Writing and Reading
I spent the last two weeks reading over these questions and thinking about how, in many ways, I got lost in the worlds I longed for in the pages I devoured. They were my salavation. I never left the house without a book, something to write with, and paper. That part of me hasn’t changed much at all but I will allow my phone to exist as all three at times even though I prefer the real stuff.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t able to read or write. I was a spontaneous reader or what is also known as hyperlexia. Although it can be accompanied by a lack of comprehension, I was able to read and write before I went to kindergarden. Prior to my parents discovering I could read at the age 3, they did read to me. According to family stories, I would sit still and be read to as young as 6 months and began speaking at 9 months by asking questions. Looking over more of the hyperlexia information, I was likely parroting what I heard around me. Having also been recently diagnosed as neurodivergent (although I prefer the term neurospicy myself) puts my development as a reader/writer into a much broader context.
I believe I took over the reading duties for myself rather early on as my parents were not readers and didn’t enjoy it. I think I am making up for it now as I love audiobooks for reading fiction. I spend so much of my work life reading and writing, I try to get my hands into somethiing else during my “off” times. Therefore, I enjoy listening to my new or old favorite book as I knit or sew or create something in the kitchen. As a child, my drive to read and journal/write was often met with frustration and incomprension. Therefore, the only books lying around the house were mine.
A third, and equally loved, passion for me has been cinema. I am now learning, my spicy neurology also influenced my movie watching as those of us with ADHD can not only guess the end to almost any movie due to our abilities with pattern recognition but we often look up the ending so as to alleviate our sense of uncertainty. As such, it was never about the resolution or “end” of a film for me. Instead, I wanted to see how a director chose to embody and visually represent the narrative. I happily move between a book and film because I believed, long before I knew who Marshall McLuhan was, the medium is the message.
While I would not say that McLuhan is at the heart of how I teach writing, I do currently teach in a School of Communication and Media. Therefore, I teach quite a lot about a lot of different types of writing, often to my students’ dismay. I have had the critique more than once that my online public speaking has “too much” writing and not enough speaking. Whether or not that is the case, the way I structure my assignments in the aforementioned class is representative of how I teach writing by scaffolding assignments enveloped in the understanding that writing is a learnable skill and a process.
This echoes how I write as well. I have often experienced the dreaded ADHD procrastination bug which can keep me from doing things like writing even if I want to. I often use an outline as a form or structure to keep me on target as well as move back and forth from the computer to pen and paper. After creating an outline, I often write as much as I can in the first draft. I then print it out with my pen in hand editing and adding to until it hits a point where adding more by hand becomes unmangeable. Then the process starts out all over again.
Opining
Our current state of the union, whether in regards to the economy, international affairs, or domestic policy, is a wellsprng of concern to me. I fear for those in more vulernable positions I currently inhabit and I am not without points of exposure to potential dangers. I vacillate between consuming as much news as I can stomach to needing big breaks from the macro-level forces at play.My fears are almost biblical at times; therefore, the interplay between sacrafice and faith feels appropriate to consider. I do not know (and am always comfortable saying I don’t because it is at those points real learning and growth occurs) how that that interaction will evolve. I am left wishing for a many doses of humility to be given to those in power. I don’t believe in communicating at people or enforcing dominance in my writing or speech. As such, I do not use words that I can’t define. I may attempt to use words I can’t pronounce as I have only read and written them and never heard them pronounced.
Thinking
I only recently learned that some folks on this planet live with silence. I cannot imagine what that life is like. My internal voice is my constant, and sometimes difficult, companion. My voice is also always under construction in the form of edits. I replay old conversations, imagine what future exchanges may be, and provide a voice over as I move through my day all with slight, minute-esque edits.While my narrative is constant, I don’t know if I align it with the process of thinking which is also very different from rationalizing. The process of thinking is akin to a deep processing mode which likely aligns with ADHD hyperfocus. I get into the zone and nothing can really get through. Rationalzing, on the other hand, is trying to make solutions and idea retroactively fit and not allowing the information and your own processes to find an answer.
Professor Karen Sichler 