blocking

[jazzfish]

Blocked:

"For a long time, I considered myself ADD and dreamed of a pill that could make it alright. But the longer I write, the more I think my problems have less to do with ADD, and more to do with my desire to avoid pain.

It's painful to write. It's painful to take a clear look at your finances, at your health, at your relationships. At least it's painful when you have no confidence that you can actually improve in those areas. I would not speak for anyone else, but most of my distractions (and I said this at SXSW) are traceable to a deep-seated fear that I may not ultimately prevail.

I was diagnosed ADD in elementary school, and put on Ritalin for a few years. At this point I'm willing to believe that it wasn't that I couldn't concentrate, it's that I didn't want to. There wasn't any point to it. The reward for doing the work was either more work, or getting to go play-- and it was easy enough to just go play without doing the work, especially once "playing" and "reading" became interchangeable.

(None of this is intended as a slight to anyone else who may have been diagnosed ADD. It's a Real Problem for a lot of people. I'm only looking at whether it was the problem in my specific case.)

These days? There's something going on there, something that makes focusing incredibly difficult without an external deadline, and trivial when the deadline's imminent.

(Self-imposed deadlines have less force. I hate that.)

And I'm tired of how much effort it takes to start writing. I'm tired of sitting down intending to get the next scene done, and having this bit in my brain that doesn't even bother talking to the rest of me about what's going on and instead just holes up with a mindless computer game for an hour or two.

I don't know myself well enough to say whether I'm afraid of writing. It's got an awful lot of baggage associated with it; maybe I'm afraid that may parents were right (and if they were right on that then what else might they have been right on? TERROR).

I don't know what to do about any of this, other than to name it.

---

No deadline this time, just a reward: when I finish the (current draft of the) space story, and ship it off to VP, I can write a (fun! or at least exciting) letter that I've been contemplating for the last couple of days.

That ought to be enough incentive. I hope.

Comments

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

I read that people with ADHD actually experience time more slowly than the rest of us, and therefore they get bored easily. I feel like I have the opposite problem.

[jazzfish]

... huh. That's kind of a neat concept. I dunno. I mean, how could you even tell?

And... at least you're rarely bored? :)

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

I think the researcher asked a bunch of people to tell her when they thought five minutes had elapsed. Something like that.