Absent-minded vs. single-minded

[gianmaria]

Hi everyone.

While still going through screening session with a doctor, I found myself wondering about my attention deficit issues.

This is not a question, nor I’m sure I want to make a point, but i need to share this.
The possibility I may have ADHD gave way to the need to assess things (which is always good, I s’pose).
One thing I’ve noticed about my attention deficit is that I know fairly well what distracts me: I know where my mind wanders.

And ususally my thoughts revolve around very specific subjects that happen to interest me in a given period.
And mostly they have to do with my unfulfilled artistic ambitions.

While practicing my day job for an IT company, I do try to keep one or two artistic endeavors going.
At this time I have a couple of speculative comic book projects that may see the light of day next year.
Small potatoes really, but still.

However little the time I can spend on this stuff, squeezed between my regular job and my family, this is actually what excites me and where I get my kicks from.
So I’m frequently there with my mind.
But it’s not just that.
I can get unexpected stimuli from stuff I happen to stumble upon (on facebook, on tv, on the newspaper) that may connect in one way or another with my comics.

Latest example: we bought a bunch of Disney movies recently for the kids.
I love that stuff, so I would watch it with the kids and notice interesting things I might apply to my comics work.

In order to know more, I seek out behind-the-scenes info about this or that movie and I discover (as it is very easy nowadays) an awful lot of material: documentaries, blogs, pictures, anecdotes about, in this case, Disney animation.
so far, so good. This is normal.
Almost everyone has a passion and dives in to it, whether it’s music, fishing, boats, cars, stamps, whatever works.

The “issue” with me is that I get sucked in to the point I hardly think of anything else for a while.
Maybe not to the point I cannot talk anything else (I now I have rather geeky interests and I try to spare the people around me), but it is kind of embarrassing when over dinner you wife tells you about the tiles she’d like to use for the new bathroom and all you have to say is: “Sorry, can you repeat it? I was thinking of Milt Kahl animation of Shere Kahn.”
(See http://andreasdeja.blogspot.be/2014/01/milt-kahls-first-shere-khan-scene.html)
More than absent-minded, I’d rather say I’m single-minded.

But I’m not sure this has anything to do with a condition like ADHd

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[g.laiya]

sounds like, perhaps, “normal” passion for an interest enhanced by ad/hd hyperfocus and/or perseverance?

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