The lighter side of ADHD
ADHD person here. Been making an effort lately to use less parenthesis. A thing I quickly found is that many of them can be replaced with a comma just fine. Or, just like, taking the extra two seconds to turn one run-on sentence into two. (But then again turning my comments into puzzles is fun).
That's when someone just quotes one sentence out of context and I am heartbroken.
Discovered the same thing about a year ago, it works amazingly well !
You'll love German speakers then. In my experience they love bonus content thoughs as well as math equations in their thoughts like "=" for reframing a thought or "=>" for concluding a thought.
Not a German but I'm dutch so close I guess, and I pretty regularly use =/= and == in text. I picked up == from IT class, not sure about =/=
Hot damn (I'm so [so] "guilty" of this); seriously – it's no even (or odd) funny!
Parawhat?
me and all my beautiful footnotes
I feel this so hard
Since one email with {[()]} in it,I really force myself to cut back on that... Now it takes me three times as long to type a bloody answer to anything ...
I send my work emails to my boss to proof read cause I can’t be trusted to be succinct and relevant (not that they force me to, I just overthink).
…i apologise for the long letter; i didn’t have time to write a shorter one…
I’m going to start using that!
Me too, next year.
Lol, I did that too!
But people bitched abut it & about me being weird so now I just ((())) if it's really needed (or if my brainhole just can't/refuses to rephrase the text ... or I ran out of fucks).
I started using double dashes -- like these right here -- because then it feels more like an intentional pause with some neat stylistic touch.
Mostly, I just write like I talk.
That's basically just em dashes, which these days will get you accused of being an LLM.
Only if you use a — instead of --, if they know what they’re talking about anyway.
My phone autocorrects them to — so that’s fun, lol.
That's the point where I go back and edit the first parenthesized block to be separated by a comma, semicolon, or dash, make it a separate sentence, or convert the inner parenthesis to a footnote.
Oh
Primary thought (secondary supporting thought [tertiary supporting thought {fucking quaternary supporting thought, we have long since forgotten the primary thought}])
DAE start their parenthetical thought and end up writing full and multiple sentences inside it before returning to the original point?
I try to catch myself and just make a new paragraph when that happens but I'm not always successful.
Guilty, but now I'm considering switching to footnotes¹. They let you express a related thought without disrupting the flow².
¹I blame House of Leaves. Lotta footnotes in there, and they can go a long way before they really get out of hand.
² Sure there are cons, like the fact that the reader has to go to the bottom for context, but there's also no real length limit.
yes, but as far as I'm aware I don't necessarily have ADHD? I do have autism, and there's the suspicion I have ADHD, but I don't have a paradoxical reaction to caffeine and also I've not been tested so who the fuck knows anything. My psychiatrist certainly doesn't think testing is necessary.
Primary thought; secondary (interjectory thought [aside]) thought, supporting thought that wouldn’t work as an independent sentence, digression: the actual point.
Don't forget [Option A | Option B].
I feel like a semicolon or colon would be better here than parentheses
I find that semicolon connotes "Concept B follows from, but is distinct from, Concept A", while parens connote "Concept B follows from, and is intertwined with, Concept A".
Because all thoughts are intertwined.
I find parenthesis are best when concept B is worth noting, but tangential to concept A, especially when the next few points are going to be back on the same track that A was on.
Why not all of the above?
Parentheses are the push() and pop() of my thought stack.
lda
Learning push/pop in the context of a stack provided me with a lifelong justification for being what others call "flighty". This is super evident while doing chores and I jump from washing dishes to wiping counters to washing floors to putting laundry in the washer. To someone at that point it looks like I've started a bunch of things that I didn't finish.
In fact, I paused on the dishes so I could clear a spot on the counter for them, realized I swept a bunch of crumbs on the floor that I needed to clean up, but before I could finish the floor I had to do something with that dirty pile of laundry that was in the way. Keep watching and you'd see me "pop" each of those tasks back off the stack in turn, eventually getting back to the dishes where I started.
Is it fair to say people with ADHD add thoughts onto a stack while the rest of the population adds thoughts to a queue?
The thoughts are added to the ether and the ones that happen to make contact with the previous node become the next link.
I suspect it's non-ADHD is linear, while ADHD is multi-dimensional mesh.
More like the thoughts are added automatically to the stack with little to no control.
You pop one off the stack but in doing so it opens up and a dozen springy toy snake thoughts burst out.
Yeah. So you pop one off the stack, but in processing that item, you push 10 more things on the stack. And the same happens when you pop one of those 10 items off the stack.
Stacks on stacks on stacks
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Wait, that's an ADHD thing?
—me, every time I read a post in this community
It isn't unique to ADHD, but it is very common with ADHD. Pretty much everything that defines ADHD is something everyone does but dialed up to the point that it is a disorder.