An exercise in fun and frustration! :D
So as usual, this started out as a Tangency thread. (I was actually going to ramble about voices in fanfiction, particularly Arthur and Eames, of course, but I'm still half-asleep and need to ponder that some more so maybe I'll get around to it later. Or maybe no.) The question was, "How do you think?" And my answer was pretty close to what it's like. Still, I don't know that text can capture the sheer...chaos of it, at least sometimes.
It's kind of a double-edged sword thing of taking ADHD medicine. On the one hand, I can concentrate enough on one thread of thought to follow it to its conclusion without getting distracted overmuch by irrelevant things. On the other hand, sometimes it wears me out trying to handle thinking about everything without the distraction of being...well, distractable. In the mornings, I can't lie in bed daydreaming because my mind is going, "Oh, I need to do that, and that, and oh, that's probably going on and I'll be mad if I miss it..."
It's like this analogy: There's my HP desktop purchased in '06, with 2gb memory and some kind of fairly decent processor, and my HP Pavilion laptop (bought in '08) with 4gb memory and an AMD dual core processor. The desktop is me sans medicine; I can go about a task or two if it interests me enough, but if I want to do something else, I have to close the previous application/line of thought completely. Luckily, I can usually save about where I left off and come back to it, but it's a very inefficient way of doing things. Plus it whines all the time.
The laptop is me plus meds, capable of doing a lot of tasks at once and following through with them. But since I can do different things at once, I tend to go overboard. It usually ends with me freezing up because I've overloaded on processes/thoughts, and having a quiet mental crash somewhere in a corner. Or learning to cut back a bit on doing things simultaneously. (Self, you cannot read Inception fanfic while watching the movie while roleplaying a Pirates of the Caribbean AU and playing Harvest Moon. You get confused.)
I got sleepy while writing this...
It's kind of a double-edged sword thing of taking ADHD medicine. On the one hand, I can concentrate enough on one thread of thought to follow it to its conclusion without getting distracted overmuch by irrelevant things. On the other hand, sometimes it wears me out trying to handle thinking about everything without the distraction of being...well, distractable. In the mornings, I can't lie in bed daydreaming because my mind is going, "Oh, I need to do that, and that, and oh, that's probably going on and I'll be mad if I miss it..."
It's like this analogy: There's my HP desktop purchased in '06, with 2gb memory and some kind of fairly decent processor, and my HP Pavilion laptop (bought in '08) with 4gb memory and an AMD dual core processor. The desktop is me sans medicine; I can go about a task or two if it interests me enough, but if I want to do something else, I have to close the previous application/line of thought completely. Luckily, I can usually save about where I left off and come back to it, but it's a very inefficient way of doing things. Plus it whines all the time.
The laptop is me plus meds, capable of doing a lot of tasks at once and following through with them. But since I can do different things at once, I tend to go overboard. It usually ends with me freezing up because I've overloaded on processes/thoughts, and having a quiet mental crash somewhere in a corner. Or learning to cut back a bit on doing things simultaneously. (Self, you cannot read Inception fanfic while watching the movie while roleplaying a Pirates of the Caribbean AU and playing Harvest Moon. You get confused.)
I got sleepy while writing this...