A Mind That Loves to Roam
I’m always doing more than one thing at once. A thought here, a conversation there, an idea half-scribbled while another one knocks at the door. I follow pathways sideways, backwards, upside down. Tumbling down rabbit holes that split into more rabbit holes, until I forget where I started but somehow land somewhere better.
Sometimes I have five conversations in my head at the same time. A word sparks a question, which sparks a memory, which ties back to something I left unfinished weeks ago. This is how I work best: tangled, alive, chasing sparks before they fade.
People sometimes ask me to focus. But they don’t see… I am focused. I can always find my way back to the core, no matter how far I wander. It’s like a thread I never really drop. I might meander, but I don’t lose the point. I just see more of the map along the way.
Friends stare at me blankly when I say something oddly funny, a punchline out of nowhere. Because in my head, I’d already run the joke through twenty twists, jumped the in-between steps, landed at the payoff without explaining the trail. It made sense to me. Sometimes only to me.
For a long time, I thought everyone’s mind worked like this… stitching stray thoughts together, drifting off mid-sentence because a new idea had just swung open a door. But slowly I realised it’s not like that for everyone. My wife still stares at me when I spin off mid-conversation, eyes darting ahead to something no one else can see yet. You must have ADHD, she says. Maybe she’s right. As a kid, teachers wondered, but no one checked.
My daughter has it: properly named, properly understood. I watch her spark and tumble like I did. Like I still do. For me, it works. I built a life and a job around it. I work in a creative world where wandering minds are valued: connecting dots, seeing patterns, pulling sparks out of thin air. This scatter is my fuel. It feeds my ideas, shapes my work, keeps my days full of what ifs.
But for her, it’s harder. School wants straight lines. Tidy rows of thought, focused, neat steps from A to B. I see her bright, busy mind trying to squeeze itself into those boxes. Sometimes it fits. Often it doesn’t. And that’s the tension. The same spark that makes her light up the room makes the system frown and say focus.
It doesn’t always fit neatly. Some people want the straight path. Point A to point B to point C. I can do that when I need to. I can hold the thread steady, rein it in. But inside, I’m always jumping fences, circling back, stitching wild connections that don’t look like they belong… until they do.
Is it a struggle? Maybe. But not for me. The real struggle would be trying to hush it down, tidy it up, make it smaller. I’ve stopped pretending. I let my mind run.
Some people can wander with me. Those are the best conversations to have. Together we leap, lose the path, find something better on the other side. Some can’t, and that’s fine. They have structure. They have calm. And I value that they stick with my meandering mind, even when it loops and leaps and doubles back. I try to meet them where they are, and keep the thread clear enough to follow.
But when I can, I let myself roam. I let my mind tumble, loop, spark. That’s where my wonder lives. That’s where my work lives. That’s where I find the unexpected dots: waiting to be connected in ways nobody told me to look for.
