How my ADHD works.
THE SHINY
I see a shiny. I can't ignore the shiny. I follow it into the depths until nothing else exists but the shiny. I can learn and know everything about the shiny.
Suddenly there's a new shiny. I can't ignore the new shiny. I follow it into the depths until nothing else exists but the new shiny. I can learn and know everything about the new shiny. But now I can't remember anything about the before shiny. There is only the now shiny.
But then. . .
The before shiny reappears and it becomes my now shiny again. There's so much of the old now shiny that I suddenly remember but I've lost all that I knew about the last shiny. The last shiny has ceased to exist. There is only the now shiny.
And this, my friends, is the intersection of object importance and hyper fixation. It applies to people, places, things, and knowledge. When it's in front of me it can become everything and erase everything else or it can be overshadowed by current shiny and go completely unobserved.
There is also this
THE TUNERLESS ANTENNA
I have one of the most powerful antennas ever gifted to a mind. But I also am stuck with with a 1970s off brand RadioShack tuner from a toy electrician set. To say that it's imprecise and unreliable is to say water is wet. But is it though? Is water wet? Or does it only feel wet? Hmmm. . . See there's static on the line, crossover from one of the other channels. Like any antenna, mine is receiving all the channels, all the time, all at once. But my tuner isn't precise enough to focus on on only one and so there's the mostly clear channel, and crossover from the channel to either side of it. Things get staticky. There's cross chatter. I get lost because I can't focus on just one.
And then there's
THE SPINNING WHEEL OF INDECISION
The brain is a computer and just like a computer it can get stuck in a logic loop or crash when the processes exceed the processors limit. When that happens you see the computer's spinning wheel of indecision pop up. On Mac it's a rainbow. On windows it's rotating sunburst or blue line chasing itself depending on how old your operating system is. With me you get nothing. No indication that my processor is looping, locked, or crashed. All you get is nothing.
When it finally breaks free you notice a burst of frenzied activity as the brain quickly pushes everything through to catch up. It looks a lot like procrastination, but really, my processor is just incapable of processing all of the demands.