What a nightmare things have been. Dalton has been sick again and missing school, and our lovely, brilliant, U.S. government is still shut down. This has been brutal, as parenting often can be. The government shutdown on the other hand is just idiotic and absurd. Sigh…
And I have been so discombobulated and out of whack lately. What is going on, am I depressed? Is it overwhelm; what gives? It has been a tough couple of weeks I guess; I need to regroup.
And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these ideas I have been having, some of it related to my memoir/”bugwump” project, and then it has also sort of morphed into this other set of ideas which are rather more suited for a SciFi novel. It has gotten a bit mixed up in my head, yet it all kind of relates. I really think though that I’ve definitely been cooking up a novel, in addition to my “bugwump” thing.
And I have a question which relates to a lot of different areas: I often struggle with having more than one project going at a time. And I have this sense of conflict over the idea that I should only do one thing at a time and need to discipline myself in that way, and my ADD (or whatever it is that makes these things difficult) makes it hard for me to decide what to make the priority/choose which to do first. I get very torn and it results in my not doing anything. This is a problem, it is not happy.
But what if I knew nothing about this “philosophy” of doing only one thing at a time; might that then remove the conflict and difficulty and allow me to, in fact, manage doing multiple things without any difficulty or negative consequences? After all, I have no such conflict or trouble reading multiple books at the same time. Or would it sabotage my chance of success at completing things if I let myself consider more than one project at a time if – I don’t have that conflict over not doing what I “should?” And that seems to be the main problem sometimes; is it ADD? Conflict over feeling compelled to do things “the right way” rather than what seems to come more naturally?
This conflict causes immobility and confusion and that brings failure, dysfunction and major frustration. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? We are raised to feel that we must conform in order to get along. But some of us have trouble with that. And thus there are those of us who have been labeled and grouped together and told that we are a certain way (ADD) and that is not the way that (most of) the world works. But I thoroughly believe that being forced to conform against one’s own nature and not being totally successful – or totally willing – is what causes this syndrome of dysfunction, and NOT a “symptom” of the “condition” itself. And after all, some “ADD” people do quite well. They have succeeded in being who they are without that conflict to drag them down. Makes sense to me.
“They” say that human beings are not really capable of doing more than one thing at a time and that it is unproductive to “multitask.” But I am not sure I agree, because it depends on what one is doing (as every MOM knows quite well.) And women must frequently multitask; they say women are better at it than men. But that is not exactly what I am talking about here anyway. I am talking about working on a book/manuscript – or a piece of artwork – and also working on another project. But obviously this does not mean working on more than one thing at the same time, it is simply a matter of doing something from start to finish before starting another project and that is what I have trouble with.
But would I still, if I got rid of the limiting factor of not telling myself that I must do it differently? I feel like this hinders me. Because otherwise I might be actually writing something instead of merely thinking about writing. Something to perhaps consider further at another time.