which people usually struggle without having it identified. It goes like this:

I have an errand or chore to do. I think of this task, then I start doing it--- in my head. I imagine all the details of it in sequence. It's the kind of visualization that you would think would be helpful if you were an athlete with a goal, and you actually intended to imagine it in mind-numbing detail.

Only you didn't mean to imagine it at all, and rather than being a tool of getting focused, it feels like something your mind is doing; it is going through a whole activity on its own, without your permission. It just goes there and does that. So I've gotten in the car, with all of my stuff (and in my case, the baby and his stuff). I've driven to 128 south, got off a few exits later and driven down another road to the running store. I've parked, got the baby out of his seat and into his stroller, walked over to the store, tried to explain to the salesperson that I want the cheaper running shoes, accepted the fact that this still puts me in the $90 range, tried them on, mulled and been uncertain, grumbled, purchased, and departed. Oh wait! I'm still at home thinking about doing this. Oh drat! now it seems tiring and boring, for I've gone through the mental motions already.

It's easier to deal with this mental rehearsal crap now that I:

• Know it happens
• Don't criticize myself for it
• Know that even though I've done it in my head, I don't necessarily have the energy/time to really do it today
• Let it go if I don't do it
• Watch the whole process just go by, like a river I'm sitting next to.
• See it as what my brain is up to, not what I'm choosing to do.
• Check in about my energy level and general state of being ~ why is my mind off in uncontrolled land today?
• Try to laugh it off

I have realized from my own experiences and talking with others that this is the kind of experience that people don't talk about that much as part of their inattentive experience. Yet it can be exhausting. And it can be confused with ruminating or obsessing. I see it more as my mind going off on an adventure without me... sound familiar to anyone?

Inattentive ADHD video on WebMD

Thanks to Pete Quily  and his blog for bringing my attention to this nice little video clip on WebMD about ADHD, which you can find here. This clip  starts out showing ADHD boys with hyperactivity, but then talks about, to paraphrase Tom Brown in the video, girls not getting diagnosed because they don't make enough trouble for other people, because they're not hyperactive. As is so common, it focuses only on children with ADHD, but it does so in the context of how we slip through the cracks, until later, or until, well, never, when we're predominantly inattentive.

Not discussed in the video but really important I think is how much impact it has when children and adults are suffering from unidentified ADHD for a long time. The video does touch on the important point that inattentive symptoms are invisible- and therefore disbelieved. All in all, an impressive job on the part of WebMD in a three-minute video. If you're really impatient, start at about 1:00 (one minute) to skip right to the inattentive point.

Focusing on Inattentive ADHD

Because I want to write about ADHD- predominantly inattentive type, I've been  thinking I ought to do a bit more reading on what others have said on the matter. I'm attracted to the subject because (1) I have ADHD, predominantly inattentive and (2) not that many people seem to talk about it. It seems like when I talk to clients about inattentive challenges, these massive blinking lights go off, because no one "got it" before. I hope I can blog about some of the stuff that I keep figuring out with clients over and over again, that we aren't finding elsewhere. But in the meantime, while it feels like there isn't much information out there, I realize I haven't exactly done an exhaustive literature review, so I'm starting my search. I'd like to ask my readers to share (in the comments) anything you've read about inattentive stuff that particularly struck you. I also wanted  to share this overview that I think is pretty terrific. I found it on CHADD's National Resource Center on AD/HD, and it is an information sheet called AD/HD Predominantly Inattentive Type and you can find it here.

I think it fairly addresses a number of the issues around diagnosis and definition of Inattentive Type. I particularly like fact that they cite a list of questions developed to help assess adults for inattentive symptoms:

1. Do you often make careless mistakes when you have to work on a boring and difficult project?

2. Do you often have difficulty keeping your attention when you are doing boring or repetitive work?

3. Do you often have difficulty concentrating on what people say to you, even when they are speaking to you directly?

4. Do you often have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project, once the challenging parts have been done?

5. Do you often have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?

6. When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, do you often avoid or delay getting started?

7. Do you often misplace or have difficulty finding things at home or at work?

8. Are you often distracted by activity or noise around you?

9. Do you often have problems remembering appointments or obligations?

Individuals who have significant chronic impairment from six or more of these symptoms are likely to have AD/HD if they also meet certain other criteria for diagnosis that are specified in the DSM-IV.

This list is useful if not exactly a complete reflection of the experience of inattentive symptoms. It also succeeds in  highlighting the fact that general ADHD assessments may not be sufficient for capturing adult and/or inattentive ADHD.

I'm also pretty impressed with the Wikipedia entry on the subject. What have you read that has helped you, struck a chord, or even made you mad- on this subject?

Writing and Working Spots

The other day I was talking to my sister about how I get work done, and how I used to get work done...  I suggest to clients that they think about how they got work done in college, because sometimes that really gives some clues about what the optimal spot is for them to work.

I used to go study spot-hopping. It was hard to focus on reading or intense studying for long periods, but I had a lot to do. So I'd find a spot with the right level of stuff going on and the right level of background noise, and work there for anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of hours. When either my focus burned off or the noise level changed too much, I'd get up and go to the next spot. I was lucky at UMASS that there were tons of options; study rooms at the library, places to get lunch, coffee shops on campus, in Amherst, and in Northampton. Moving from place to place gave me a little break and a little movement. Then I could buckle down again for a bit. The University of Amsterdam was a little harder, while I was doing my Master's, but I could alternate between the train, the dining hall, and the awesome little Philosophy Department library, which wasn't so quiet because everyone was working in small groups trying to understand Kant, which can't be done no matter how many translations you have, and because there was a lovely dog named Flor who hung out there.

The right level of background activity and noise: even toned conversations. Enough for it to sound like a lull in the background, but not like people competing for airspace. Occasionally something to eavesdrop on half-heartedly or half-ear-edly.

Goal: enough to occupy the whitespace in my brain, the inattention. The part that gets too busy thinking and speeds away from the task - and thought- at hand. Not so much that I can't absorb what's in front of me.

It often would change and become too much in one place at lunch time, and then another study lounge or what not would get quiet enough. Silent areas of the library were often too quiet The funny thing is that my sister did exactly the same thing. We both still do a version of that, using coffee shops, libraries, benches, in our "spare" child-free moments to work. How about you? What's your working sweet spot? Does a dog make the difference?

Groovera - more music to work by

Just found a new source of music to work by... internet radio station Groovera. They have three channels in the chilled-out realm, and I found it when I inexplicably couldn't connect to my old standby, Afternoon Nap. Right now I'm listening to Groovera's Jet City Lounge stream.  

Downtempo music isn't always right for me, but it has been for a few years. As I'm sure I've said before: it's about whatever magically optimal level and type of stimulation/background works for you. The key for me is to find the right mood, the right groove, while quieting the mind enough to focus in on what I'm doing.

What music works for you when you're working? Please share in the comments because I want more ideas!

Brain Dead

I've been trying to post. Really. I'm just enormously tired. I'm not uninspired; I've come up with things I want to post about (focus/work styles; oh wait there was a longer list that I've forgotten- see I'm tired and have no memory). I thought I'd read some of my favorite blogs and see what tickled my thoughts or just warmed my neurons. Of course this started by finding that over at finslippy, Alice is having a bit of writer's block,
and asking her readers for help getting re-started after trying times.

For those of you with ADHD, getting re-started with a habit routine is something you probably have to do all the time. I say habit  because habits and ADD brains don't go together so well. We don't just, say, write every morning at 8:30 for a few days and then discover that lo! we are automatically writing at 8:30 every day.

Instead, most days it remains a conscious activity, replete with a difficult process shifting focus away from whatever you were doing before (showering? reading e-mail?) and shifting it to the target activity. This includes remembering what you wanted to do, remembering when you wanted to do it, and remembering what time it is right now. So to you I say, do not expect your desired habit to become a habit. Ever. It might, but don't expect it to. Just keep plugging at doing it every day. Climb aboard the wagon every day. Hone your skills at starting anew with a routine. Let go of your sense that it should be easier...that it should be automatic... that you shouldn't have forgotten; this sense is what's eating all your energy to actually get down and do it.

If you're inattentive type ADHD, this sense can eat your energy, chew it up, create more energy as a by-product of digestion, use this energy to think about what you wanted to do in colorful detail, all the while forgetting to get up and do it, forgetting to eat breakfast, and making it feel hard and boring by the time you finally remember you're still thinking about it an hour later.

I want to sum this up in a nice package of: what my writing routine is. Or: tips to make routines easier. I'll work on that but meanwhile I'm going to get up and actually retrieve the hot beverage I've been meaning to drink before it is no longer hot.

Unempty Homes

Recently I started an email group for parents in my neighborhood. Did I already post about how the opportunities for socializing explode when you become a parent?
One thing that has taken me by surprise is how many people are working from home. It seems like practically every household has one member working from home at least some of the time. This must be an exaggeration (though some households have two work-at-home members). But it does mean a shift in perspective about a couple of things.

1. All those houses are NOT empty during the day
2. The 9-to-5 office job norm? Not so normal anymore.
3. Parents are figuring out how to do childcare, family life, and work/life balance differently, one parent at a time.

But reviewing #2, maybe it's been that way for a while. That's what the Bureau for Labor Statistics says in this report from 2004 :

"In May 2004, 20.7 million persons usually did some work at home as part of 
their primary job,the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department 
of Labor reported today.  These workers, who reported working at home 
at least once per week, accounted for about 15 percent of total 
nonagricultural employment in May 2004, essentially the same percentage 
as in May 2001."

This report is four years old now, but reports no significant change since 2001, i.e. that 15% of us work from home at least part of the week.  So that office job assumption? Out the window.

Getting through the workout

I went to my running workout yesterday. A few things I have to mention:

• Music helps get into the running (or whatever other exercise). I left my ipod in the car because it was raining. I know it makes me faster.
• Without music, it's easier to crap-talk myself. It's pretty easy to crap-talk myself, and I don't think it's just because I've just missed many workouts because of a cascade of viruses and baby ear infections and the like. I don't think it's because I feel sluggish from all the sickness, and "run" like it. I think it's easy to do.
• It's hard to keep the pep talk going. The best is when I let go and experience what I'm doing. (music helps that too).
• I know this isn't just me- or just ADHD. My track club buddies confirmed similar experiences.
• Pros of working out alone: I don't feel like I have to "catch up" to everyone else or go at a specific tempo
• Cons of working out alone: I have less motivation, pay more attention to too many details of what I'm doing and thinking, and it's LESS FUN.