Is impulse a feedback loop?

Maybe with the ADHD bodymind, pure thinking is a bad replacement for pure impulse.

Recent experiments in block printing, this one in April when the trout lilies appeared. It just hit me, after writing this post, how the ripples around the trout lily image make a kind of reverberation.

New forms, new forms—my letters here were previously sent under the name creative attention. Things are moving differently for me (more below), and this letter is now Long Stride. So many of you seem to be fellow brisk thinkers, restless and divergent and impulsive like me, that I’m trusting you’ll get it without some exhaustive or clever explanation. That’s the energy I’m feeling as I keep showing up here. You’ll also find more footnotes in my posts going forward, which have always called to me as a space for divergent thoughts and side steps while writing. I want to be a lot looser with those going forward, and I like the idea of foot notes as a way of keeping up with (even encouraging) the pace of a long stride. 〰〰〰

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I want motion, I said.

I need motion, I caught myself saying again, later the same day.

Caught myself lurching forward in my chair as I said it, felt the chair stick as it tried to keep up with my body. I’ve left the wheels on the chair even though it’s on thick carpet. I can’t even deny my chair the possibility of motion. And I don’t want that to be some silly metaphor for all this, but it’s true.

I’ve become skeptical of myself in this late-identified-decoding-ADHD season.¹ I’m trying to do a better job of keeping up with myself, or even staying ahead of my mind and my impulses if I can, but at times that starts to feel too much like stopping entirely.

When Impulse arrives now, I do not run into her as the next great wave of possibility. Now I pause and take note of whitecaps. I arrive with a notebook. I’ve got some questions. I measure the gape of water as it comes to shore. I take a step back and ask if this is a passing storm or a genuine current that I want to work with. One that’s worthy of following. (For me, the muddiest question post-ADHD-identification is not How do I manage this, knowing what I know? but rather Do I trust myself? And when? And how?)

I want motion—

and now I question motion.

And then I fear stagnation.

+

Recently my dad was diagnosed with cancer. There’s a Post-It note in my studio where two words are scribbled: aggressive form.

I tether myself to notes and doodles to be able to pay attention on the phone. But I couldn’t move the pencil anymore after those words. Even though he caught it as early as he could have, even though he’ll get incredible care, even though, even though—

The recent weeks have been full of waiting for more information and more clarity. It’s the perfect combination of a Big Deal with an Unknown Timeline and a Forced Pause that can undo a restless person like me. And a restless person like my dad, who is definitely the one I got this wiring from, and one of the very few people who understands how it works in me, because of how it works in him.

When I think about losing him, now or later, it’s about losing my dad and it’s also about being more alone and illegible in this world.

He and I have and have not done well during this time. My mom jokes that she’ll be able to keep up with us as long as we keep alternating the days we break down.

I’ve been thinking of the time the psychologist asked me how I rest. I tried to hide how much I hate the word. Well, I’m like my dad, I told her. It’s more like active rest. We like walking in the woods or building something—

In these weeks of forced pause and unknown waiting, I’ve planted over 50 new flowers and shrubs in my garden. Spread hundreds of seeds. Installed fencing. Dropped dozens of pounds of mulch and a few bags of Biotone into the earth. Thought of mycelium and teased hundreds of roots. Wondered how many trees I’ve watched my dad, a forester, heel in over the years. We’ve planted a pumpkin patch at the family cabin, a pumpkin patch so big one friend asked if it was a new business we’re starting. No—we just need to move our hands. We need a scale of project that matches the feeling.

I need motion—

I am not running away from this.

No, no, I am actually feeling it all,

and if I stop I don’t know how I will feel it through—

chopping the invasive species back

with that sharp blade is the way I hack into the feeling—

let me stay in motion with it.

+

The big unknown drives me back into that conversation with Impulse. The cancer diagnosis arrived right in a threshold moment for me.

For months now I’ve had the sensation that I need to try new forms and expand my sense of what form means in my art. I think it matters to the book I’m working on, but it’s also not something to explore only in the book.

I was experimenting with that, with zines and block printing. But now, in the wake of this forced pause and reorientation, it’s remarkable how much experimentation also looks like dabbling. And dabbling veers too close to purposelessness, to stagnation, for my liking. I want to pick my feet up and start moving.

Normally I would take Impulse’s first offer of a new, different, more novel project and fly forward.

This happened after my dad’s heart attack in 2020. (He’s given me a few chances to think about these things.) I threw myself into a project that felt like The Big Thing I Must Commit To. I put the date on the calendar. I made the promise to others, so now I had to do the thing. I worked the deadline hard, and by the time the project got delivered, I was exhausted and pretty disenchanted with myself. And then there was the beautiful trouble of people actually liking the thing I had made, and the feeling that I owed them more, and it would take many more months to unhitch myself from that.

(Maybe I’ve done more unhitching than I have unmasking, for better or worse. Maybe now I have veered to the point of removing many hitches entirely, left myself so free and uncommitted that I wonder if I’m really up for carrying any load at all right now.)

I don’t think you can actually measure Impulse from the shore anyway. Waves don’t last long enough to be measured like that. I just haven’t figured out how to be discerning while also staying in motion.

(How do you recognize a true impulse without ever touching it? Or—isn’t measuring and weighing impulse antithetical to the spirit of impulse?)

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I want feedback. I need to do something, make something, that gives me feedback, I heard myself saying recently—

Maybe that’s what this is really about. Maybe I’ve decided that for me pure thinking (or, serious intention) is a bad replacement for pure impulse, and what I want is something that marries the two. Or blurs the two.

Tasking a risk has always been one of my favorite ways to get feedback.

The way I understand a feeling or an idea or a possibility or even a relationship is by making something. Making a choice, trying a project. And seeing how it feels to make it happen, then adjusting or even abandoning it based on what I learn.

I wonder if my creative practice actually just needs to be a series of feedback loops, rather than a definitive set of goals or projects.

As I write this I keep hearing/seeing the word Reverberation.

Is this the way my divergent-impulsive-spiral mind actually flows and orients itself? Impulsive stimulus in, feedback out. Too loud? Too noisy? Ok, fine, I can adjust. Or abandon for better possibilities. But don’t ask me to plan the volume in advance. Or stick to it forever.

I know to some this sounds a lot like running on vibes, but I don’t hate that.²

Maybe that’s what I’ve lost in my efforts to be more paced and discerning, in my attempts to stay ahead of myself—

Maybe this forced and uncertain pause with my dad has just been a reminder of how irritating and unnatural it is for me to be hyper-discerning, hyper-intentional, hyper-paced. There is no room for Impulse here.

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What is a creative practice like if it’s made entirely of feedback loops? ³

Impulse … Experiment … Feedback … Impulse … Experiment … Feedback

What if it’s experimentation set in perpetual motion?

(Noticing how this flow refuses to fit neatly in the hierarchy of beginning/working through/finishing a project. It’s more like a whirlpool than a straight arrow.) ⁴

One of my ongoing curiosities is how things accumulate in this way of being… how do you know when you’re getting anywhere and not just tinkering? I’m not sure yet.

Another curiosity is how this changes the relationship to Impulse, and to the choice to work on one thing or another. What gets prioritized, or how, in this arrangement? I’ve been returning to dance and choreography again for insight—something about the arrangement of bodies and shapes and lines in a space, something about sequencing feels like a clue here. I don’t have answers or insight yet. I’m circling. ⁵

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Writing this right now is its own feedback loop.

Something else slips free: This is why writing isn’t cathartic for me.

It’s that reverberation idea again. Writing and making things isn’t an emptying out for me, like a pool draining itself through gravity alone.

When I stop and return to this section to insert this sentence right here, like I am right now, I am observing an opening and responding to it. It’s feedback.

These sentences are pushing back against me and shaping me into a form I didn’t have and couldn’t imagine at the start of writing today. The spaciousness of the margin creates a gutter for the things I cannot say yet.

And I like the friction and then the flow of breaking the lines—

I am in motion against the screen,

screening myself against it.

I am in motion, Impulse on the smallest scale:

next word, next word, next word. Stop.

How does that feel? What do I know now

that I didn’t when I wrote the first sentence?

Maybe this is why the language of reverberation, feedback, and forms is with me now.

aggressive form—

is a note on my desk without context

it could mean anything

and maybe that is the form I am after,

no context

it could mean anything

if I stop too long

if I ask it to explain itself

it won’t be—

1. I am still at odds with even using the acronym ADHD in my writing. I hate how it gives deference to diagnosis and that way of approaching this bodymind. I still feel like it’s an alphabet soup. I still imagine I can invent some elegant way of signaling to you what I’m talking about, but then a practical voice inside of me says: It’s ADHD. That’s the name. Get over it.

2. I also wonder if this is why restlessness gets a bad reputation as so-called recklessness. From the outside this doesn’t look like a feedback process, a making and remaking. A fluid experiment. From the outside in, it can look like reaction, maybe. I don’t know, because that’s not how I meet the world. I’m more interested in how this sea feels on the inside, and I’m tired of translating it for the ones who boil it down to reaction, to reckless energy.

3. I’m suddenly imagining a gigantic, dreamy list of the types/forms/modes/channels of feedback in a creative practice. I want to work on that list.

4. I have a rough intuition that sometimes we (I) flail in our creative work because we’re convinced we’re unclear about the outcome we want and the place we’re going, when in reality we just need to generate some feedback about the space we’re in, and that feedback creates good friction/the next impulse to try and experiment with. Maybe this has something to do with iteration. Maybe it has something to do with listening more and planning less. (Maybe what gets written off as impulsive, restless, or reckless thought-action in the neurodivergent mind is actually an intense, immediate, swift form of listening… a tight feedback loop? Am I giving myself/my way of thinking too much credit? Maybe-possibly-yes, fine.)

5. I returned to Annie-B Parson’s The Choreography of Everyday Life as a start.