We All Know Adhd Leads To Forgetfulness, But Here's Some Especially Insidious Ways That This Wears On

we all know adhd leads to forgetfulness, but here's some especially insidious ways that this wears on me:

i forget about things that i'm looking forward to, like games, events, or days off – so my future looks bleak, boring, distant, and joyless, as though every day is just going to be another day of Work and Not Much Else.

i forget about my own burnout and how little energy i have – then i push myself too hard and collapse almost instantly, over and over again. then i guilt myself about being so tired all the time!

i forget about my own accomplishments, no matter how big or small – leading to a strong sense of imposter syndrome and even worthlessness. digital projects hidden in folders away from sight, physical works fading into background noise on a shelf somewhere…

i even forget my own emotional state, and the events that lead up to it – meaning i usually end up internalizing all my feelings, bottling them away for years without ever acknowledging or processing them, simply because i forgot they were there!

my world consists entirely of what's in front of me right now, and what's on my mind right now. even then, i don't even have my whole present, much less any of my past or future.

i'm just doing my best with what i have, in the moment.

The Missing Sketchbook

I finally found one of my missing sketchbooks last night! Naturally, my first instinct was to take pictures and post it online, lol. It's around ten years old, so I've forgotten about nearly everything that's in here – this is a big deal for me!

This is the first page??? I don't remember the context of this sketch, whether it was by reference or whatever – but I definitely don't remember ever drawing anything this complex. The fact that I even attempted it kinda blows my mind 🐲

Holy frick it's a redraw of a super old Kirby puzzle I made... Every row, column, and diagonal has something in common – can you figure them all out? (Probably not, some of the answers are really obscure details that I could never quite capture.)

Once again, I have no memory of ever drawing something this complex, but my inner 14-year-old's heart is fluttering with excitement. The Mario vs. Donkey Kong series was my first time really sinking my teeth into level design! But that's a story for another day...

Mini golf courses! These are fairly simple, but I was always fascinated by the design and gimmicks of a particular one I went to as a kid. There's a bunch more of these in the other sketchbook I'm missing, including one with a waterfall!

WAIT WHAT??? ANOTHER BIG PAGE????? And it has a bunch of redraws from the original AAAAAAAA

Okay, okay, before I get carried away, the Big Page was something I did in my first sketchbook where I would fill in a bunch of boxes with little Kirby scenes!

Here's what the original (four or so years prior) looked like – much bigger page, but much, MUCH smaller boxes, lol. I remember it being so hard to draw that small, looks like I corrected that mistake in the newer one. Maybe I should do this again sometime...

Wait? Wisps?? Sonic Colors???

counts out the years on my hands

Yeah I guess that adds up, doesn't it...

I did a lot of perspective drawings in this particular sketchbook – it was kind of a natural extension of the mazes I drew in my graph paper notebooks (which I always did way more of than sketches).

This one was a test for the next two...

SPACE! This scene was inspired by the later levels of Thruspace, which I can't seem to find screenshots of. I really loved how the walls open up as you go, and you start seeing more outside the tunnel.

I hope I can stream Thruspace one day, it's still near and dear to my heart.

This sketch helped me map out the image on the right – one of my first pieces of digital art! I'm still really proud of the concept behind it. No two pixels touch orthogonally... although one's missing from the digital version, whoops!

This was for Mario's 25th, ten years ago.

Here's some Mario items and enemies, to practice shading with just a pencil. Honestly, it wasn't "practice" at all – I just thought they looked cool like this, and I wanted to try it out in different ways. Whether it looked right didn't matter as much.

I really miss that mindset…

Some more assorted sketches:

A few Chao in various shapes and sizes. They sure are a diverse little species, aren't they?

A Zelda dungeon room – I don't remember how it works. I just remember wishing I could make whole dungeons! (Still do, honestly.)

Finally, here's the wackiest one of all: A concept for a rotating game system! Each of the four colored sections has a control stick, two buttons, and a "paddle" at the bottom (the colored-in part). There's also an accelerometer, so you could rotate it and play from any section!

One game might ask you to put one hand on either side, like a regular controller. Another might ask you to hold it from the bottom, like a Game Boy… but four people could hold it and play like that all at once! It's a little like the Switch's multiplayer, but pre-dated by nearly ten years!

I didn't really come up with any games for it, though – and in hindsight, I think it may be a little *too* out there for anything much more than the obvious:

A Platformer But With Gravity

Steering Wheel

WarioWare: Twisted

But I'm just amazed I came up with this at all.

———

Anyway, that's mostly it! This is a tiny sketchbook with 24 pages, and I've shown all the big stuff.

Drawing was usually a way for me to express ideas rather than practice quality, but I'm surprised by how much I tried to push my limits here – only to completely forget it all.

This was the last sketchbook I kept up with regularly, before being overtaken by "I can't draw, all my drawings suck" for several years... right as I had just started looking at quality on my own terms. Luckily, I'm starting to catch up again lately ✨

I'm still missing one other sketchbook in between this one and my first, but it might be lost to time – I knew this one was buried in a box somewhere, but the other had been missing for much longer. If I find it, we'll do this again!

In the meantime, back to drawing.

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

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.

Long Desk

with a little help from twitter, i decided to get some upgrades for my streaming setup! easier streams lead to more streams, after all ✨ so i got myself a new monitor and a new router so i can stream from my room again. but the biggest upgrade by far:

how it started vs. how it's going, Long Desk edition

look at how much more space there is now!! this is literally exactly the same model of desk i've had for nearly a decade, except twice as long. thus: Long Desk.

i've always liked these cube shelves, so i made them part of the desk setup.

what used to be a completely separate entertainment center setup that i had to fumble around with every time i wanted to stream, is now a dedicated streaming/recording setup that cleanly extends my existing digital workspace – ready to go live at any time!

definitely not hinting at any future drawings here...

but far more exciting imo is that the whole other half of the desk is a dedicated PHYSICAL workspace, something i've never had before! i'm hoping this will encourage me to experiment and sketch more often, as well as practice drawing in a much more focused environment.

all i have to do to change my focus is switch the chair from one side to the other, and all the tools i need are already there – no more having to get Set Up, do stuff from my bed, clean up clutter gathered from a thousand different hobbies… less friction, more creating!

Long Desk

My most ridiculous level yet comes with an equally ridiculous speedrun! I did mention there were different routes in this level, right? This was my clear check run ✨

Treasure Tower Takedown (v2) | TGL-L3V-6FG

A mysterious tower with untold riches has appeared over the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser’s armada is storming in to search it by force. Race to the top to claim the treasure before Bowser does! Featuring multiple routes, secrets, and even endings, but a very tight challenge – this one’s for super players!