Speedrunning life with a Rube Goldberg brain
Tue 15 July 2025
There's a scene in The King's Speech at the end where he's finally giving his big, inspiring speech, and while you hear is the speech, what you see is the scribbled crib notes and the incredible mental gymnastics he has to go through to get each word and phrase out coherently.
This is a lot like life with ADHD. On the outside, the "Neurospicy" person might appear calm and collected, but internally they are navigating a maze of mental complexity not unlike a Rube Goldberg Machine.
I had been meaning/promising to write an article about my ADHD journey for about a year now (ever since I was diagnosed), but it's been such a moving target, I couldn't get it to "sit still" long enough to write anything particularly helpful. My thoughts on the subject have gradually morphed through a progression somewhat like the Kübler-Ross model of grief:
- Denial: lol I don't have ADHD, I'm just scatterbrained and undisciplined!
- Anger: Oh holy crap, I could have had this fixed when I was a kid!!
- Bargaining: Ok, if I can only find the right meds and therapist now, I can still be normal!
- Depression: My brain is broken. The meds don't work. Nobody has a real answer for me. This freaking sucks.
- Acceptance: This is just the way my brain works. Sometimes it's a superpower. A lot of times, it's a burden. I have to learn to manage it, and somehow still get stuff done.
What I actually wanted to write about today was something I hinted at in yesterday's blost: my experience with "digital doodling." But I'm not actually talking about the doodling experience itself, as my extreme lack of experience in that realm doesn't make for much interesting blog-fodder. It's more my experience navigating the neurospicy brain-machine that I'm wanting to explain.
I got into doodling earlier this year because of a toot encouraging others to try doodling as a kind of protest against the flood of meaningless and soulless AI-generated slop that's been inundating the internet as of late.
So, wanting to get back into digital doodling (which I enjoyed doing a bit of in decades past), I bought myself a wacom tablet and started experimenting with software to doodle with. I loved the idea of doodling with vectors, rather than pixels, but I didn't really have the time to properly learn how to use Inkscape. After trying Krita and a couple other programs, I finally settled on Xournal++. While its graphics features were pretty limited, and it's mainly meant for notetaking, it is easy enough to use for basic doodling, and that's just what I did.
As I mentioned in yesterday's review, while the digitizer performed well, there were some aspects of attempting to sketch with a stand-alone digitizer that were a little sub-optimal (at least in my experience — I'm probably missing a lot of skills in that area, and a skilled illustrator reading this (or the previous post) would probably roll their eyes at it). So, what do I do? Decide that digital sketching is a bit more trouble than it's worth and just go buy a dot-lined notepad and bust out my wonderful collection of fountain pens?!?
Of course not!
"In for a penny, in for the GDP of a small Caribbean island," screams the ADHD brain. So, I go and buy a laptop that I honestly didn't need and just dug the hole deeper and deeper.
After awkwardly flipping my Yoga tablet around and struggling with the too-small-for-comfort pen and the general clumsiness of the device and software stack for several days, I had to stop and admit that it wasn't really working for me.
So, I guess I'm going to order myself a Rhodia notebook and start doodling on pencil again (pencil, ya know, 'cause mistakes. ;)
100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 37
Category: Life Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Hobbies Humor Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Productivity
Lars looking on wistfully while ingesting his sister-in-law's retort to his rant 