It's a process...

I am a chaotic thinker. That translates heavily into everything I do, from writing to housework to creating invitations to watching a show to accounting. Yeah... It doesn't fly well with the accounting thing, but that would be why I steer clear of most of those types of duties.

If you could plug a set of headphones into the base of my skull and hear all of the things that my brain is churning over you would yank them from your ears and drop them at your feet. It's loud in here, horrifying and messy like my teenager's rooms. Thoughts jump around, shout for attention at all the wrong times and rabbit trail into oblivion. Voices talk over each other, push aside mundane tasks and evoke the weird and unresolved. They leave little bits of themselves strung about, pieces of stories that may or may not ever see the back-light of my computer screen, and they often lead nowhere. Like the wasteland of a hoarder's collection, I cannot seem to throw them away, only leave them there to languish and mutter until I find them a home.

My chaotic thinking often results in chaotic doing. I can start out determined to get the kitchen cleaned and end up researching how it is blue birds have evolved such iridescent coloring. Having a conversation when I am in chaotic mode has to be terribly frustrating for my friends and loved ones, although for me it is merely thinking out loud. It's odd and frustrating and funny and exhilarating, all at the same time.

Before you step into a diagnostic role, I do not have ADD or ADHD or any combination thereof. I can concentrate on one thing and I can, to a degree, operate in polite society without awkward silence or inappropriate outburst. It is only in my mind that I am constantly tearing jagged holes in the universe and asking the very writerly question, "What if..."

I don't view my chaotic mind as an affliction, something to be hid away or secreted from view. Rather, I embrace it, revere it like one watching seedlings push through soil. In that moment, when all of my thoughts seem like a jumbled mess of shouty ideas and tangled string, I am watching for the "a-ha!" that transforms the "What if" into something unique, something interesting, something to explore. Like seedlings, which to my eye look very much the same when they push through that dark loamy earth, each will develop into something recognizable, unique, genuine. At that point we decide whether to weed it out of the dirt and pluck it away, or water it and let it grow.

What are you watering today? Hmmmm?

Photo Credit Creative Commons