A Little Background

I have ADHD. I was "diagnosed" by my pediatrician in the early 90s, and as the term was fresh and new, there was little push-back from anyone who could make a difference in my treatment, which was Ritalin. I did not notice any difference in my behavior or demeanor, but my mother will swear - to this day - that she and my teachers could.

I do not know how others think. For me, ADHD-thinking is a lot like being aware of all the plates I have spinning at all times, and only being able to focus on one of them when I am confident that, for however long the task may take, none of the other plates will fall. This means that I will often approach a new task with trepidation for fear of ruining one of the many tasks on my plate, and if I do decide to take up the new task, I will be compelled to ensure the well-being of the other tasks first.

This usually means that I do not take up new tasks, or I do take up a new task but drive myself crazy at the outset.

The Blog

I have "maintained" my personal blog for around two decades. Every time a piece of new technology comes along with some buzz, I usually want to try it out by rewriting my blog. This time is no different; however, I got to a pretty good spot functionality-wise last week and found myself not wanting to write. My mind is telling me "no, don't start writing or you'll have to keep writing" even though this is clearly my blog and I have no readers. My brain is worried that tomorrow or the next day or a week from now I will not have written something new, and so begins the downward spiral toward the plate that is "writing in my blog" crashing to the floor.

I actually have a lot of source material to write from that I think would be interesting to some. I have the motivation to write, but the inertia has been winning. So, I was working today on a simple Github-esque drag-n-drop feature wherein I could drop an image into the <TextArea /> component that I'm using to write the bodies of these blog posts, and it would upload the image and put the markdown to render it where the cursor is (the content of this blog is written in markdown - not a WYSIWYG editor or anything fancy). I finished it, pushed it up, and thought "you have to write something."

Writing is exercise. Like all exercise, inertia is usually the thing that keeps you from doing it. Anyone who has ever exercised regularly will tell you: once you have a routine and you do it a couple times, inertia of stopping the routine is on your side. It becomes hard to not go for that run today because it is Monday and you always run on Monday. Writing is the same - if you can just set aside 30 minutes on Monday to write, and actually sit down with purpose and write, then it becomes easier to write and harder to not.

I am going to keep this one short - just wanted to write.

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