After trying to express my own thoughts and experiences I decided to look at the causes and science behind ADHD as a whole, as well as my form of ADHD which is initiative.
As mentioned on the left is a break down of what causes inventiveness, in simple terms the brain has a call and response system, whereby information on my surroundings triggers a message to be sent to the parietal lobe, once this signal is received it reminds the brain of its long term goal, this means that when a person is distracted, they will get back to the task at hand. The ADHD brain, however, has underdeveloped nerve fibers so no signal is sent and the brain isn’t reminded to stay on track, this leads to the person to stay distracted. It was really interesting to learn this information as I often get lost in my own world and then come back to reality and times passed without me knowing, that sensation of time skipping is likely because my brain isn’t reminded to stay on task so just drifts until it finally gets the signal. On the right-hand page, I was just responding to this information as well as trying to visually convey inventiveness. To me, inventiveness is losing time without realizing, feeling spaced out is the easiest way I can explain it and so I used that as a prompt for my illustrations.
Although it doesn’t seem like an important spread, this spread is very significant, it was a self crit in a way where I tried to lay down where I was with my ideas, and what I need to do to develop.
“So far I have struggled to produce imagery as ADHD is very close to my heart and I don’t want to misrepresent people suffering from it. ADHD is a spectrum and because of this it’s hard for me to cover and fully understand every combination of symptoms/points of view, Instead of tackling ADHD as a whole, I will break it down into smaller, more manageable categories.”
After my self crit, I had my first group crit with Nina, she advised me to narrow down on what it was I wanted to look at and simplify my approach, essentially what I had established in my self crit. The group liked my drawings that overlayed images to show the clutter of a hyperactive brain but as I didn’t have much visual work they weren’t sure where I should take the project as far as form and audience. I think narrowing down my ideas would allow me to make more informed decisions about audience, visual style, and the format my final piece would be.
The crit was pretty humourous as many other people chose quite funny subjects, I wrote down some of the quotes that inspired me to create because although my subject matter was serious, I wanted to have fun with it and make it my own, I often use humor as a lightning rod to help me come up with images and characters because if something is funny, you are imagining what it would look like because it’s obscure, but with a bland statement, I tend not to have such a strong image in my head because I already assume I know what the person is trying to say.
“What aspect of beans do you want to inform people about”
“What about beans?”
Based on the feedback I was getting and the deadline of 3 days to narrow down my ideas I panicked and wanted to change my idea completely. I thought about bread and metal but realized that the research I was doing interested me and I wanted to work on something constructive, so there’s no real reason to change, I just had to find my niche. I started to draw more of my hyperactive, cluttered drawings about a range of ideas, I would write a word down, then draw every one of the initial thoughts I had based on the word, these initial thoughts would all hit me at once so drawing them at once was entertaining. Often people have an internal monologue, I do generally but when I have a wave of thoughts they all hit me at once, and there is no monolog, instead, I feel as if I’m looking at lots of computer screens all with an image on them. Expressing my thoughts in the way they appear to me felt very satisfying.
After exploring hyperactivity I decided to focus on mental clutter. Rather than using this brief to educate people about a specific learning difficulty, I thought it would be better to offer solutions that are more versatile and can help people who suffer from a range of disabilities and issues. I have used meditation and mindfulness as a tool to clear my mind of mental clutter and as someone who suffers from ADHD, it has helped me slow down and find clarity in many areas of my life. Meditation and reflection are two of the key aspects of mindfulness, as meditation can help you calm yourself, giving you space to breathe and reflection can help enable you to make progress, rather than having time fly by, I look at the time I’ve wasted and this helps me recognize patterns in my behavior a lot easier, reflecting on negative thoughts also helps me as rather than having them linger in the back of my mind I can confront them, which enables me to move on and leave them behind.
I started to research meditation more in-depth, I used a range of sources, Headspace has a lot of good information on their website. This writing was more for me to reflect on what I had learned rather than a final piece of information/instruction. I then started to draw based on the breath, as for me the breath is the most important tool for learning to meditate and if I could illustrate that, I knew I would be able to produce a proper and informative product.
