So far I’m not living up to the “daily” part of this rabbit hole series. It occurs to me that maybe this series would be better suited to my other blog, Overthought Pop. But then I would probably have to pick some sort of pop culture thing to analyze in the context of my thoughts. Well, I can figure that out later if I want to.

For now, I figure the most important thing to do is just to put pen to paper and cursor to screen and all that. So, here I am. It’s all about overcoming inertia, anyway. So, I’m going to “just do it.”

One thing that strikes me about this “just do it” concept is that I remember a writing assignment from my very first writer’s group last semester that included the instructions to just keep writing and resist the temptation to edit on the fly. That was quite an eye-opening exercise for me, since, until I tried it, I hadn’t realized that I have a habit of/tendency towards editing on the fly as I write. I suppose I’ve done this for a very long time, as I remember writing in my journal for years as a kid, teen, and young adult, and as I reflect, I tend to edit in order to clarify what I’m trying to say.

I’m not sure if this tendency to edit on the fly might also be, for me, a way to cope with my neurodivergent brain (thanks, ADHD!). What I mean is, I always experience what sometimes feels like an infinite number of thoughts at once in a rapid-fire succession inside my brain. It’s like that film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. (In college, way before I knew about ADHD even, I once coined the term Everything, All the Time, Right Now to describe what I observed my brain doing. So when that movie came out, I was all about it!!!)

So what I’m saying is, even though I also process information fast, I have trouble with executive functioning and working memory, so that makes me impatient to “get it all out” before I forget, which can also cause a bit of anxiety. (Yay!) Now if you think about writing and speaking, both of these processes take time to execute. Even if you write or speak as fast as you can, it still takes a lot more time to record or voice a thought than it does for that thought to rapid-fire into existence in your brain before it disappears (usually because it’s bombarded or usurped by a thousand others. Yikes!). It’s very hard to describe how things are inside the ADHD brain. I’d like to find some examples written by other people who are better practiced and informed in doing than I am to help me better express my experience.

But I digress. The idea is that editing on the fly while writing seems to really help me to ensure that I am capturing everything I want to say or express. Because another tendency I have, which may also be related to ADHD/neurodivergence, is to “short-hand” a lot of things, because again, I’m very impatient to get the ideas out and move on – whether I realize it or not at the time! As a result, I don’t always give all of the supporting details of what I’m trying to write or even say, and often have to back track to get it right. I guess it’s great that I ended up being a History major at UCLA because that was one of the best kinds of training I could do for my brain and intellect. It was very challenging but it forced me to slow down, really think through my hypotheses and conclusions, and support them with evidence and citations, etc.

Perhaps that’s why I was always drawn to Science, because of the methodical nature of it and proving your hypotheses and drawing conclusions based on rigorously-conducted experiments. But I guess it was too focused for me on the natural world and well, the science of it all, so I didn’t ultimately stay with my entering major of Pre-Biology and ended up switching to History and getting a B.A. in that, instead. History allowed me to look at EVERYTHING in a scientific manner, so that’s why I ultimately chose it. Fun!

But I digress again. The final point I wanted to make about editing on the fly for now is that I appreciated the exercise given by my writer’s workshop instructor because it was about getting into a flow, away from your inner critic and other distractions that can prevent you from expressing everything you really want to say. Seems a bit ironic since I was just saying that I feel like editing on the fly helps me express everything I want to say and so it doesn’t feel like a distraction.

Even still, I can see the benefits of “just writing though” sometimes as a first draft, then coming back and editing. It’s just that, with my specific ADHD Brain Mix^(TM), I fear that by the time I get to the end of the passage of stream-of-consciousness words I throw out, I will have forgotten some vital stuff that should have been inserted back at the beginning by the time I get back to it. Perhaps I should trust myself more, because if it’s really *that* important, it will surely come back to me. Like the proverbial “if you love something, let it go free” or whatever.

Ok that’s enough of a rabbit hole for today even though I didn’t go very deep on anything in particular. If you think about ADHD, you have the hyperfocus part which enables you to go deeeeep into a rabbit hole and then take twists and turns into related rabbit holes (like in a wild-ass interconnected warren!)