“Don’t you have an off switch?” I used to hear that a lot as a kid. Still do, really. Also “Isn’t it tiring, being on all the time?” Usually I point out that I don’t know how to do less. Sometimes I move insanely fast, like my head is churning out ideas at a pace so fast, if we were walking, I’d be the world’s fastest women. It’s actually like that in my head pretty much all time time.
There’s a reason I jokingly call myself an ‘idea’ person. I’m always thinking. Always. Every day, all day, all night. I write stories because if I didn’t, I’d never be able to sleep. Oh yes, when I lie down to sleep, I have to tell myself stories so I can transition into dreams.
The weird thing is that I can feel myself spinning up to extra-fast sometimes. Like just now, about half an hour ago, my brain kicked into high gear with a solution for a problem we were having at work. I had to stop doing everything else, take a deep breath, and just plow on with that problem. I was totally incapable of talking,r eading, or doing anything other than that one thing for the time it took me to solve the problem. Or at least write out a solution and pass it on to my boss.
When those moments happen, I literally think faster. Words start to get jumbled in my head because I’m thinking so fast. Images flash by. This isn’t hyperbole, this is actually what it’s like in my head. It’s a little terrifying to be inside my head when things kick up like that. Sometimes I get a weird buzzing, like the hamster wheel in my brain is spinning too fast. Once, when I was really sick, it freaked me out so much that I couldn’t stop or slow down, I was crying. I had meningitis.
I spend a lot of time calming myself, pulling the thoughts into order (or at least an order I can understand) and relaxing. I meditate. I do a little at-home Yoga and Aikido. Martial arts are fantastic for helping you build mental order and structure. So is math, mind you. You have to go through each step of a proof in order, and while I’m prone to skip steps that I can intuit, I know I have to go A to B to C, and that helps me relax.
In the slower, normal, moments, I usually have a few ideas bouncing around at once. A conversation with Twitter friends, a support question on forums, things at work, a story I’m writing, music I should be listening to, the news I heard on the radio. And yes, it gets overwhelming now and again. Which is why I go to the gym, actually. The only time I stop thinking about sixty things at once is when I’m exercising. That drops me down to about three. If I put on music and read a book, I’m ‘full’ and no extra thoughts enter my head. If I can’t read (like when I take long walks), I’m again, back to telling stories.
It’s not unusual for me to stop in the middle of something, write notes down (like I have one ‘bugger Jetpack to get yourls as the shortlink’ right now on my corkboard) and then carry on like nothing happened. Sometimes I’ll jump topic while talking to people, because my brain’s back-burnering all these things at once, and that thought became paramount.
The point is this. Yes, I’m like this all the time. Yes, it’s ADD (or ADHD, I was diagnosed before they thought hyperactive was a bad thing). This is exactly what adult hyperactives are like. We just keep going with idea and idea and idea, thought and thought and thought, and we rarely slow down. If we seem ‘normal’ to you, we’re probably sick or exhausted. But yes, I am like this all the time.
Just ask my parents.