Focus, starting, and ADHD

When the usual route into reading or arithmetic does not form, children build another one, and it nearly always runs through memory. It works for years, and it costs far more effort than anyone watching realises.

This is the bright child who is somehow always tired, always slow with written work, quietly memorising what everyone else is working out. The route…

Some people get all the way to university before anything is named, then meet eighty pages of reading a night and cannot do it. Nothing broke that night. The volume simply outgrew a way of coping that had held for years.

The history reads the same way every time afterwards: always needed longer, avoided reading aloud, dreaded timed tests, stomach trouble in exam…

You are comparing how it feels inside your own head with what other people chose to show. Those two were never the same kind of thing.

Keep the sentence short enough to actually use, because you need it while your thumb is still moving, not an hour afterwards. Somebody's holiday…

After a long stretch online people are often not fully there. Something faintly hypnotic settles in, and things get said and done that the same person would not say or do in a room.

This is not only teenagers. Adults describe it too: an hour that vanished, a message that reads as though somebody else wrote it, a flatness…

Spend long enough online and people start arriving as types rather than as people: brilliant or worthless, with nothing in between. The flattening happens to how you see yourself as well.

Worth naming as something the environment is doing rather than a fact about your character, because what an environment produces can be changed by…

Not every app is doing the same thing to you. The ones that tend to hurt have comments underneath, a feed chosen for you, and a number attached to how you did.

One young woman described a picture site as the safe one, because there was nowhere for anyone to reply to her. That is a useful way to sort your own…

A whole evening can go into recording an evening. It is worth asking, with no scolding in it, whether you were there for the thing you now have a photograph of.

This lands better than a rule about hours, because it is about something you would miss rather than something you are doing wrong. Try leaving the…

One client took two years of steady work to get a single app off her phone. If you are three weeks in and it is still there, you are not doing this wrong.

Change here is slower than nearly everyone expects, including the people helping. Saying so early protects both sides: you do not read a slow month…