Obsessions

I have never realized how typical AD/HD I was until just recently. A person posted about her peculiarity of getting obsessed with activities, spending lots of money on it, and then giving it up. She asked whether it was just her, or it was something normal among AD/HD people. Many, including myself, responded that they have the same peculiarity. However, I noticed that my obsessions are slightly different from those who responded. I do get obsessed with ideas and activities, but I spend a lot of time rather than money on them.

Looking back at my childhood and adolescence, most of my obsessions have rarely been material. Thanks to my parents who taught me how to question desires of buying something. Yet, I have always been obsessed with information and knowledge for as long as I can remember myself. The only thing that changed was the subject and the area of that knowledge. I read anything that contained knowledge for as long as I could comprehend it (SI tables were among the shortest reads in my life). There was not a single encyclopedia, a dictionary, or a reference book that was in our home that remained untouched by the time I reached about 10 years. The primary victims were books that explained how things worked, described how places and frontiers (including the cosmos) were explored, and general history (though I never got into any particular subject of history). The only fiction books I read in childhood on my own (i.e. not assigned in school) were from Alfred Szklarski's series about Tomek Wilmowski, which still fell under the category of exploration because while the characters were fictional, their travels and footnotes to the books were extremely historically and scientifically accurate.

Encyclopedias allowed me to harvest them for wisdom in no particular order. I could open a random page, look for a particular topic, or even scan indices until something caught my eye. There were times when I read just the footnotes of Szklarski's books getting way ahead of the story. As a result, I got spoiled for life. I now cannot read a textbook because explanations are much longer than reference articles I am used to. I get bored with fiction because development of characters takes away from action. At the same time, there is Wikipedia to save me. I accidentally found out that most of the topics in social sciences and some other subjects are covered very well there. Even though professors advise against it because of doubts of quality, I am no fool and cross-check articles during lectures. In addition, Wikipedia satisfies my thirst for knowledge because it contains significantly more factual information than textbooks and hyperlinks allow for instant explanations of unknown terms.

However, there is one passionate obsession of mine that I carried over the years and that still haunts me. It is nothing but writing. There is no better example of how I enthusiastically start things just to give them up later. I clearly remember one "project" that I undertook, but never got back to it even though the notebook has always been nearby waiting to be continued. There might have been other things I tried to write, but I do not recall anything major except for that one. However, I remember how much pain it was to write a composition about "my sports" or "my past time" because there was not much besides reading, but I always had a lot to write when it came to "my travels" or "people I admire" making my teachers wonder how I could remember so many details or how I knew about some historical figure.

I realized that writing was one of my things only after I had started blogging. At first, I thought that a blog would be a convenient way to tell all my old friends (who now live all over the world) about my life. I later realized that since other people read my blog, I could use it as a soapbox and spread the "evil seed" of my brain onto the masses. The format proved to be comfortable for my brain full of racing thoughts. Each entry has its own topic and neighboring entries do not need to be even closely related. My erratic mind, which has so much to tell the world, cannot find a better way to express itself. Unfortunately, nothing protects me from posting things I regret later on or leaving unfinished drafts. In fact, this blog is not even a month old and I already have two unfinished entries, which I intend to publish eventually. Yet, it is not as bad as my laptop's hard drive, which houses a couple dozen drafts of letters, articles, plans, papers, and other forms of writing that had never made it to the intended audience. Time spent composing them is probably close to at least a week. Of course, it is nothing comparing to some other lost investments, but it makes me sad that so many great ideas will never see the world because I could not stay focused at the time when they were relevant. May be one day, when I become rich and famous, I will publish "the unpublished works". Until then, they will be wherever I take my laptop.

P.S. I wrote this entry in two attempts each lasting about 90 minutes over a course of over six hours.