AD- Ooh, Shiny!

I’m fairly certain I have ADHD – or, as a friend taught me to prefer calling it, ADOS (Attention Deficit – ooh, shiny!).

One of the things that most helps me to make sense of the rapid-fire thoughts in my brain is writing. Although I cannot string together five coherent thoughts in my brain, I can keep track of five coherent sentences (if only because I can reread what I’ve just written). Parentheses and dashes figure prominently, if only so I can interject – wait, I was supposed to put some crazy random idea there, but honestly the trees outside aren’t that random and attempts to write a stream of consciousness have generally been disastrous.

If there were a god of ADHD, it would surely be Mercury, the ever-changeable god of thieves, travel, and messages. And sometimes medicine. And pranks. And athletes. You get the idea. Mercury, the origin of the word for "mercurial", unpredictability, and the element once known as quicksilver...

Quicksilver-thoughts
Droplets rolling, roiling, pairing, parting
Never-still never-same – patterning poorly
Irregular, unexpected
Interjected
Accepted, rejected, undetected
Beautiful impossible shiny fishes slithering away
Flipping flippantly fluidly ungraspably
How does one order?
How can one make them line up straight and neat
Like iambs marching meekly in a row,
Not one undone, not one left incomplete
Each clearly placed just where it ought to go?
How does one trim the tangled skein of knots
To show a web of tidy tied-up thoughts?
And then the volta's early, out of place
Throwing off the rhythm and the rhyme
Uncertainty comes running on apace
Off-kiltering the slightly twisted line
The yarn unravels, raveled at the ends
Fibers fraying every which-a-way
The rhythm falters, breaking as it expends
Fails the ordering, all thought gone astray.
Empty
Gone
Ashes, dust, decay
Order drives quicksilver thought away.

That poem, by the way, makes more sense if you’re familiar with the sonnet form. (English teacher here; English class is, at least, good for helping you understand an English teacher’s metaphors!) The lines in between “How does one order?” and “Empty” are a warped sonnet. A classic sonnet is fourteen lines, each line in iambic pentameter (iamb: da-DUM beat; pentameter: five such beats) and following a fairly rigid rhyme scheme (multiple options here). The two most popular sonnet forms, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, both usually have a volta, or switch in tone, toward the end. The volta is usually after the eighth line or twelfth…

I miss the classroom.

This is why I’m a teacher, employed or not. I find this stuff so incredibly interesting, I can go on for ages.

And I adore sonnets. It’s doubtful I’ll ever consider myself a poet, but the organization of thought is wonderful.

And this whole post I’m typing in Word in my car on the way home, and I’ll probably edit it heavily before posting, but sometimes… sometimes it’s necessary to think out on paper. Even if thoughts come in ADHD-disorganized fashion. Squirrel!

Note: Didn't end up heavily edited at all. Although I did do a bit of fact checking; on what, I dare not reveal. ;)