I live in two worlds.
One is the material and physical world in which I exist as the real person behind ADD-Libbing, with all of my quirks and qualities and expertly covered grey hairs.
The other is the life I sometimes (OK, often to always) live in my head. This is the life in which I created a pretty sweet mindset that includes all of the awesome things I'm going to do and try and enjoy.
Now, both of these things are fine. Except for one thing: the ADD mind is like that Fourth of July carnival that comes to your town (or one near yours...or if you're outside of the U.S., a festival for another occasion) filled with sno-cones and ferris wheels and dunk tanks and junky prizes that seemed important at the time that they're won.
There's one difference, though. The carnival in the mind never ends. And so, as I've often thought, we ADDers need to separate the not-so-great-for-us parts of the carnival (like eating six candy apples a day) from the better parts of the carnival (like the scholarship fund's raffle that helps deserving kids go to college).
Lately, I've been guilty of the metaphoric candy apple indulging. After a busy 2009 doing a lot of enjoyable things and having the requisite challenges and such, I've now realized that I've been cruising way too easily through 2010. I've been traveling a bunch for the employer, which has been a good thing, but sometimes the hubbub that goes along with being on work travel masks the fact that I've not been attending to my own goals and interests.
As I mentioned in the subject line for this post, you can't call yourself a runner unless you write. Which, duh, is obvious. But in that little world that I've created in my mind, I'm totally a writer. I'm also totally a dozen other things, too, like a cook and an athlete and such. But microwaving is cooking as much as paying for a gym membership without going makes me an athlete.
I've repeatedly reminded myself in the last couple of months that I needed to blog. Yes, needed. There are a lot of things I've figured out for myself as I've typed them here. Many of these can be read on this blog, but others have not made it onto the blog for public viewing. (Yeah, heavy...I know!)
What brought me here today is that I got a comment on a post from a reader that began with, "I really LOVE your blog!" I blushed a little, admittedly, and thought about how my experience with ADD helps others with ADD, just like other blogs and similar resources helped me when I was first diagnosed. And those things still do help me, too.
But what I often forget is that when I don't blog or don't comment on stuff or don't do the things that I really want to do and instead reach for the remote or click around Facebook or eat convenient frozen meals or say that I'll go to the gym tomorrow or not work on that really great idea for a novel that I have is that I'm missing out on the good stuff. To get back to my carnival analogy for a minute, candy apples are good things in small doses. But they never compose an entire meal, nor should they.
(If you don't value your teeth, then perhaps this analogy makes little sense. But, I'm guessing that teeth are important to you. So, good, we're on the same page.)
Honestly, this post didn't necessarily go where I thought it would when I first started writing it. But, I'm glad that it went where it did. As Newton's first law of motion states, "Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it." And if there was anyone's butt that needed a figurative kick impressed on it, it's been mine.
So yes, I'm getting myself back in the game here. It's great to be back. Part of me wants to go back through this and edit it to pieces and navel gaze about what I've written and save it as a draft. But nope, it's going up for all to read, warts and all!
Thanks for reading this, folks. And if you stop by, please comment and say hello. Because knowing that we're all in this together is something that we always want to remember.
