Had Big ADHD Fun Times The Other Day While Trying To Get Dinner...

Had big ADHD fun times the other day while trying to get dinner...

There's a farmers market style place about five or ten minutes from where I live. Besides the usual produce etc., they also serve hot food like tamales on the cheap. My mom picked up some boudin from there once (yes, I live in Louisiana), so I figured, why not go try it?

I didn't realize before I left, but I was spacey as hell, which makes driving twice as hard... and twice as dangerous. I could feel myself violently snap back to reality every time someone turned out in front of me, which happened way too often for being, again, a five to ten minute drive.

I made it there safely by some miracle, but while I was in line, I couldn't stop thinking about how weird the drive was. This didn't happen the last time I was here getting tamales, right?

Anyway, I got up to the counter and asked the lady working there for some tamales. She went to the back, opened the pot with tamales in it, and asked how many I wanted.

It started to dawn on me that something was wrong. Yet, I managed to ask for 3. She pulled them out of the pot and into a bag.

...I slowly remembered I was here for boudin. How did I get tamales???

I thought about correcting myself, pointing out that I meant to say boudin. But the tamales were already out of the pot, she was already ringing them up, and I didn't want to explain how I could have possibly made such a huge mixup. So I rolled with it.

The drive home was a lot easier, which was probably for the best, since I was now twice as spacey – completely fixated on figuring out literally what just happened???

That night, I had tamales for dinner. They were good. But they were not boudin.

I still haven't gone back yet for boudin.

my animal crossing oc, Rivers, may be her own character instead of a self-insert, but there was a brief moment where she almost wasn't… and it completely smashed my understanding of my gender identity

i started playing new horizons as myself, much like i did with new leaf. thing is, this was a very boring way to play AC, because i didn't click with the majority of clothing options, and mostly stuck to jeans and hoodies

(i also do this IRL, which is usually a yellow flag regarding gender…)

more importantly, this also extended to hairstyles. i didn't like any of the male styles at the beginning of the game, and wrote off the female styles as "not for me." so i went with the one i disliked the least, hoping there would be more options later.

and there are! after a few days, a magazine shows up that unlocks more hairstyles and colors. unsurprisingly, i still didn't like any of them. the only thing i could decide on was blue hair, but even that didn't feel right for some reason…

i started messing with the female hairstyles, just to try everything, make sure i wasn't missing something that might work. i still didn't click with them…

until this one appeared. and i froze up.

i don't really know how to describe everything that went through my head all at once.

"i like that one!" "that's not me." "it's cute!" "it's WRONG." "it COULD be right…" "…but i'm so scared." "…but it's so nice…"

"…why am i having such a hard time with this?!"

keep in mind: this was before she was Rivers. this was me deciding for myself.

and after an exhausting few minutes of chasing myself around… i finally managed to hit the A button. just to try it out for a bit. i could always change it back, after all.

i didn't change it back.

and for a little while… this was me! not just a character to project onto, but me.

in fact, Rivers only came into her own a few days later, after i was a little more disconnected from the idea of being a girl. (i am genderFLUID, after all!)

i wanted to try the same thing again with clothes, but i still had the same issue where nothing really clicked with me. at a certain point i just started trying on whatever might look cute on her, and that's when Rivers really became her own character.

in any case… i will always remember that moment of frozen hesitation, of hard self-examination, of asking difficult questions, for being the moment that put the biggest chip in my shell.

Thank you, Animal Crossing, for bringing me one step closer to finding my truest self.

Creation As Communication

It's not exactly a secret that I was the quiet kid, growing up. I was homeschooled, I was fairly sheltered, and there weren't a lot of other kids in my life – so most of my time was spent around adults. (Even when there were other kids, the reason was usually about the adults.) Add autism into the mix, and you have a very introspective child whose life happens around him, rather than through him. I mostly just sat in the corner and did my own thing, until somebody else reached out to me.

"My own thing," of course, involved a lot of video games and Legos. But at some point, drawing was added to the mix.

It started fairly innocuously – my dad showed me how to make a maze, so I took that idea and ran with it, filling stacks of graph paper with mazes of all shapes and sizes. Eventually I got a sketchbook, and started filling it with Kirbies and other video game things I liked. I didn't have much training with it, not even "how to draw" books; as a result, most of my drawings were fairly simple. But that didn't matter, I just enjoyed the act of creation. In lieu of talking, creation was how I expressed ideas – to myself, mostly.

Now, as I mentioned previously, I was not a major player in the life happening around me. So anytime I was dragged along to something important that the adults were doing, I brought something to do. Quite often, it was a sketchbook. And as I sat in the corner, plotting my latest maze or whatever, sometimes one of the adults would remember I exist, and try to involve me a bit so I didn't feel left out:

"Hey, what's that you're drawing?"

So I turned my sketchbook to show it.

Almost invariably I was met with the same answer: "Wow, that's amazing!"

We would spend a minute looking through the last few pages of stuff I've drawn.

And then they would turn back to adult business.

Now, I need to stress that to the average adult, these were absolutely incomprehensible hieroglyphs. That's not because of their quality or anything – but I was drawing either video game characters and scenes that they weren't at all familiar with, or page-spanning labyrinths that would take several minutes to make sense of, at best.

Even though I knew that their reaction to it was just cookie-cutter encouragement, it always felt like some part of their reaction was... genuine? Perhaps it was their tone, or the fact that they gave it more than just a quick glance – but they really seemed surprised by what I was making, even if they couldn't understand it. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, born out of the fact that I was getting any attention at all.

Whatever it was... I wanted more.

I started bringing my sketchbooks to more places, coming up with bigger ideas, and learning how to talk about what they mean when it was finally "my turn" to speak. I made certain things just to excitedly await the time that I could show it and talk about it and have my time in the spotlight (which was really more like a candle). And then, once it ended – as it always did – I would go back to my corner and draw some more.

Sometimes this was the most communication I had for weeks.

Eventually, I started to become proud of my creations – not just because of the attention they garnered, but because people had really nice things to say about them! I embraced my identity as the quiet creator, both because it was working really well... and because it was all I knew.

Then, my sheltered life came to an end when I went off to gifted school, and a couple of things happened all at once:

At some point I started to have some confidence in my drawing ability – enough to say I was good at it. Then somebody called my bluff.

I got on the internet. As it happens, lurking in the corner on the internet is a great way to be completely forgotten.

Life started requiring that I actually participate in it myself, rather than things just happening around me.

But I didn't just lose a hobby, or struggle with coming out of my shell. No, I have been dealing with the fallout of losing my main method of communication ever since.

All my childhood I was the quiet kid in the corner with his sketchbook, and suddenly I lost all of that. No longer did I have the sketchbook to fall back on, since I "wasn't good at it." No longer could I stay quiet, since I would be left behind and forgotten. No longer could I stay in the corner, since I finally needed to take center stage of my own life.

Not all of these habits were healthy, of course – but I never had the space to grow out of them. Instead, I had to drop everything I knew.

All at once.

Even today I struggle with falling back on these methods. It's why I stay so quiet until I've made something like a drawing or a level. It's why I struggle to keep up with friends that I didn't really have before. It's why I put so much emphasis on "projects" and "making stuff." It's why I spend so much time pushing my creative limits, shooting for the stars in the hopes that more people might notice, maybe even stick around.

Writing this just feels like another one of those Big Things to show people in the hopes that somebody else will know what to do about it... even though I know I'm the only one who can figure it out.

Honestly, in a lot of ways, I have figured it out. Being on the internet taught me how to stand out more, and be supportive of others. Having more friends my age taught me how to be present in the moment, and responsive to others. Livestreaming taught me how to speak out more, and come out of my own shell.

And all of these things taught me who I am not just as a creator, but a person!

...Even still, I struggle to find that piece of myself again.

Redraw of my current Twitter avatar – my Animal Crossing OC, Rivers! I should properly introduce her here sometime.

Moonshot Scaffold | SSG-R79-3HF

A treacherous ascent up a space elevator that's still under construction! As you go up, less of the elevator is constructed – meaning fewer platforms to catch you if you fall. One slip could send you tumbling back through the stratosphere...

This time Sky’s made a monster: introducing Cartridge Tilt, a random level generator for Mari0 that builds glitchy, corrupted looking mappacks!

Read more and try out some pre-generated maps: https://forum.stabyourself.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5396

It may look like an incomprehensible mess, but this uses a structure-based generator under the hood to give order to the chaos – generating familiar elements like pipes, hills, and bridges, but in completely random orders and positions. Recognize anything in these screenshots?

Seriously, this is over 1500 lines of Lua! You can check out the whole thing on Github, and even run the script yourself with several options: https://github.com/skysometric/cartridge-tilt