The Thralldom of Hyperfocus.

Dude, did you-all know that “thralldom” is a fucking word?

I, for some unfathomable reason, did not.

Or, I mean, maybe I did? At some other moment in time that has absolutely zero bearing on this particular moment in time because that’s not really how my brain works?

I guess we’ll never know.

Anyway, I now possess–potentially redundantly–this worthy knowledge thanks to one of my many odd quirks (because people with ADHD are basically just 300 quirks in a trench coat). You see, I was initially just going to use the word “thrall” in the title, and although I clearly know what “thrall” means, as it’s what immediately popped in my head for this context, I had to look it up first due to my colossal case of imposter syndrome.

Seriously, it’s unimaginably large. Like, blotting out the sun type of situation. Real talk.

So when I go to use a word I don’t often use, something more complex than basic vocabulary, I look it up first just in case it doesn’t actually specifically mean what I think it does. Because to be perfectly honest, however rare, that is, in fact, the case on occasion. It’s humiliating and I hate it, but at least the secret can die with me.

The vast majority of the time I look something up, then, I’m just confirming what I already know before making that knowledge–or lack thereof–available for public consumption. Like, I totally looked up “imposter syndrome” just to make absolutely sure there were no nuances of which I was unaware before blithely tossing out the assertion that I have it (ditto “blithely”).

Because that’s really at the heart of this. I don’t simply want to confirm that I do, in fact, have the basic gist of the word down before using it. I want to be fucking positive no one could ever accuse me of using the word incorrectly. Not even a little bit. Or, you know, if I am using the word incorrectly but on purpose, I want to be absolutely certain I’m using it incorrectly in the correct way, otherwise the whole point is negated.

I’m also just a really huge word nerd and like reading dictionaries.

So back to our case in point. I was looking up “thrall,” a word I already know the meaning of (like you do), and it was then that I came upon the word thrallDOM, and I was like, damn, I’m fucking using that instead.

And so I did.

SPEAKING OF WHICH.

Let’s talk about the Thralldom of Hyperfocus.

In the neurodivergent sense, hyperfocus is the ability to, and propensity for, losing ourselves so completely in something that catches our attention, it can and does seem like the rest of the world fades from existence for however long we’re enthralled. We’re likely to not even stop for base bodily functions like eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. In fact, we’re likely to get extremely put out if we’re eventually forced to stop for something, especially something utterly mundane like peeing.

My own contentious relationship with peeing apparently began at a very young age. (Yep, that is now a sentence I have written.) As I’ve said before, it’s fascinating (as well as many other adjectives that have decidedly less positive connotations) for those of us with late diagnoses to think back over our lives, especially our childhoods, and realize there’s clearly been a very large, very blinding neon “ADHD SERVED HERE” sign buzzing above our heads from the very beginning, but apparently the sign actually existed in another dimension and was, therefore, unfortunately, invisible to everyone. Or, if it was of this dimension, it was purposefully ignored, or had a thick curtain hastily drawn over it, or had its power cut, or was simply just bashed to pieces with a length of pipe, the falling shards tracing our future scars all the way down.

Everyone’s childhood is a bit different, you know?

But yes. The peeing.

You see, there is always evidence for the existence of this lifelong, inter-dimensional, mysteriously-sourced, hovering electrical companion of ours in the traditional childhood stories our families like to tell about us. One of my most infamous childhood stories (because there was quite a bit of infamy going on back then, due to the fact that I was kind of a shit) involves my mother’s oft-repeated explanation for why I continued to have regular daytime accidents long after learning to use the toilet: I was always “too busy” with whatever I was doing to stop and use the potty (and apparently gave zero fucks about just peeing my pants wherever I happened to be because I was just that awesome…and shitty).

In other words, I was hyperfocused on something and simply couldn’t be bothered by such pedestrian activities.

Eventually I learned the ancient ADHD art of holding my pee near-indefinitely, so the accidents stopped, but the sentiment did not. I fucking HATE having to stop what I’m doing to pee. I find it so incredibly OBNOXIOUS, I loudly complain about it on the regular. I will literally spend orders of magnitude longer complaining about having to pee and not wanting to than it takes to just get up and go to the fucking bathroom already. I get visibly irritated and huffy and low-key violent when I’m finally forced to surrender the battle with my bladder (because the fucker ALWAYS WINS). I curse and slam whatever I’m holding down and stomp off, growling deep in my throat in visceral annoyance.

And that is not even one ounce of exaggeration, either. It really is that juvenile.

My point is that hyperfocus is an all-consuming beast that doesn’t even answer to nature except under extreme duress. And that’s regardless of whether we actually want to be doing whatever it is we’re currently obsessively focused on. Because it does feel like an obsession. It feels compulsive. We can’t not do it, whether it’s something we enjoy, such as regularly bingeing favorite shows over and over and over again (like, say, The Expanse, Black Sails, Wynona Earp, The Punisher…), or something we don’t enjoy, such as researching exactly how climate change is likely to affect various regions of the world in the years to come. I mean, I don’t necessarily even want to know with my actual brain any of those terrifying details, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t found myself spending countless hours, nearly entire days sometimes, doing precisely that.

Then there are the times hyperfocus ups the ante by choosing a topic or activity with much higher personal stakes, such as the elusive source of my body’s recent histrionics. This, unsurprisingly, tends to kick things into even higher gear, which was especially true for this subject, as my body absolutely excels at coming up with utterly confounding nonsense, and my brain, in turn, LOVES solving mysteries. It remains forever and always on high alert for mysteries to solve. In fact, my brain loves solving mysteries SO MUCH, it actually spends quite a bit of time attempting to solve mysteries that don’t even exist.

I know.

…I know.

So anyway, this personal stake in the subject matter collided with my penchant for both puzzle-solving in general and medical research in particular, and…

Together they became my Winter Overlords, and the Thralldom of Hyperfocus gained complete control once more.

Meaning I spent hours and hours, day after day, week after week, reading journal articles and research papers and analyses and meta-analyses, plus articles from mainstream publications, blog posts, and individual anecdata (anecdotal + data = anecdata) from various forums. And for someone with ADHD and, like, zero science background, this is a somewhat comically disjointed, arduous process that involves A LOT of concurrent Safari tabs and A LOT of stopping to look up terms and concepts, sometimes the same ones over and over because my brain is particularly fussy about the precise bits of information it will and will not absorb properly.

It’s fucking exhausting.

BUT. I. CAN’T. STOP.

Partly because I do actually find it all terribly fascinating, of course, as that’s a fundamental piece of the hyperfocus phenomenon. ADHD is literally defined in part by our inability to keep our attention focused on things we find boring. But it’s also partly because each instance of hyperfocus is like a module that my brain suddenly decides it must absolutely 1000% without question and definitely without delay complete before moving on to literally anything else. Some modules only require a few hours of my time, and some require every single moment not spent doing aggravatingly necessary things like peeing, and they require that time commitment for some unknowable number of days.

So that’s what you do. Even when, as in this instance, your brain really has to work for it, which is yet more evidence for the unique power hyperfocus holds over us because it’s completely at odds with another key aspect of the ADHD brain: our propensity for automatically eschewing anything we know–or assume–will take a considerable amount of sustained mental effort. Even just the prospect of facing something mentally challenging is enough to warrant an initiation of my brain’s automatic shutdown protocol. Like when an iPhone automatically shuts itself down if it gets too hot. Except, you know, preemptive.

A good example is when someone starts explaining the rules of a new board game to me. The very instant they begin, time slows, sounds become difficult to decipher, my head fills with static, and there, emblazoned across the olden timey TV snow suddenly coating every surface of my brain, appears one word: NOPE.

But apparently hyperfocus has the ability to bend reality to its own purposes in order to get around all that, which is equal parts incredible and maddening.

Kind of like everything else about living with an ADHD brain.

Anyway, there’s lots more to say about hyperfocus, of course, but that’s all I’ve got for now because this post is loooooooooooong overdue for publishing. I started it weeks ago but life has been tragically distracting since then, so here we are.

As always, thanks for reading, friends. I hope you and your loved ones are somewhere safe tonight.

SLAVA UKRAINI!