Have you ever been mentally frozen?
Having Attention Deficit Disorder (or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) can be a blessing, when you know how to use it to your advantage, and sometimes it just flat out sucks ass. Having ADD has granted me this amazing ability to hyper fixate on a multitude of things, one of which was learning photography (the settings, how the exposure triangle worked and how you could manipulate it, how to edit, how different lenses give you different images, so on and so on). But then there are times, where everything just Stops. Not just in the sense that I stop learning or I can’t pay attention, I mean my brain just freezes and there’s nothing I can do to move past it.
I’ve had this issue come up before in the past, mainly when I was in school, and a lot of people dismiss it as “oh well it’s because you have ADD, so you just can’t pay attention”. But that’s not it, because (I can’t speak for others that have ADD, but) I can actually pay attention quite well, and typically I pay more attention than those that don’t have ADD. This frozen thing is even different from Hyper Fixation, and I’ve found that it typically happens after Too Many hyper fixations. I’ll try my best to give an analogy.
Imagine a hard drive as a brain, and we’ll say that the “normal” operating procedure to put files of information onto this “brain hard drive” is one file at a time. Now this file is filled with just enough information that the brain needs to learn something, maybe over a long period of time which gets downloaded to the hard drive in multiple files, and those files all stay relatively small in size (easier for the hard drive to load). That will be our example of a typical individuals learning experience. Then there’s my brain, and how I learn things. My hard drive functions like any other, what screws everything up is my downloading system. I have an uncontrollable fear that if I don’t learn everything I can, I’ll lose interest and Stop/Delete the file part way through its download. So I hyper fixate on things, cramming the file with as much information to keep me interested as possible, making the hard drive try harder to download the “fat file”. On top of that, I learned that I can actually hyper fixate on multiple things at the same time, as long as it was relatively in the same subject (photography, videography, editing, production, audio, lighting, etc.). But the down side to that is my brain, or hard drive, gets to a point of downloading so much information that it crashes, and subsequently freezes.
No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try (which most times makes it even worse), I can’t get it to go away. But why am I telling you this? Well it should probably be pretty obvious, but I’m telling you all this because I’m going through one of those “Frozen” moments right now. I’ve had so many things going on, between doing photo shoots, doing production shoots, creating videos, curating/building a YouTube channel, keeping up with business items for Grimlock Media, and also making sure that I’m talking and networking with people to plan future events. And all of this isn’t bad, nor am I complaining about any of it, I’m more just writing down what it is that’s happening as a heads up to what’s coming next.
Because I “hit my limit” so to speak, and I now know that I can’t continue to take on all of these things at the same time, I’ll be sitting down and prioritizing what’s most important. I can tell you ahead of time, my dealings and drive to work with True Northwest Magazine will be part of my top priority, as well as continuing to build my business how I see fit. But certain things like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook will more than likely fall off (some may get canceled entirely).
One thing that won’t be canceled is this blog. I’m very proud of this little blog, whether anyone reads it or not. Additionally I’ve found that it helps me free up space in my brain, which very well may help me get past this damn Freeze.
Thanks once again for reading (if you did, and you got to this part, type out “brain freeze” in the comments), I really do appreciate everyone that gives me support in all the things I do.
Catch y’all later.
Andrew Hoyle - Grimlock Media
