What Are You Like, Anyway? + 12-Minute Meditation
A neurodiversity-inspired inquiry into our quirky wiring and the "Marlboro Man" trap.
For this week’s guided meditation, scroll to end of post
Hey everyone
It’s personal self-disclosure day! File under a new section called “True Stories from Jeff’s Always Changing, Sometimes Messed-Up Life.” Because Home Base is a place where we can be honest about our learning and flailing, share best practices and laugh (lovingly) at ourselves along the way.
This is also Part Two of a post on burn out, and what we can do about it. In Part One we entered the spa. In Part Two, we get curious about how we might mitigate some of our challenges in the first place. It’s part of a broader inquiry into how I think neurodiversity as a concept and a movement can be helpful to everyone, wherever you may find yourself on the various spectra of being human. In a nutshell: it’s a movement that aims to increase our mind-body literacy into the actual way we are, versus some ideal of how we should be. The clearer we get about this, the more we may be able to reconfigure our lives in more intelligent and energy-efficient ways. This can lead to more interpersonal smoothness and understanding, and free us up to express our gifts and strengths with more creativity and intentionality. God knows the world needs that.
To make this more concrete, I thought I’d share two examples from my own life; one from work, one from family. Then I guide a practice to help you explore some of the same terrain in your own mind and life.
How understanding my wiring helped with my creative work
Before I was a meditation teacher, I was a journalist. Back then – we’re talking 20 years ago now – I thought being accomplished meant writing rigorous, non-fiction books about important subjects. I managed to write one of these, and then spent ten years floundering around trying to write a sequel. At various times that sequel was about 1. Dreaming; 2. Psychedelics; 3. Animal Consciousness (particularly whales, I love whales); and 4. Enlightenment. Because, you know, when you get high you realize whales are enlightened. Ha! Honestly I can’t even remember now how one idea led to the other, so random and deranged was my writing process. Eventually, eventually, in that slow way of reluctant life-learning, I realized there was a fundamental mismatch between my creative ambitions, over here, and somewhere over there, my actual creative abilities.
With my particular presentation of ADHD, I toggle between two very different attentional styles. The first is hyper-distractibility, where I skip quickly from subject to subject. The second is hyper-focus, where I obsess about a single subject for hours, and the next day forget what I was doing and often have little interest in it when I do remember. 😆 Interestingly, meditation has tuned me into a third form of attention: an open availability to the present that is neither distracted nor fixated. When I’m more consistent with my practice, I still experience both distractibility and fixation, but I can generally choose whether I want to follow them. And sometimes I do – they each have their place as creative tools.
But that wasn’t my point – see, ADHD in action! My point is that in general, my mind has trouble systematically working through a single subject, the way a longer book treatment might demand.
So duh, stop trying to write those kinds of books, Jeff!
Yes, except figuring that out meant figuring out my own damn self. Or at least part of myself. Until you’re presented with the possibility that difference exists, you may never even know to look. I didn’t. Until I did. Some of it happened just through beating my head against a wall long enough that I finally got some insight. I also got perspective by reading other people’s descriptions of ADHD in various books and blogs. And finally, I worked with a great ADHD coach for a couple years; she helped me begin to implement what I was learning into the actual way I organized my work and life. The process took a long time, and is ongoing.
Today, there’s a more natural fit between my work and how I’m wired. I get to be in the moment with people, and speak spontaneously about what’s happening in that moment – the perfect use of my ADHDness. I get to write lots of short pieces that loop around the same subject, without ever feeling like I need to entomb myself inside some fake conclusion about the nature of, well, anything. I also get to own a learning process that’s more spiral than linear, where each circuit of the neighborhood reveals a new aspect and, sometimes, a more fundamental layer. (This is also true of writing and guiding meditations, by the way, where you spiral around and around the same insights, revealing – at best – ever-more subtle and fundamental layers.) Finally, if the changeability of ADHD and bipolar are part of what makes them so challenging, it’s also given me empathy for and perspective on a wide range of mental health conditions. Cause I’ve been there! Human internal variation turns out to be a big neighborhood, filled with many fascinating characters, all poised to potentially to turn their lead into gold, fingers crossed.
And that brings me to an example from my family life.
Cue the paywall!
(Part of my learning now is getting clear about what mutual support looks like in action, something I’ll share more about over the coming weeks)
