painting the pavement with my teeth
My life follows a pretty established cycle. I often find something that excites me greatly, I put a great deal of effort into it and then abandon it on the side of a road somewhere where it dies of exposure. As you can imagine they have long since stopped letting me take pets from the shelter or adopting children. I have a digital trail of many half finished scripts, business plans, editing projects, 3D assets, songs, ARG’s, games - the list goes on for a while. Creating these things gives me a short hit of dopamine then fizzles out into obscurity when the idea of looking at them makes me almost physically sick. Since a therapist suggested I might have ADHD my life began to make a little more sense, especially my online work and lack of ability to be consistent, at least that’s what I tell myself. It sounds better to me than randomly routinely entering a deep depression that can only be cured by watching numbers go up on a screen in a video game and obsessive masturbation, usually at the same time.
I choose to tell myself that my inability to be consistent is likely due to some undiagnosed neurological disorder, I always find the allure of watching to see if more than seven people have clicked on my video slowly become less appealing then the task of making a video, something I love dearly, becomes like asking me paint the pavement with my teeth. However, I have often wondered if it is just because I go through times in my life where I have three different jobs doing very different things so I am too exhausted to keep multiple projects up. It’s taken me a little too long to realise the only way I have been able to have jobs simultaneously doing three different things might be due to my proclivity to hyperfocus for hours/days and pick up new skills very quickly accordingly.
Unfortunately for you all I have come to the same conclusion many people in my position have done, there are two main universal motivators that transcend any barrier I have faced so far. Money and attention. You can relax, I'm not going to end this with some sort of donation link, and if you’re reading this I already have your attention so you’re safe for now. I have a theory that if I make a pipeline across all my various mad internet projects to at least capitalise on funnelling all the separate small things that grab attention into one easy to manage source for me, and one easy to view source for you. As you can imagine I do quite a lot of, what some might say, mad shit - and I’ve never quite found a way of combining the different audiences of things I do into one area.
Something I have been wanting to set up for a while is an e-mail list. I’ve always thought it slightly old fashioned and it’s a bit of a step up from sending you a postcard with a linktree site scribbled on it, but I think I could probably have some fun with it.
(Editors note; I didn’t finish writing this article because I had some ideas and spent the next six hours in a 3D animation hole and made some neat assets for a newsletter that who knows if I’ll get around to sending. Watch this space)
I’ve long since come to the conclusion that whatever is going on with me is probably neurological, I frequently get into situations where I realise I’ve forgotten to do laundry for a few weeks, social situations are incredibly confusing and the the concept of identity is baffling to me, though I think I’ll leave examining that for a later date. The nail in the coffin is probably the therapist that I had this initial conversation with; I thought it was a few months ago, it was over a year ago and I forgot to return her emails asking to rebook. Sorry Tina. (I can’t remember her real name.)
