i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this

 

i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it

 

i am the cause of most of my own problems

 

furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed

 

birdsona: ?????

 

🌎 Ontario, Canada


webbed site
egrets.ca/

dcoles
@dcoles

When people talk about ADHD, it's typically about how it makes it difficult to maintain focus (or the flip-side, the tendency to hyperfocus on something).

For me, another notable aspect of ADHD is non-linear thought. Much like my tendency to jump between activities, my thoughts tend to also jump backwards and forwards and all over the place. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it tends to lead to some particularly creative insights and connections; but it also can make certain activities, in particular writing, Hell.

As an example, I really struggle with "stream of conscious" writing. My stream of conscious is more like a turbulent storm. So instead of starting at the top of the page and working downwards, I tend to write my documents from the inside out—inserting individual sentences into logical place as they arrive. As a consequence, documents tend to "evolve" over time and it's difficult to predict when they will be "done" (it also partially sucks for writing fluffy filler-text).

I've also noticed that it causes some odd grammatical quirks:

  • Word superposition: inability to decide which word is better/clearer
  • Nesting: a series of nested (typically using parenthesis (or sometimes brackets)) thoughts
  • Misordering: words grammatically end up in grammatically incorrect order
  • Punctuation soup: commas; semi-colons; brackets; em-dash—they're all good
  • Superfluous grammar: when a sentence has got some unnecessarily grammatical structures

Thankfully these can all be caught during proofreading. It just takes a bit longer.

Edit: It's fascinating how the difficulty shifts throughout the day. My focus is generally better in the evenings, which also tends to be when my writing is most fluid.


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

i do all of these grammatical quirks, but especially misordering and especially especially nesting

i work mainly with code and computers have been the main way i make things for literally my entire life so i always describe this like, thinking in a stack

new thought/clarification/detail interrupts the flow of my train of thought while im writing so i push it to the top of the stack and write it in parentheses. another thought or clarification comes up while im writing that so it gets pushed on top in another set of parentheses, then when it's done, it's popped off the top, inner parentheses closed, and back down to the original parentheses until that thought is done, popped off the stack, and closed, then back to the original thought

i have to actively try not to do this because it's very apparent that this is not how normal people think, and all this inline context switching is just confusing to them


 
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