Learning push/pop in the context of a stack provided me with a lifelong justification for being what others call “flighty”. This is super evident while doing chores and I jump from washing dishes to wiping counters to washing floors to putting laundry in the washer. To someone at that point it looks like I’ve started a bunch of things that I didn’t finish.
In fact, I paused on the dishes so I could clear a spot on the counter for them, realized I swept a bunch of crumbs on the floor that I needed to clean up, but before I could finish the floor I had to do something with that dirty pile of laundry that was in the way. Keep watching and you’d see me “pop” each of those tasks back off the stack in turn, eventually getting back to the dishes where I started.
Yeah. So you pop one off the stack, but in processing that item, you push 10 more things on the stack. And the same happens when you pop one of those 10 items off the stack.
Parentheses are the
push()andpop()of my thought stack.Learning push/pop in the context of a stack provided me with a lifelong justification for being what others call “flighty”. This is super evident while doing chores and I jump from washing dishes to wiping counters to washing floors to putting laundry in the washer. To someone at that point it looks like I’ve started a bunch of things that I didn’t finish.
In fact, I paused on the dishes so I could clear a spot on the counter for them, realized I swept a bunch of crumbs on the floor that I needed to clean up, but before I could finish the floor I had to do something with that dirty pile of laundry that was in the way. Keep watching and you’d see me “pop” each of those tasks back off the stack in turn, eventually getting back to the dishes where I started.
I like this take on it. I’ve just been calling it my “if you give a mouse a cookie” mode
Is it fair to say people with ADHD add thoughts onto a stack while the rest of the population adds thoughts to a queue?
More like the thoughts are added automatically to the stack with little to no control.
You pop one off the stack but in doing so it opens up and a dozen springy toy snake thoughts burst out.
Yeah. So you pop one off the stack, but in processing that item, you push 10 more things on the stack. And the same happens when you pop one of those 10 items off the stack.
Stacks on stacks on stacks
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Storing hobbies on racks on racks on racks.
Why haven’t I finished that task from eight weeks ago? I can’t tell you, or it will get even later.
I suspect it’s non-ADHD is linear, while ADHD is multi-dimensional mesh.
The thoughts are added to the ether and the ones that happen to make contact with the previous node become the next link.
lda