What Makes Me Tick
When I was first getting started on this journey to authorhood, I really hoped that I could get the books published, then slip back into the shadows, a name on a cover that people remembered only when they were looking to see what else I wrote. Some friends like to describe me as an Introvert that has the capacity to be an Extrovert for a very limited time. Fame wasn’t ever something I was after. I don’t want to be recognized on the street. All I want is to tell my stories and live my life.
Modern authorship doesn’t really allow for that kind of life. Other authors I know have instagrams, tiktoks, and other social media accounts on platforms that I’d never heard of before. Social media was never my strong suit. I liked to consume the media, but I was never really producing it, and I most certainly never had aspirations of influencer-hood. But we’ve entered an age where, surprising to many people in my parent’s generation, we have more readers than ever before.
With that number of people reading, we got a very many more people with the dream of writing as well. Because of this influx of writers, publishing company exclusion or selectiveness means many aspiring writers need to try to make their starts on their own, hoping that they’ll eventually be picked up and given the set up I originally hoped for.
In order to get that start, we need to market our work ourselves, and to market our books we need to also market ourselves. As anyone who’s ever interviewed me for a job or been my friend, selling myself has always been a struggle. I see the greatness of all the other people around me, and I suppose I feel my own accomplishments feel minor and limited by comparison. A common affliction of our social media world: comparison driven feelings of inadequacy. This was only made worse by the fact that for decades I was unaware of my own neurodivergency.
It took a long time, but I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD at the age of thirty-six, and once I was put on medication my whole world shifted. Motivation was suddenly easier to grasp, tasks didn’t seem as daunting, and writing a few pages a day every day instead of not writing for a week and then cranking out thirty or forty pages in a go before burning out completely for a week became child’s play. I liked to tease my mother, who was an elementary teacher for over thirty years, that she and my sisters (also teachers) were able to notice these issues in their students, but no one ever thought that it was what made me… the way I was.
Around the same time,I was informally diagnosed with AuDHD (a fun combination of Autism and ADHD) the same way many people on the spectrum who aren’t severely on one side of it are diagnosed: people with an actual diagnosis looked at me and went, “Yeah… you’re one of us. Hop in, we’re going shopping.” So I know it's not a formal diagnosis, but too much is explained by it for me to question the end result, and honestly, it’s making my understanding of myself and how my brain works make more sense. As a major plus, it's also helping me understand the disconnect between me and other people. Now I understand that they don’t see the world the way I do, and it helps me ask the right questions, see the ways my behavior can be viewed by them, and build a better understanding with the people around me. Whether a doctor signs that note later or not, I know how to interact better than I ever have before.
My understanding of my ‘spicy brain’ also helped me understand why I interpreted things around me the way I did. Stories became my way of understanding the world, which is why I was such an avid reader as a child (and even now, but I don’t get to enjoy it as much as I would like), why I play story driven games (and some not so story driven ones with good stories on easy mode), and why TTRPGs of all kinds flood my brain with dopamine. It also explains my long stint as an English teacher. Stories mean everything.
This quirk of mine was exceptionally apparent when I was in college. My roommates set up a projector on the wall and decided to have a movie night. My roommate himself (we were in a suite style setup) was in his room studying like a good Organic Chemistry Teacher’s Assistant while the rest of us watched Shutter Island. The reason this movie was chosen was because I was the only person who’d never seen it before and everyone wanted to see my mind get blown.
About a third of the way through the movie, something clicked. I asked them to pause and explained my prediction. Without going into details here, I apparently hit almost every plot twist the movie had to offer, being slightly off on a few predictions. The room went silent, and even my roommate, who hadn’t been in the room with us, but was able to hear me speak, stepped out of our room and just stared at me.
“How did you guess that?” he asked.
“It was pretty obvious,” I said, shrugging slightly, surprised that anyone would be taken by this movie if they were paying attention.
And that was a big problem I ran into a lot. “Isn’t it obvious?” Oftentimes in my life, and even in my game, I thought things were obvious. I’d create riddles and puzzles, thinking that with just a bit of thought and effort, they were easy to solve. I’d be met with confusion and blank stares. I’d even taken to giving my students the riddles to see if they could solve them. If they could, great! If not… I’d try my colleagues. If neither could, then I was the problem.
Got it back to gaming eventually. My usual MO: It always comes back to a game, but that’s another issue that I’m working on. With any luck, it will be taken care of sooner rather than later. Notice I didn’t say ‘fixed,’ because that implies something is broken, though I suppose something is, just not me and not the people around me. It’s our methods of communication. I suppose the number one thing that makes me tick, more than anything else, is how much I value communication while simultaneously being bad at it. What I would say should be the takeaway today is to check your communication, see if an outside source understands your point of view, and if most people are still confused, find the root of what’s making your communication fail, because remember, if you can’t communicate, no one will understand how you tick.
