Blogging From The Couch
PUBBLICATO: XX MESE 20XX
ULTIMO AGGIORNAMENTO: XX MESE 20XX
Introduction
A couple of years ago, during yet another period of struggle against myself to manage to put together a semblance of routine and force myself to stick to it, an unforeseen event sent everything up in the air just when I was managing to come to terms with it a little.
Twelve months after “the event”, all of which passed in a flash, I decided to pick up Relaxing Gameplaid again and everything I had left aside from that time.
Needless to say, between this decision and “now”, another eight months have passed, spent trying to recover things with the same effort as in the beginning.
It's true that there were other personal things that I had to do and that slowed me down, it's true that I had to transfer the site to another hosting that took me weeks of research, it's true that I lost a month because my PC died and I had to rebuild it almost as if it were new when it wasn't the right time and how many other "it's true that...".
But it still remains that another EIGHT months have passed.
<sad trombone>
Story of my life
</end sad trombone>
In the meantime, however, I wanted to collect some thoughts on the matter and use them to inaugurate the “blog” part of this site, which will host in-depth articles on the video games I have played, but not only.
So let's also talk about ADHD and its pitfalls, among which I fell straight like a potato into, without even wanting to or be able to foresee it, to explain some of the complications of neurodivergence.
What is ADHD?
There would be enough here for days and nights!
For this very reason, however, I'll avoid going into too much detail since, fortunately, there's now a ton of information much more reliable than I could ever be.
Suffice it to say that ADHD, like autism, is a neurodivergence and stands for "Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder" (last in a long series of names, which have changed over time).
Following the definitions of ICD-11 and DSM-5:
Le “neurodivergenze” vengono classificate come disturbi del neurosviluppo. Il termine indica quindi uno sviluppo “neurologicamente divergente dal tipico” e sottolinea come una persona abbia processi/funzionamenti neurologici differenti da ciò che è considerato “norma”.
“Neurodivergenza” e “Neuroatipicità” vengono usati in contrapposizione a “Neurotipicità”. “Neurotipico” indica una persona che non presenta neurodivergenza.
And ADHD like this:
[ADHD] is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulty maintaining attention, excessive activity, and/or difficulty controlling one's behavior (e.g., impulsivity) that does not appear appropriate for the person's age.
There is also the term “Neurodiversity”:
The term neurodiversity refers to the normal variability of the human mind in relation to cognitive functions, and other mental functions, such as those related to sociability, learning, attention and mood. The term aims to propose an inclusive vision of cognitive diversity, highlighting neurobiological differences and, at the same time, considering the socio-cultural contexts in which human experience unfolds.
Consequently, we're all neurodiverse in some way, but some of us are also neurodivergent.
That said, what do all these definitions mean?
In essence, our brain works differently, in ways that people who aren't neurodivergent often don't understand, misunderstand and struggle to empathize with.
Of course I understand, it's not easy even for me who have it, even if I do not have a diagnosis in hand, but inevitably it makes our life a little more difficult than it already is. After all, even though it's talked about much more, unless you go and investigate directly, it is difficult to know what you're talking about. In short, it's not a topic that you easily stumble upon in everyday life unless you're young and/or often on social media.
In all of this, one thing must be kept in mind: the society we live in has been built around certain categories of people, the majority of whom are “neurotypical”.
Even and above all, the world of work is organized around what neurotypical people are able to do, with the assumption that we are all equal and able to follow the same rules in the same way, therefore with the expectation that we can all be equally productive (and this is already a problem in itself, even without neurodivergence).
So let's start talking about online presence: the concept of consistency that algorithms theoretically force us to do already goes heavily against what we are naturally inclined to do. Posting regularly requires first of all the routine of accessing social media, organizing content, planning it over time and if it's based on other content, creating that first and within the right timeframe.
In short, beyond the literal routine of posting, we need to take into consideration an ability to organize, plan and respect timetables that we often don't have and that is very difficult for us not so much to create, but to maintain.
If I had to summarize in a few words the main problems regarding online presence, they would be:
- time-blindness
- procrastination
- difficulty completing tasks
- random energy spikes
- executive paralysis
- anxiety
- random and chaotic hyperfixations
Of course, most of these are very common and basic features of ADHD in general.
Hyperfixation and its impact
Hyperfixation can be fully defined as our greatest cross and our greatest delight.
What I am about to write now is obviously my personal point of view, but after having spoken at length with other people - diagnosed and suspected ADHD - I am quite convinced that it is a decidedly common experience.
Why delight?
Because Hyperfixation is our greatest and most precious engine.
It is that thing that when it is there fills you with enthusiasm and you feel like you could conquer the world and you can't talk about anything else (and often you don't even want to), you would go on all day, every day, starting from the macro and going to the micro and returning to the macro again. Theories, hypotheses, pages and pages of study, failures and successes, long hours of research on unlikely Wikipedia pages (or maybe you wrote it directly, the page).
If it’s a hobby, you’ll spend your money to buy everything you need, producing a gazillion objects in an extraordinarily short time, without looking at anything else. And you’ll find a corner in your house or room to accommodate all this new goodness even if it means revolutionizing the entire area.
If it is instead a product of a media (video game, book, manga/comic, anime/animated series, series, film, etc.), you will end up in the vortex of its fandom and in no time you will be on Twitter banging your hands on your keyboard, going from your miserable 100 tweets in 10 years to 10,000 and more in six months (assuming you manage to avoid the constant dramas that these days plague fandoms and social media in general).
If you draw, you will produce an inordinate amount of fanart.
If you write, you will instead produce an inordinate amount of fanfiction.
If you write and draw, congratulations, you have earned a truly personalized level of curse.
Whatever you do, you will eventually get into a million Discord servers, following all the people involved in creating the product (authors, artists, developers, etc).
You start early in the morning and finish at night, after having stuffed into the middle of this program everything you are forced to do to live, but of which you retain few memories because your thoughts are always in one place and the only thing that saves you in these hours is the fierce dissociation that prevents your brain from melting due to boredom and disinterest.
The dopamine wave, at this point, is a tsunami of catastrophic proportions. It overwhelms everything in its path, preventing you from seeing anything else. You memorize tons of information, you learn at the speed of Trinity in the Matrix, and before long you may be counted among the most knowledgeable people in your specific niche of interest.
The dopamine wave, at this point, is a tsunami of catastrophic proportions. It overwhelms everything in its path, preventing you from seeing anything else. You memorize tons of information, you learn at the speed of Trinity in the Matrix, and before long you may be counted among the most knowledgeable people in your specific niche of interest.
And the cross?
The cross is that we don't choose what to hyper-fixate on.
Or when.
Or with what violence.
We don't even choose how long it will last.
Or when it will end.
Because, yes, 8 to 10 it will end.
And worst of all, without hyperfixation, we often feel empty and bereft of something that makes us feel so good when it’s there. Not unlike a drug, in some ways.
The Unpredictability
Obviously I didn’t decide to talk about hyperfixation by randomly shooting at the pile of the most common symptoms, but for the simple reason that it’s what happened for most of the time I abandoned Relaxing Gameplaid: an unexpected hyperfixation, which arrived at the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 and threw me into the whirlpool.
I won’t get into the what and why, as it’s irrelevant and no, I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 intensively and extensively for thousands of hours. I remain a puzzle and point-and-click fan and while the game is almost objectively wonderful in the realm of cRPGs, it’s not really my genre.
(And this is also an aggravating factor, if you like).
I've only started a handful of runs and finished it once.
In co-op.
Which absolutely didn't prevent me from getting hit by its lore, since I'm already a role-player and therefore know D&D, albeit a little. And that was enough to stumble upon what I was hyper-obsessed with, ending up completely off track and straight down the slope.
This is to say how hyperfixation can really be so damn random: Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that I bought at the beginning of Early Access in 2021 because I liked some characters and wanted to delve deeper, and that's why I played a lot in that period, before abandoning it while waiting for the final release.
It was a hyper-obsession even at the time, during which I spent a few hundred hours exploring every nook and cranny of Act 1 (the only one available) and looking for every little secret. However, at the time it kept me busy for a month, maybe two, but it didn't stop me from doing other things.
Then it came out and even though I don't play AAA or cRPG games, it was enough to throw away months of work that was already in fits and starts and complex to manage.
I also threw away the money for a year of hosting, without touching the Relaxing Gameplaid site (and I remind you that another 7 months have passed…), which, although the amount is average, for me is still a lot for a project of this type.
But I'm happy about one thing: that now that the tsunami is passing and I've started to pick up my poor pieces to see what I can put back together, I've realized that I care about this project. That I like playing and reviewing indie games of genres that have always interested me and that evidently continue to interest me.
So, after thinking for the umpteenth time whether to delete everything and just play the games without sharing anything about them, or to move on and try again, I decided to go ahead and change a few things, as well as adapt the format better to who I am and my problems.
In the hope that the next hyperfixation, when it'll happen (because it will happen, there is no escape), it won't be able to knock everything down again.
The consequences
The consequences have been many and on multiple levels, from the hosting money thrown out the window as I said before, to the missed reviews of the games that I still have on my list.
I also lost many opportunities to ask for copies of video games I cared about and review them at the time of release or just play them, at the time of release. Of course, they are not games that I'll not play, but I'll have to wait for the moment in which I can buy them and make up for the opportunities I have missed. As much as I may regret the missed opportunity in the first place, of course spending what there is to spend to pay for a copy to indie development studios that I like and often composed of a few people, is absolutely a pleasure.
Dopo dieci anni di attesa per l’uscita del sequel di un gioco che ho amato tantissimo, su cui volevo concentrarmi per qualche mese, sono finito in ritardo di un anno e mezzo: l’ho comprato all’uscita, ho iniziato a giocare, ma mettendolo in pausa per la traduzione italiana, sono poi finito iperfissato altrove e..beh, eccomi qui.
Nel frattempo il gioco non solo è uscito, ma ha anche sputato fuori diverse DLC che mi sto ugualmente perdendo come “giocatore della prima ora”.
Summing up
Neurodivergence isn't a creature that can be destroyed. The only thing that can be done is either to get frustrated in continuing to oppose it or to learn to know it and manage it, integrating its characteristics into everyday life and trying as much as possible to find situations and environments that are as compatible as possible.
Of course, it's easier said than done, especially in the chaotic reality we live in today and in this increasingly advanced world, but, paradoxically, less and less inclined to accept diversity and make it a strong point, as if it weren't obvious that homogeneity impoverishes in the long run.
And so I'll try to do, so… bear with me. And if you do, I will never thank you enough.