paper jam!

A method to the beautiful madness of ADHD paper piles. Or, yes, I *do* do things with them, and here are some.

Oh you beautiful piles.

I know the “piles of paper surrounded by a coven of abandoned coffee cups” is a nearly played-out trope of ADHD, but damn if it isn’t true. I love my paper piles.¹ They’re my evidence of practice. My attention accumulating in a real, material form.

The more I fall down rabbit holes with my next book and other projects, the more I want to see, feel, and mark up the practice. Having over 100 virtual tabs open on a screen creates the sensation of total free-fall—anything with even a vague connection to my work or that strikes a little curiosity gets opened and stays open (just in case! the proverbial just in case!).

Printing things out creates the sensation of pulling things out of the rabbit hole. Of surfacing and coming up for air. Printing calls in a pause.

What I love lately is how hitting print is just enough of an action—some good friction—that I start filtering out what’s meaningful to print or not, and by extension, what's meaningful in the here and now of my projects. As in: Do I really need/want to print this? Am I actively working with this material, or am I just passively collecting it? ²

That quick filter is surprisingly helpful to figure out which curiosities are most important to me right now, which ideas I’m actually trying to connect into something more. (The bonus, as someone with chronic migraines, is that printing things out also leaves bread crumbs to follow back into the work, after a series of pain days have sent you far away.)

I want to work with this practice more consciously, so I thought I’d share it here. I’m going to start a regular “paper jam” here at Long Stride, and each edition will gather discoveries and essays and research and who-knows-what that have, for me, risen to the level of being worthy of paper, ink, and deeper attention.

Gathering and printing a mix of things off like this also leads the ideas to riff together and cross-pollinate… i.e., a jam session. I like how this approach rips the ideas out of time and searches for what’s evergreen, or at least perennial, in them. Our world is so timestamped now that many ideas get de-prioritized simply because they happened too many days back in the feed. Printing things out and shuffling them together de-centers the timestamp and undoes the “feed effect.”

I also wanted to pass along two tools that are helping me right now for research, reading, and taking notes:

• The Uni Jetstream 4&1 Multi-Pen is my current go-to pen AND pencil. It’s the pen that I run around the house looking for if I misplace it, the one convincing me none of my other dozens of pens are up to the task of marginalia. Multiple ink colors make color-coding easy if you’re reading for themes or patterns. I also like using different colors for different reads. The first time I read something, I’ll mark things in green (plus the date of the read on the first page, in the corresponding color). The second time, I’ll use blue. I like knowing which questions surface for me at different times, or noticing how certain threads start to catch more weight or meaning over time.
  

• Book: Research for People Who Think They Would Rather Create — This book is geared toward visual or performing artists doing research, which I prefer even though I’m usually working in written forms like essays and poems. It’s nudged my thinking about what makes a strong research question and how to get more specific with my curiosity… whenever I look to other disciplines for guidance, my focus in my own discipline gets clearer.³
  

paper jam! inaugural edition 〰〰〰

〰〰 // THE PRACTICE OF PRACTICING // 〰〰

“I started to wonder if I could practice being good at practicing.” This piece by Winnie Lim is fitting to be the first one I share in the first paper jam, because it’s got the spirit of what I’m trying to do here: energize practice by practicing more overtly. Turn something passive into something more active—and therefore something more conscious and pliable.

I love this kind of meta-practice. Maybe it’s because of the fits-and-starts temperament of ADHD + the unpredictability of my migraines. Steady momentum and discipline are not my natural states, unless I’m pushing myself to the point of getting sick (which Winnie also writes about).

Given that, I often worry about whether anything is adding up. But when I get a little meta and make a practice (like this paper jam idea) to hold the practice (research/reading, in this case), I remember that not all is lost.

Like Winnie writes: “I wonder if it is about acquiring enough subconscious knowledge that I have done this before and it works, so the next time I start a new practice it won’t seem so daunting… the act of practicing also involves knowing when to start, when to end, and how much to do.”

For me this comes back to feedback loops… if I make something more conscious as a practice, that creates more chances to get feedback.

〰〰 // REACH-SEARCH // 〰〰

Annie-B Parson’s The Choreograpy of Everyday Life got me wondering about the concept of kinesphere, which has become its own rabbit hole. Definitely one of those “is this adding up to anything?” research dives, where I’m not sure what question I’m really asking yet, but it keeps morphing and touching other things I’m reading, so I keep following its lead.

That’s how I stumbled into Pauliina Jääskeläinen’s paper: “Research as reach-searching from the kinesphere.”

Something about the language of “reach-searching” reminds me of Hannah Emerson’s poetry and The Kissing of Kissing—the way Hannah speaks of the periphery, the ways she turns the language sideways and speaks through it, so you get a sense of her autistic experience without her having to “explain about” it.

I wonder if there’s something about kinesphere and reach-searching that’s overlapping with/cross-pollinating with the realm of neuroqueering and Nick Walker’s writing on the “bodymind.” Maybe it’s passages like this one from “Research as reach-searching” that spark this for me:

“I return to my desk, let my forearms rest on the table, and conform to its hard surface, at the same time conforming as a body to the practices of doing research… What if research was, instead of re-search—the act of finding what already exists—thought of as reach-searching movements from the kinesphere bubble? If so, how far can I reach-search through this embodied being, this body that I as a researcher am at this moment? How do other kinesphere bubbles shape my researcher’s movements?”

It’s a divergent way of being: instead of moving into what already exists (even physically conforming to the desk as an existing structure!), reach-searching moves outward toward what might possibly be.

Elsewhere, Jääskeläinen writes about horizontal vs. vertical movement and touches on linear vs. nonlinear processing, and the idea of improvisation… and no, not everything must be tethered back to my own little neurodivergent universe, but of course I recognize so much of the neurodivergent bodymind in these concepts. Of course they help me return to myself with new language, and new questions.

In particular I’m wondering about choreography. I’m noticing how my body reaches, expands, contracts, and how that connects to what’s happening internally. What is the choreography of overstimulation? What are the movements of my bodymind, in time and space, when I encounter the neon lights of the grocery store? What kind of dance is this? What kind of reach-search is my restlessness, my impulsiveness? When I am asked what my migraine triggers are, am I really being asked how I improvise, how I contort or adapt?

〰〰〰 // THE DIAGNOSIS NARRATIVE // 〰〰〰

My last share here might further illustrate the difference between researching and reach-searching, and more specifically in the context of creative nonfiction.

Tajja Isen

wrote a must-read essay, imho, about memoir now: “Self-Diagnosis is Making Memoir Too Predictable.” What she’s describing (“the tendency to impose a diagnostic structure") to me echoes Jääskeläinen’s idea of research as “the act of finding what already exists.” Like the researcher conforming to the desk, the writer conforms to the shape of a pre-determined diagnosis.

I feel like this choice, or tension maybe, is especially relevant for neurodivergent writers. And especially those sharing stories of late-identified neurodivergence. Even as some of us try to break free of the diagnosis paradigm, we often begin our stories with the fact/event of our diagnosis.

For me, there’s this awkward tussle of needing to name ADHD so it’s legible to others (e.g., what’s the clear angle for the editor reading my manuscript?), while also trying to depart from the diagnostics of ADHD as quickly as possible, so that the story doesn’t become: I found out I have ADHD, and here’s how everything in my life pointed to this eventual diagnosis.

Neurodivergent storytelling is well on its way to being oversimplified and overpathologized… what I dislike most of all is how the diagnosis narrative tends to turn its source material into a commodity. The aim is to package the identity, rather than generate more questions.

I get prickly about this because it’s not authentic—it doesn’t reflect the true complexity of neurodivergence, or humans in general. As Tajja says:

“The unconscious is a swampy and surprising wellspring, not a cheat code. Why am I like this? is one of the most prismatic, horrifying, liberatory questions a writer can ask, an attempted answer one of the most intimate offerings it’s possible to make to a reader.”

But I also get prickly about this, when it comes to ADHD stories in particular, because the diagnostic origin story is just so damn boring at a certain point. And linear. The diagnosis story is a Point A-to-Point B story. When you begin with the conclusion, you’ve hooked yourself to a fixed point. And I’m just one person with ADHD, but my lived reality of this bodymind is anything but fixed.

And I say this knowing I have written about discovering my ADHD in some of these exact ways! I say this knowing I’ve already revised the essay that was published in the Kenyon Review, because I still wasn’t totally happy with the framing, because of the exact issues Tajja writes about. It’s a very strong cultural orientation at the moment, and it can take practice to shake it off. I’m still reach-searching, still listening for the true shape of the questions.

1. I’m trying to do better about the dirty coffee mugs though...

2. Not that I’m opposed to the passive collection of raw materials with the hope of future magic… it’s just that moderation isn’t really my thing, which means the collecting oh-so-easily slips into noise-making. It can get a little grating when you’re trying to follow through and finish a project.

3. When I read writing craft books—that is, study in my own discipline—I sometimes get the sensation of over-engineering. Like I’m clogging the process by staying inside of it, rather than clarifying it by getting outside, finding fresh air. I don’t know—I’m just sure that cross-discipline reading/watching/encountering is the most consistently helpful thing in my practice.