Quentin Parker: Indecision / Percentages

 

Indecision / Percentages

Quentin Parker

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My first diagnosis was an “unspecified” ADHD. I have a habit of almost, but not completely, meeting the benchmark when it comes to mental health evaluations. It took months for the label to shift from “unspecified” to “inattentive,” and a year for my therapist to suspect a possible overlap with autism. This was either due to or despite my autism screening results coming up inconclusive; she said it was unlikely that a non-autistic person met any of the thresholds, at least in her years of experience. I was instructed not to spiral about this, that my life wouldn’t fundamentally change with an eventual autism diagnosis, and that Google was the last place I needed to search for answers. Luckily, I was proactive and went to Reddit to corroborate her theory before the session ended. 

The signs seem to have always been there. I can now pinpoint the moments in my adolescence where I boiled neurodivergence down to being a kid: the excessive talking to my classmates in the second grade when we were expected to learn, my hyper-specific (bordering obsessive) interests that lasted years until I abandoned them completely, how I procrastinated on nearly every major assignment until a day or two before the deadline because the time constraint was more actionable, the overwhelming need to spend money so that I could have things for the sake of having them—only to forget they existed once the newness faded. Without knowing, I taught myself to hide in plain sight. My impulses became jokes and I laughed off my lack of motivation to do tasks or make decisions that didn’t result in immediate gratification. The phrase, “I’m just a boy,” was a crutch for my mind’s shortcomings. When I couldn’t hide, I masked the traits completely. I suppressed the urge to plan my responses and cut in the second someone finished a sentence, maintaining my composure when they’d go on another tangent and I lost my opportunity to participate. Once I sat in a graduate-level literature course unable to do anything other than daydream or fidget or pretend to read, I realized I’d actually been hiding from myself.

The ADHD diagnosis wasn’t revelatory or cathartic, it was inconvenient. Day-to-day tasks overtime became noticeably herculean compared to when I juggled almost twenty hours in the writing center, multiple 400-level courses, a teaching assistantship, an honors thesis, two capstone projects, nine graduate school applications, running a literary magazine, a 6-day-a-week workout schedule, intermittent fasting, and persistent essay submissions in my last year of college. Answering the long-standing question of how my mind worked meant that I suddenly couldn’t “lock-in” my way through academia. If I wasn’t on campus, I was lying in bed. I hated lying in bed. But I also loved it. But I also couldn’t not do it. I went years without meaningfully reading a book that wasn’t assigned and I couldn’t write unless there was a due date attached to the essay. Cooking dragged on longer than ordering food and waiting for it to arrive at my doorstep, the hard work already done for me.

My therapist introduced me to the concept of “habit stacking.” It was a logical solution to my problem: attach the things I want to do to something I already do routinely. If I run out of clothes to wear for the week, I can load the dishwasher after loading the laundry. If I need to buy gas, I may as well go to the grocery store while I’m still in the car. The hope is that one task snowballs into another, then the snowballs become dominoes, until every task has been knocked down sequentially.

Reading and writing are roadblocks. My brain hates to choose. In an ideal state of mind I can pick up a book that interests me (enough) and voluntarily begin to read, but I struggle to get past the action of staring at letters on a page; nothing flashy, nothing shocking, nothing extra to flood my brain with dopamine. Pages and text and pages and text until it ends. If I want to find something more in a book, I have to work for it. Essays are no different; there’s no finish line on a blank page. Concepts and outlines aren’t results, only “maybes.” I can spend hours revising, striving for perfection, because nothing needs to be made—just shaped. I can easily exhaust myself at the thought of focusing on one book, and many books, and one essay, and many essays. The repetition of reading and writing is incredibly unappealing, yet they’ve remained passions of mine since the sixth grade.

I started rolling dice because I needed something to do with my hands and my brain. Something repeated but not repetitive. For the last six years my “special interest” has been Dungeons & Dragons, which translated into an obsession with collecting dice (if and when my budget allows). Before I started playing, I developed a dice ritual. Everyday I rolled them in sets: d4’s, then d6’s, then d8’s, etc. I did this until I rolled the maximum number on each die. My ritual became an absentminded form of stimulation, something I’d turn to when I was bored at home, an alternative to scrolling social media or playing games on my phone while sitting in front of my laptop. This practice can take just a few minutes to complete if I roll really well, and some days I can do it for up to an hour, rolling slowly and methodically or messily and frustratedly until I get my desired results. In my creative nonfiction workshop course, we were given the task to develop a side practice; I decided to gamify incentive.

Dice rolling has been a method of circumventing my (possible) AuDHD. The rule set is necessary for success: the d4 represents the 4 essays I planned to revise for the semester, the d8 represents that 8 books on my shelf that I planned for months to finally read, the d6 and d10 represent that various times I allotted to read and revise so that rather than leaving task completion to the horrors of the indefinite, I knew there was a point in time where I’d be required to stop. However, structure is never enough. The dice incorporate a tasteful randomness where I never have to decide what book to read or what essay to revise, otherwise I can easily talk myself out of it. The dice, in removing the burden of choice, require me to switch between projects when they deem it so. They tell me exactly what to do and how long to do it, with options and variety. A near perfect reverse psychology. 

I act in sequence now, after years of behavioral contradictions and searching for ways to trick my brain while needing my brain to be aware of the tricks. The dice don’t create the doing, but they leave me with something I can do without much room for argument. I can leave my thinking to percentages.