Losing My Marbles
The fragility of thought and the weight of words.
Writing is thinking? No. By the time it comes to writing, I’ve already done the majority of the thinking.
(THE THINKING NEVER STOPS. PLEASE SOMETIMES CAN IT STOP.)
For me, writing with ADHD feels like this:
My thoughts are like glass marbles – sparkling, heavy, delicate, spinning fast through the air. When I’m speaking it’s like juggling them freely. My hands are light, my movements fast, and I can keep almost all of them in motion if I talk quickly enough. I follow one train of thought, loop back to another, catch a third mid-sentence. It flows; it works. People can follow me (mostly?). I can keep the marbles airborne.
But when I write? It’s like someone’s strapped weights around my wrists.
I’m still trying to keep the same rhythm, to move at the speed my brain demands, but my hands can’t move fast enough anymore. The marbles start to fall, scattering across the floor one by one, and I can only watch as the thoughts I meant to catch roll out of reach. By the time I’ve wrestled one sentence onto the page, three more ideas have disappeared under the furniture, never to be seen again.
And god forbid someone interrupts me, even just for a second, when every ounce of focus is bent toward keeping just a few marbles in the air, then ALL THE MARBLES go crashing to the floor at once.
A knock on the door. A “quick question.” A notification ping. And suddenly every marble I was barely even keeping aloft skitters across the room. Some roll under the fridge. Some disappear into the gaps in the floorboards. Some are just... gone. Maybe I will see them again if I refocus and search hard enough. But for most I will never remember exactly what they were.
The frustration, the absolute fury, of losing something you were this close to capturing.
The marbles I managed to save are still beautiful, still mine. But the act of writing means only ever saving some and having to accept that I’ll lose the rest.
This is why I don’t see generative AI as a replacement for my thinking. I see it as a way to catch more marbles before they roll away. Because the thinking? That’s already happened. What I need is help turning the juggling act into something linear, something that doesn’t require you to watch me spin in real-time to understand what I mean.
The thinking never stops. But I refuse to believe that the only way to be heard is to learn to juggle with weights on.
