How I Plan a Blog Post (or How my Attention Deficit Disorder Rules Everything)

Today gets really heavy folks. I apologize up front, but there is a point to the story. And thank you for taking the time today to read it. You really didn't have to put in the effort, but I'm thankful you did. Maybe it will help you today. Maybe it will help you with a friend or stranger you encounter. Maybe it will distract you from whatever is bothering you. In any event, remember you can get through anything. 💗

Planning a Blog Post? For starters, I don't. 

That is truly the simple answer. I simply don't plan my writing. I just type. If you've come here following a "Friends Only" Facebook link I posted, then you know me in real life and already know how I operate. You know I'm the off the cuff kind of person who flies pretty much by the seat of my pants. I take the world as it comes and react. That's not to say I don't plan my life reactions ahead of time though! ADD is my superpower and my curse.

Attention Deficit Disorder, my Superpower

A few years ago, I was out at Mama Deb's farm helping her husband try to separate some yearling fillies from their mothers. One of the fillies, named Amira, didn't have a halter, so I had a lead rope around her neck and was attempting to lead her through a pulled open gap between fences. Not quite ten feet away, two geldings, Spirit and Kolby, decided that it was the absolute perfect moment to pick a fight with each other. Amira spooked and pulled away. Very quickly. The following event took less than 10 seconds, but it felt like 10 minutes.

In those 10 seconds, time felt like it slowed down. You know those scenes from Flash or Supergirl or Smallville where the main superhero starts moving faster than a speeding bullet and everything around them slooooows waaaaay dooooown? Like that. My thoughts sped up fast enough that I had time to think "if I don't let go of this lead around Amira's neck, she's going to pull my arms out of my shoulder sockets. Or she's going to pull me face first around the paddock where the rest of these horses can stomp my butt."

So I let go, but I didn't want my face to hit the dirt. I have glasses which as many of you know are expensive to replace and I can't drive 45 minutes back home if my glasses are busted. I had enough forethought to put my hands in front of me as I fell. You see, I went from standing up vertically to being perfectly horizontal in the air because of how hard Amira pulled me. I also knew that if I landed on the ground with my elbows locked and perfectly straight, I was going to break some arm bones.

I held my arms slightly bent, my palms slightly in front of my face, and I landed horizontally in the dirt, knocking the breath out of me. As the thought, "I'm about to get stomped" rolled through my head because Spirit and Kolby were by now in a full fledge fight stirring up the whole herd, I rolled to my back, sat straight up, stood up, and went up and over the fence. I stood wheezing while my son who is not an outdoorsy kid, stood wide eyed and panicked.

He has ADD too, and after catching my breath I explained how fast my brain went through my thoughts, how ADD was our superpower. The explanation took longer than the event itself. Writing this, you reading this, it all took longer than the actual event of Amira knocking me flat on my face.

Attention Deficit Disorder, my Curse

I firmly believe that if I wasn't afflicted with ADD, the situation with Amira and the horses could have had far worse consequences. But on the other side of the coin, getting through life with ADD is super frustrating.

It is true, at least in my case, that people with ADD can multitask like nobody's business. We flit from topic to topic, task to task, easily transitioning between them because of how quickly our brains flit through thoughts. We're easily distracted. It takes a lot of hard work and focus to train ourselves to stay on task, particularly if it is a task we don't particularly like. But a task we really like, dare I say love? We can do that one thing for hours, not realizing that time is ticking away. For example, my son and I both love video games and can easily spend all day in Minecraft, unaware that hours have passed.

And therein lies the curse. Grocery shopping, cleaning the house, doing laundry, any task we don't much care for, take a backseat as we while away the hours. I've tried planning out blog posts before. I find it distasteful and am easily pulled away to do something else. I might lose the piece of paper where I started to plan and then have to start all over. I may lose track of where I saved a text file in my computer's document tree. Starting over is aggravating because I'm sure I have forgotten the just so perfect way I wrote something. So I don't plan in the first place.

Valuing One's Self

I'm sure my husband thinks blogging is a waste of time. He has no use for it, for reading blogs, and he thinks that what he does during a single day is none of anyone else's business. But I was a kid who felt alone. I was a single mom who felt like I was the only mom in the world going through my particular brand of crap. ADD isn't my only affliction by the way. The world of the internet saved me when I was struggling with my conditions. Finding out that there were others going through the same things and finding people who were interested in the same topics, well it just plain saved my life.

When I was a child, my adoptive mother told me lies about my origins that were fabricated in an attempt to ... Well, I'm not sure what her purpose quite was, but I'm sure she thought she was doing the right thing. She always thinks she's doing the right thing. But in my case, it made my self-esteem plummet. If my biological parents were addicts and a murderer, then my worth to society was less than nil. Another lie I was told was that my birth mother had considered abortion. Again, this information was not reality, but I spent the better part of 15 years believing that lie.

After high school, I became close with a young girl online. She was 13 to my 19 and I've never met her in the years since, but when I met her in an AOL roleplaying chat room, she was going through a lot. She said she had been raped, cut up and carved by her attacker, and pregnant as a result. She said she was considering abortion. She said she loved me. Like loved me loved me. Could she have been catfishing me? Oh abso-freaking-lutely! Could I blow her off and take the chance that this young teen was telling the actual truth? Heck no!

I told her how I had been told that my birth mother had considered abortion. That if I had been ended, she would have never met me. I told her there was no shame in having the baby. She could consider it a gift after going through something so horrible. I also told her there was no shame in giving the baby away. Many rape victims cannot look at the child they were left with. I also told her it wasn't anyone's place to judge her, no matter what she decided. She ended up giving birth to twin girls and she told me that my story helped her. That's when I decided that no matter how rough I thought my life, maybe something in my story could help someone else. They just needed to hear it.

Blogging About My Life

And that's why I blog. Maybe some crazy thought that rushes through my head will help someone who reads it. Turns out abortion was never an actual serious thought for my birth mother. But my belief that it was doesn't change how I lived my life back then. At 17, I had a nightmare and when I shared it with my adoptive mother, she led me to believe that I had been molested by my grandfather. Again, not a true story, but it doesn't change how my belief in the lie led me to live my life.

Belief is so powerful. If you believe the worst, the worst is liable to rear its ugly head and control your life. If you believe the best, you're liable to become quite disappointed when the best doesn't happen. So how are we supposed to live our lives? With realistic expectations, and hope for the best.

And this has WHAT to do with Planning a Blog Post?

So by now you're wondering what any of this has to do with how I plan a blog post. 😄 Remember how I said I don't? I didn't plan on telling you the story of Amira. I didn't plan on telling you the story of my AOL chat room friend, or that I was led to believe I was almost aborted and molested. I didn't plan on telling you any of that, but it came about organically. One ADD thought led into the next ADD thought.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't just type whatever comes through my brain, get to a stopping point and hit publish. During the course of typing all this, I have gone back to the top several times and edited, changed a word here and there. I've previewed it to make sure formatting isn't wonky. I've read through it aloud to make sure it sounds right, that I didn't forget a word here or there. It still flows as naturally as my brain allows, words from my mind put down to 'paper'. And maybe it will help someone. Maybe it won't. Maybe you think I'm aggrandizing. Maybe you think I'm making this crap up. But for the record, I've tried writing fiction and I'll admit that I'm not great at it. LOL In fact, I've never finished a single story I've tried to write. I keep going back and get caught up in the editing. It goes back to that easily distracted thing. The story becomes boring or I forget where I was going with a passage. Which is why I'm not a novelist or author.

The end result of my blog is the same. I've gotten the thoughts out of my head. Despite the wacky  devil-may-care attitude I affect, I'm actually quite shy. My blog puts me out there for people to see. If someone doesn't like it, they can click away to another website. If it entertains someone, I'm glad they got a laugh. If it helps someone going through something similar, in today's case dealing with distractibility, I'm glad I'm here in this world not struggling for no reason whatsoever.

What to do Next?

So what's next? That is up to you.

You can click away from the page thinking I'm a lunatic. You'd be partially right.

You can comment and share your experience or thoughts. I'd love to hear your story.

You can do whatever you want. It won't hurt my feelings. I'll probably never know what you did.

All I know is that I shared and I did something that was important to me. Haters gonna hate and people are going to scoff. And I don't care about them. I mean, I care. They're humans and I care about the human race. But I'm not going to let it affect me or deter me from sharing of myself.

I hope you have/had a good day.
Her Royal Pinkness, Elizabeth I