The problem with ADHD and stream of consciousness writing is that I don’t really have a stream of consciousness. What I do have is more akin to the Daytona 500 – when all is going well I have a large number of different thoughts zooming through my head at high speed. Inevitably, however, one of those thoughts careens out of control and it’s all chaos from there. Which is to say I had an entire page of something else entirely written but lost my ability to keep it even vaguely coherent and threw it out (or in this case, deleted it). Oddly similar to my drawing process, come to think of it. Well, if you call it that – I don’t think I’ve gotten more than 3 lines on a page without getting annoyed with it and throwing it out in 25 years or so.
The side problem to that is I don’t really know another way to write anything. Yes, I’ve been through enough writing courses to know how I’m SUPPOSED to do it, but making an outline means you need to have at least a basic idea of the beginning, middle, and end to outline. If I’m lucky, I have ONE of those. Usually the end. Sometimes I can extrapolate the beginning from that for an outline, but I don’t write fiction precisely because I have no clue what goes on in the middle. So instead I stream of consciousness – aka I let my fingers run over a keyboard with no apparent destination and hope they get to something vaguely resembling an endpoint along a relatively coherent path.
Today is not one of those days. Perhaps it’s the beginning of the Arizona heat starting to melt my brain. Perhaps it’s sleep deprivation, or oxygen deprivation from the hell that is the air quality right now (which is not assisted by the very blooming tree in my front yard that I just happen to be allergic to). Most likely it’s just ADHD rearing its head and refusing to be cooperative because I’m not trying to write about D&D today.
Ah, work. Really, there’s an oddball limbo of stress for that right now that may be the exasperating problem in and of itself. Currently, I’m a temp, somewhere I’ll not post here (and you won’t find it on my Facebook, I’ve gotten out of the habit of keeping my current job on my Facebook page). I like the job, more than I’ve liked most jobs I’ve had, but I need more to do. I’m bored. My bosses know this. I may pay for them having that knowledge.
That said, a number of permanent positions adjacent to my current job are about to be opened, and should I get one that should solve my boredom issue, as it overlaps with my current job while giving me new things to learn and some more constant things to handle. And that is a special kind of stress – don’t get me wrong, the permanent positions are NOT replacements for my job – if my coworkers or I get one of them, new temps will replace us. But I find this temp job thing to be extraordinarily stressful.
It’s not helped that the last time I had a temp job I started it before a market crash in 2008 – and the company I was temping at froze hiring. So I was left with a boss that wanted to make me permanent, a job I didn’t hate that kept my interactions with other human beings extremely limited, and nowhere to go with it. Admittedly, that worked out in the end, as the lack of anywhere to go with it or a guaranteed follow up is what led to the decision to move to Arizona, so it could have been much worse. But I don’t want to move cross-country again. I like it here in Phoenix, and I’ve bought a house, gorram it. So fingers crossed this one turns into something.
Well, I’ve rather lost the threads I had going again, but I’m not starting from Square One twice on this, so I’ll leave you with that bit of rambling as I wander away to likely make another D&D character, because that’s what I do.