I was familiar with the stereotype of ADD as the bane of elementary school teachers, and God knows there were ADD kids when I was I school. But I had never been a disciplinary problem for my teachers, and my grades had always been above average. I was laid back to the point of lethargy.
My therapist explained that I was that rare exception to the rule. I was one of the relatively few kids who experienced the attention deficit disorder component without the accompanying hyperactivity disorder component. Because I wasn’t bouncing off the walls like the true ADD/HDers, nobody suspected what was going on in my brain. My attention was scattered among competing stimuli much of the time, but I’d been gifted with enough innate reading ability and a sufficiently retentive memory (you do not want to sit next to me watching Jeopardy; I will always be right, and I will annoy the hell out of you) that I was able to make it through my classes without difficulty. And when I went on to college, the coursework in my liberal arts majors frankly wasn’t all that challenging.
Once I accepted that I was an ADDult, though, it was kind of a relief. Not only did it explain my tendency to flit among tasks without making much progress on any of them, it also explained some of my social awkwardness in groups. When I’m sitting next to you at a table in a banquet hall, the reason I might not seem fully involved in our conversation is that I’m trying to follow every conversation at the table . . . and also trying not to follow those. I can’t help myself.
The diagnosis helped, as did coaching and medication. The very first day I took the med I finally settled on (Strattera) and took my dog for a walk, I realized that I was walking down the sidewalk and looking at the scenery and listening to the birds and the traffic and not thinking about everything I had to do during the coming day. Wow!
But despite the capsules and the meditation that I’ve been practicing for going on three years now, it’s still not uncommon for me to find myself inexplicably all keyed up in the morning. On those days, I’m as likely as not to simultaneously embark on three or four tasks at the same time. Not a recipe for success.
What I needed was a daily mind dump. Rather than me explaining the concept, let’s have Buster Benson explain it:
I’ve long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist's Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day. Unlike many of the other exercises in that book, I found that this one actually worked and was really really useful.Buster (if that’s indeed his name . . . he claims to have previously gone by the monikers Buster McLeod and Erik Benson) created a Web site named 750words.com specifically for the use of himself and others in mind dumping. (The name comes from his estimate that three handwritten pages equal about 750 words.)
For the past 2+ months, I’ve maintained a blog on that Web site. Unlike other blogs I’ve created and then largely neglected (ufriendly.blogspot.com and 1stepatatime.tumblr.com), my 750 Words blog is unpublished. Nobody can access it unless they know my Gmail user name and password.
And unlike my private blogs, I don’t put a lot of effort into prettying up the text. I just start typing. If I notice I’ve made a typo, I fix it. Other than that, I don’t do any editing.
I just type, usually until I’m congratulated for completing my 750 words (which usually takes about 30 minutes unless I’m interrupted). I can type more if I choose, or less. I can even skip a day.
But once I’m done, with the entry, I’m done with the entry. I don’t even look at what I’ve written. I just leave the site and don’t return to it until the following day.
For the remainder of the day, I could theoretically go in and edit that day’s text (but I don’t). I can call up and look at my entries for previous days, but I can’t edit them.
Buster’s Web site provides some tools for me to analyze my entries. I can easily determine that my posting for June 14th:
- was 786 words long;
- that I began writing at 9:47a and averaged 25 words/minute over 31 minutes of essentially uninterrupted input;
- that I was feeling mostly upset, as compared to self-important, self-expressive, anxious, or affectionate;
- that I was mostly concerned with success (closely followed by death), as compared to religion, leisure, or eating/drinking;
- that I was writing about the past;
- that my primary sense was hearing; and
- that I was way more concerned about myself than anyone else.
If you use (or even test-drive) 750 Words, let me now what you think.
Submitted to the AIRS Newsletter 6/19/10 for my User-Friendly column
