Life Intensifies, PARA and C4

A post-mortem exercise to help better understand a tumultuous experience in my life by Laura Flores, aka Jean Hopkins

I never thought I would experience the phenomenon often mentioned where something so big happens tona person, that their life is forever changed. the life or death wake up call, as it were. mainly because I've spent most of my life feeling a passenger on a primate yacht, left to the whims of whichever banana lover taken the helm. I'm not sure how others experience life because I've only understood others from behind the sails of this chaotic world. most of my understanding of the worldbeyond theoars is based on books. I distinctly remember the envy of characters in the babysitter's club books. when Mary Anne got a boyfriend,I wanted one too. Kristy got siblings? where are mine? I wanted to BE Claudia, her ship's monkeys were way more fun than mine! sweet valley twins, boxcar children, and saddle club taught me about how life was supposed to be. I also read everything from Laura ingalls wilder because we had the same name. Madeleine l'engle wrote great stories that sucked me in in a way those"normal life" books couldn’t. BUT THEN...I found Louis Sachar, specifically the wayside school books. they mixed the perfectly ridiculous like "the Great Glass Elevator" with the seriousness of "Anne of Green Gables." most excellent silliness, oh vermicious knids! it would surely be fantastic to live in such a world. my dear mother was raised by one of silliest people to exist: my hero! Grandpa was and will always be my hero because he learned to mi/x the perfect as amount of silly into the everyday. he was also a selfless and empathetic man whose wife reined him in enough to keep the shirt on his back before he could even think of unbuttoning it. did I mention how smart he was?and how fun! as an adult I got to watch him interact with the kids (and my17 years younger brother). it's easier to recognize the ADHD traits from the height of parenthood. He absolutely hated not doing something with his hands. He would start wiggling like his bladder was full 3 minutes into the peanuts holiday specials grandma always put on the TV. Charlie and the great pumpkin and all!he rarely made it to the next scene before his gaze would turn towards the sliding glass doors facing the backyard, beyond which lay his shop,where he spent most of his time making stuff.with a few taps of his toes, he would stand up and stride over to the door, muttering something about checking something or other. That was the best! hed twist to make eye contact with one of the grandkids, then ask if they wanted to come with? yes! was always the answer. Sorry grandma, this movie is less interesting than grandpa! Because of ways to make everything fun.if he could answer questions with a silly remark,he did,without fail. Because of him, I taught my children,"don't be a dumbass. be a smartass." they have mostly adhered. Sometimes I question their understanding of the difference between smart and dumb. All this to arrive at the present where I'm in the process of regaining fine motor control after experiencing a stroke that came from left field. While hospitalized, the nurses noted I have"positional hypotension" which caused hypertension medication to have an adverse reaction whenever I moved.oops! Even with that discovery, we still couldn't definitively blame hypertension itself for the stroke. Since life had been highly stressful for the past several months, blaming stress was much easier. So here I am now, spending weeks and months. trying to find a learn in this mess. something,a plan, to keep my brain from producing aneurysms. in my wildest imagination my brain is an aneurysm factory pushing bigger and bolder ones e every second.losing the ability to walk, use my hands, and temporarily being unable to eat, talk, or think straight, are all experiences I have no interest in repeating. I'm grateful to know how supportive my wife and cutie pie baby boys are.

but that is not the way anyone would want to learn. While rehabilitating, my care team very quickly understood there is a big difference between medicated Laura and completely ADHD Laura. Since my scripts had been purged I had nothing to help my monkeys steer more stably. While I spent my entire childhood unmedicated, over time I learned complicated and convoluted methods to control the ship's monkey captains.The most prominent method used my brain's thinking space, which I've recently learned is not the same as other peoples' when people say"picture yourself..." and then they explain what you should envision, I'm literally there, in the 3d space in my brain. It's from my perspective, so fairly close to the ground [insert short person joke here], or more often cross-legged. I sit cross-legged everywhere. My work chair, at the dinner table, on the couch, in bed. I'd sit cross legged in the car except my wife once talked me through a scenario where I lost both my legs in an accident.so now my feet stay on the floor unless we're waiting for something. Anyway, the inner world, it's this 3d space where I can reproduce any room I've been in before. I experience the world similarly, so all of my memories exist the same way. When I'm telling a story, the character spawns in the brain and I mostly just narrate for them. I use the same mental system when troubleshooting, by putting the user in my head and switching to their perspective , also when someone loses something like shoes,I load up the room they might be in and mentally take a walk around the house.this world literally re-enacts my memories so I remember everything from my own perspective every time. spacial memory is insanely powerful and we as humans barely understand and take advantage of it.anyway, my monkey captains are never interested in things like chores or work. They want to dive into fantastical worlds and shoot fire balls into sprawling forests. In order to get things done, I have to write what I call a "mental script" which is a series of actions, as recorded from my perspective in this 3d space. Let's call it the mindspace for now. Before getting medicated for ADHD, I had to run the script in its entirety in the mindspace and only then would the ship be able to do the thing. if there was no script for what needed doing, I was essentially incapacitated. Brains are amazing miracles and have infinite capacities for growth and data. One of the miracles of brains is something brain scientists call"mirror neurons." They're neurons that fire the same brain receptors as the person you're watching do something. So watching videos of people DOING A THING IS Highly satisfying because the viewer gets all the neurons fired without having to do the thing. This helps your brain get ready to do the same thing. so watching others is a really big part of unknown situations. Mirror neurons are how babies learn from the people around them. They're really neat, great for learning,, and are underutilized. One of the issues many types of "neuroatypical" or "neurospicy" people have in common is problems with executive function. I'm not clear on how it goes for a neurobland person, but I imagine it's similar to other parts of the autonomic parasympathetic system: as easy as breathing? For example, if you have to pee, you stand up and walk to the bathroom where you leave the pee. if a ball is flying towards you, you move in some way. For me with no scripts, I might think of something in time and potentially catch or dodge the ball. Getting to the bathroom in time is hit or miss because I have a damaged nerve from getting shingles many many years ago so don't always get the warning in time for executive function to load the right script to get me to the toilet before my bladder turns into the ashamed sim you keep forcing to talk to itsnew cat.speaking of, I just took a break and discovered I had to go peeeeeee. My ADHD is still largely managed by the mental space scripts, all of which disappeared the moment I had the stroke,I dropped to the floor instantly and completely lost everything. Couldn't even move my arms and standing was impossible) but the biggest difference when medicated is I can load and execute the scripts now without needing to do a preview run of the script. ADHD has many many symptoms that are lumped into umbrellas that trickle down into some increasingly frustrating little others like needing to self soothe, struggling with textures and smells because of hyperawareness. It's incredibly easy to get overwhelmed and then frustrated and angry. screaming at friends to stop chewing when they don't stop shoving stinky loud chips in their mouth, not to mention the crinkling bag sounds!!!! The cause of all this was tied to insufficient dopamine in the brain, so many ADHD people try to make up for that missing part of being human by acting impulsively and doing adrenaline-inducing things like coasters and haunted houses. Dopamine is only one part of learning, but without it, there's no feeling of achievement after succeeding. It means we can win 1st place in a contest and come across as arrogant and snobby because we don't react right. ADHD and all neurospicy people,really, live the majority of their lives completely misunderstood because our behavior doesn't match the societal norm for how we feel. I love learning and reading voraciously, absorbing what I read into the mindspace. Remembering everything is easy because I tend to associate what I've learned with something in my mindspace, which reminds me of something else, and that thing, the other thing too, plus those thingies... spatial memory is a super power we don't take enough advantage of. Part of my understanding of ADHD included the health concerns tied to long term use of certain meds. Most ADHD meds are classified and regulated to heck and back. For example, stimulants, like methamphetamines. I wanted to try something safer and less regulated, since there are frequent shortages of stimulant meds. I ended up diagnosed during the pandemic, when seeing your therapist in-person was a national event. Here in the US, stimulant ADHD meds require in person visits to get prescribed and refilled, so my doctor was limited to prescribing non-stimulant meds. The two commonly prescribed at the time were strattera or Wellbutrin. They both operate similarly, but Wellbutrin includes a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, which leaves more dopamine waiting around for neurons to send them off. a net increase in usable dopamine. The other part is a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, which increases the "fight or flight" messengers similarly to how the dopamine stays available. Instead of being an insta-fix the way stimulants are, the non-stimulants tend to work better alongside "adhd life hacks" like the mental space scripts. For me, strattera works well. I've never tried Wellbutrin but understand it should be very similar. strattera gives me enough control of myself that I can stop before doing most of the impulsive things that messed up relationships in the past. like blurting out things in the middle of an argument. arguing in the first place. uncontrollably crunching on cheezits to release tension and stress, etc. control!!! How lovely. I became hyper aware of my symptoms to the point I told my wife"what if the meds are making me ADHD?" and she kindly explained I did all those things before and just never noticed until medication helped open my eyes. My mind was blown and I proceeded to correct all the behaviors I could, now that the meds gave me this windshield to let the monkeys watch where the ship was going. Some of the symptoms I still can't manage through the windshield are related to executive function. Starting things is hard without an impetus like "if you don't go to the bathroom and pee NOW, your bladder will take over and release right here. After that you'll have to clean up after yourself, take a shower, change clothes, wash clothes, etc...doing something like eating when hungry is often on the back burner because the consequences are far away and have no obvious downsides. Similarly, parts of the autonomic system sometimes need conscious action to jumpstart, so when I gasp loudly and suddenly, it's my brain coming back online after "forgetting" to breathe.after the stroke, thankfully my psychiatrist shared knowledge of some new non-stimulant ADHD meds. Some patients even take them alongsidestimulants.one just happens to reduce blood pressure, and specifically helps with executive function.Imust say, intuniv is working well for me but makes me a bit sleepy so I don't feel the "rarin to go" type of executive function. That's what I associate with bathroom emergencies anyway. amidst all the stroke recovery I've experienced a learning world I never had as a child. It's eye opening and every day I learn more new things about the world, recovery, growth, and relationships. I was telling a friend about how cool it's been to get the opportunity to build my mental processes again and design a more supportive system for myself to help manage my ADHD better. Since I'm stress-blind, I have added stress reducing features to my framework.my hope is to prevent the stress in the first place. Some sources of stress I recognize that exist in my mental space include: past traumas,poor emotional management, accumulation of thoughts with no outlet. for emotional management, writing a journal is the number one outlet across most therapies. hmm, I should write? just try to stop me! oh right, Lefty is still recovering, so journaling with one hand? or relying on auto-correct on my phone or tablet.where do I write then???there's an app (or 10,000)for that! How do other people handle this? How do other people write when their arms don't work? Family using text to speech! Oh no .. I like my privacy when writing. Otherwise isn't it the same as having a conversation? What does Google say? oh.... 2nd brain? brain dump huh... I do that!! oh... at my friends..hmm...journalling ... Oh yeah, in college I carried my sketchbook around and used it for notes and as a bujo. but I want to make it digital! analog reeks of impermanence and is therefore completely unreliable...I used to scan or photograph the sketchbook pages and re-bind them digitally in Google Slides. That's RIGHT! WHY DIDN'T I keep that up? oh..unreliable, right... hmmmm. Well maybe one of these tools can work out? But what about all these methods of capturing and organizing? I liked Evernote back then…maybe there's something just for adhd people! There are a lot,but the parent companies tend to use predatory marketing and onboarding…but that's a future article! ADHD people are a really vulnerable group and unfortunately get misunderstood in the worst ways. I'll write an awareness article later! I'll put that on a list somewhere…hmm….🤷‍♀️

I ended up with:

pARA for file organization. I have so many ideas and lists of ideas so that part ended up in the closest app at hand: Google tasks. Oh,and Google Keep!
Google drive (for storing writing…wip,completed,etc. even childrens books can be written in Google presentations. It lets you export a pdf,too!! layout,text placement, everything. Very cool :o it's vector based and otherwise identical to Google drawings so you can draw in it too. I wrote all the jean hopkins books in Google keep and Google drawings.
Database sort of repository (augment rather than replace because Google docs is best for writing anywhere):easy notes on Android

I especially like this setup because Google is part of everything at work already,so I don't have to get anyone to buy in or approve anything. Much easier! Plus my data is largely in gdrive already so minimal fuss there, especially with importing all my college notes… Now that I've decided the hardest part,next is getting used to this setup!Gotta prepare scripts for the monkey captains so they can steer us steadily and let me jump back into work without adding to the stress vat. Hmm…my wife has made a good point that I shouldn't let fear of stress cause me stress. Well I have all these ideas hanging out in Google Tasks so I'll start with that hahaha .One of my longest-running tasks is to set up a digital bujo. Ohhh…googling something else i just thought of .. Reddit has a post referencing something called “forevernote” . I love that name! Ooo it uses Apple notes and I work on a mac for work but don't use an iPhone…hmm i could probably do something similar in Google keep.

I did! But instead of the single note for home,which I still have for a quick overview of me,right now which helps center me like nothing else has done !! I'll tag everything I want to see at once with **Home and switch to that tag when I'm ready to start the day! I'll make a work home too once I'm back to work!

With PARA, I need to decide what goes where for my 2nd brain! Ok… P is for projects,MY FAVORITE I LOVE PROJECTS! THATS THE FUN FOLDER AND TAG YEAAAAAAA! YEEE…LOL OH AALL MY PROJECTS FALL UNDER “ART” AND “WRITING” SO…I'LL MAKE TWO TAGS! Projects//art and Projects//Writing. Writing will have journals, articles,and books or stories uh oh. Some of my books have my art in them. .oh right, I can use multiple tags haha…ok… then, I'll make task lists for goals, like getting Lefty reinstalled, and going back to work. Those are my current major goals and make sense for the mental load I can handle right now. Take it slow! No rush! Re-learning how to exist as an ADHD person isn't going to happen overnight. It'll happen one day at time until all the if-then-else scripts are rewritten. I don't need to do everything overnight and I'm fortunate to have this healing time to get back in order and feel like myself again.something strattera did that has made it frustrating for me was losing my method of doing art. As someone largely prone to hyperfixation, I relied on hyperficus no, obsession with plants is not a real trait. I was trying to say hyperfocus, but some doctors argue that it's not a real symptom, but whatever you want to call it,hyperfocus helped to get me from one art idea (project) after another, prolifically even. Writing has been the same as ever so I'm re-learning how to get into the creative groove for art.I know that will play a huge part in reducing stress because creating is part of “c4” which is the system i came up with to describe my process of getting through projects and relieving my idea list, My doctor’s suggestion for the hyperfocus problem was to pause adhd meds on weekends. I think he forgot that I had to build up a tolerance first and if I don’t take Strattra on time I get “brain zaps” (they’re really weird, like I paused my sim game and suddenly fast forwarded before pausing again), so pausing meds isn’t an option doc, thank you though

C4 stands for create,communicate,consume,create. It's a cycle of creating,then voraciously absorbing everything from words to games,then creating like crazy and back to playing games or looking at videos of people making the idea list is how the project list gets started I will include screenshots of my system since it's fairly visual (for my brain anyway). My life setup is a Windows laptop for personal work,a MacBook for work (haven't touched it since May this year,and an ancient convertible Chromebook. My windows laptop is convertible too! I can even draw using the screen so I need tools that transfer well between these devices. That's why I chose mostly Google apps.I love to bookmark new things I’ve learned and interesting “tidbits” I got into that habit while in college because there was a lot of self motivated exploration with certain projects. I could easily lose track of silly replies or things I thought of while doing the group interactions the teachers required for assignments ( peer review in a slightly structured way. I’d throw all of that in Evernote and when I had to leave Evernote I never finished processing any of that nor did I find a replacement. But Google Keep does a good job and my phone has a built in floating window bubble feature so I can open apps in a shrinked down window for quick reference and copy/paste actions.Sorry I don’t know what it’s called(editing to add: it's called smart sidebar) but I have the OP11 5G with stock oxygenOS, up to date. I don’t use the mindspace app because it’s not possible to get content out of it. I have been using Substack a lot, which has been helping me figure out what I know.I love interacting with other word absorbers and learning from them.Communication must be one of the Cs in C4. it helps you solidify what you’ve learned Knowing how I intend to use my 2nd brain, to store “quick replies, like to friends. I separated the “save article” and “my replies” sources into “knols” and “snipz” a work,they're often called canned responses but I don’t like how impersonally you have to write those so usually hand type everything…oh look, another source of stress… Snipz are things like my about me section on websites where I want to add more than words from my cat.yay…

knols is short to exemplify the content it’s intended for. to reference when you say"I recently read an article that talked about…thingy”snipz are also often screenshots and photos. Google Keep has an OCR function so you can copy/paste text in a photo or screenshot

Ok, so back to PARA!! I covered my favorite part, projects. In addition to art and writing, I wanted to give more priority to certain types of projects so I added “Requests” which invariably come from my wife. There's also plain old “Ideas” and “Articles” I’ve been marking things as articles from “Ideas” when they seem to get bigger in my head. My usual process for sorting out my thoughts on something is to write an article (or less formally, a blog post).finally, I have “books” which really needs its own ream of paper, where do ideas and outlines become distinct? I almost always start from Google Keep.I made a note in Keep to help get you started with the If you can’t access it, I can invite you with your Google email address. you can reach out to me to ask :D

The tags in my Keep notes:

tags:https://keep.google.com/u/0/#NOTE/1kQnPH96pUU_dZJ44V38wstrjMOC9qZp9iL7XtS34nO5sC7jhD2U6fqNBFkIxAX8

after Projects is another project I’m planning (plus an article):archive. My initial idea is something like what my youngest did after his grandfather died(oh neat, a knol!)I’d say a cross between

writing goodbye letters to people who are no longer in your life, like a Dear John letter, and a post-mortem after an incident at work. to help turn closure into dat, in a way. digitizing trauma for archival is very much something I would do.but usually all over a friend in a massive snotty tissue hill .my friends are all pretty great people. So, for now, this lives in my framework as an idea and a project. The R in PARA is for Resources. I interpreted it as a database from which you gathered everything you know. everything from knols tto snipz, including inspirational art-types, like you’d have on a pinboard.the last A is probably the real archive…lol. one of th As is for Areas. This is like the pie chart on your financial overview. Life, Personal, Work, how your world is divided. It can help people who don’t blur the line between life and projects. I know many people consider work their life, but for me, work relationships might get blurry, but work itself is separate. I only work on a company-issued device, for example. I try to keep social media segregated too. like Facebook and LinkedIn.those Area tags can help categorize if you're struggling to divide your life areas. It helps reduce stress, I recommend it!My areas are Life (separate from personal). Life is an umbrella for the literal living part of life. relationships, health, anniversaries, groceries, etc.Personal is more of my dividing line between work and projects. I grew up in a creativity-focused environment so never saw writing or drawing as work. Those are certainly actions you can undertake as part of a job. So for me, it’s the projects I’ve undertaken for myself (and friends/family) rather than for work.