Get out of my head?
But there's so much going on in there!
When you are autistic with ADHD, there is always a lot going on inside your head. My inner world is very big and very busy and hard to share. But I have never been lonely. Or bored.
The French thinker, Blaise Pascal, declared that of “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” There was also an experiment that showed many people would voluntarily give themselves electric shocks to break up the boredom of spending time alone in quiet room with nothing to do for as little as fifteen minutes. I find that hard to believe, but if it is true, then it is very disturbing.
I can easily kill time studying ceiling tiles: whether the dots align in a rectilinear pattern or hexagonal. Hexagonal is fun because my brain joins the dots with imaginary lines to make Buckminster Fuller-inspired shapes. If rectilinear, then I might count the number of dots in one tile and then extrapolate to the whole ceiling. Wallpaper, where it still exists, is fun too: noting the repeating patterns and spotting where joins were done well or badly. Floor tiles. Bricks. Electrical outlets. Anything not installed plumb, square or level. There’s always something to look at.
I once drove from Boston to Denver in a car with no radio or cassette player. I did not bring a portable either. This was not deliberate, just bad planning. Interstate 90 to I-84 through Connecticut to I-80 in Pennsylvania all the way to Nebraska to pick up I-76 for the last stretch into Denver. I imagined my car with a tracking beacon and watching its progress across the country from up in space. I read roadsigns and enjoyed tacky billboards. I made cribbage scores from my odometer. I observed the mix of license plates change around me. I admired crops in farm country. I challenged my bladder to skip the upcoming rest area and make it to the next one. I arrived in Denver surprisingly un-tired; perhaps even a little refreshed. On later road trips in a car that DID have a radio-cassette player, I had it turned off most of the time.
About ten years ago I was working with a career coach who often got exasperated with me and told me I needed to get out of my head. Perhaps she was right.
But how the hell do you do that?
About the Creator
Content Misfit
Big universe in my head just trying to get out. Compulsive writer. Late-diagnosed autistic doing well on zoloft. Square peg often lost in landscape of round holes.
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