Jeff’s A.D.D. Mind

An Intellectual Journey

In my college days I read Susan Horton’s Thinking Through Writing. I’m sure there were a lot of great things in that book but I remember very little of it except for the most important point - the process of writing sharpens your thoughts. It’s this idea, that you think through writing, that informs this blog-based intellectual journey of the A.D.D. world as viewed by one person.¹ The entries are my means of thinking through writing. The process works. It forces me to think in a logical, linear manner. Admittedly, when the blog is viewed as a whole, the linearity may seem disjointed. The nature of a blog is that it is not to be read chapter by chapter moving towards some inexorable conclusion but to be more diary-like so that entries have a certain internal coherence while the blog, as a whole, is merely a repository of these mini-coherent thoughts. Internal consistency between entries is not a foregone conclusion. But sometimes one entry builds upon another. One thought that was fleshed out at a previous time sometimes becomes the underpinning of a subsequent entry. So do not be surprised if I intentionally refer to a previous entry as means of both building upon my previous thought and as a means of moving toward internal consistency.²

The most interesting byproduct of the thinking through writing process is that the writing forces you to come to certain conclusions. The logic inherent to the written words³ move you in a particular direction so that, as a consequence, you may find that the conclusion based on that logic is not at all what you meant. Therefore you either live with the conclusion - if all the steps leading up to it are true then so is the conclusion - or you are forced to reexamine the logic that brought you to the erroneous conclusion. In this way you are thinking through writing.

If you are still here and reading this blog, I welcome you as a fellow traveler (voyeur?) on this journey. Do not hesitate to comment when you see fit. I encourage you to participate in this intellectual journey.

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1. See my entry “The Phenomenology of A.D.D.” and also my “About” page. [↩]
2. I must admit that in this relatively short time I have had this blog in place that I almost feel compelled to copy all of the entries and put it into some sort of book form and add the logical “glue” between entries so that I can sleep better at night knowing that there was internal consistency. [↩]
3. Yes, I’m aware of Derrida and writing under erasure but, as my kids would say, let’s not go there. [↩]