The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Bookwork Entries 3-4
These tech-heavy entries focus on the nuts& bolts of hosting a blog. It ' s not exciting reading, but I needed to resolve this problem if I wanted full focus moving forward. Sometimes our most passionate goals require us to sludge through drudgery before we can attain what we seek. In this case, I want to host my blog on my home server, but have been putting off the grunt work because it ' s frightfully boring.This is a journal I am writing on my Kobo Elipsa eReader. (Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey)
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - August 12, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Bookwork Journaling Source Type: blogs

Bookwork Entries 1-2
While I was sick from October 2021 to April 2022, I allowed myself to pile on new projects as a coping strategy. It worked. Having new plans helped keep me focused forward. Now that my health has taken a turn for the better, however, I need to spend my time wisely. It ' s time to rid myself of cruft, and focus on the most important projects. This is a journal I started keeping on my Kobo Elipsa eReader. (Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey)
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - August 11, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Bookwork Depression Journaling Writing Source Type: blogs

That Time ADHD Helped Me Win a Couple of Auctions
The problem with chronic illness is that it's boring. I don't mean for the person stricken in bed and suffering. Who cares about them, right ⸮ I am referring to everybody else who finds the subject duller than a twenty-four hour CSPAN marathon. When the chronically sick try to tell others about their struggles, they are likely to receive no small degree of exasperation from people who can't hide their dismay, as if to say"What? This again?"Of course, not everybody is so callous, and even if they are, they aren't likely to be so open about it. They'll smile at you, nod their head sympathetica...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - July 8, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Journaling Source Type: blogs

ADHD – I Forgot that I Was Dating Somebody?
Can you be so forgetful that you’d forget that you were dating somebody? For a few groggy moments, I was convinced that I had.As I dealt with forgotten bills, paperwork unearthed from the Jurassic era, and various and sundry things I had meant to get to sometime around last September, I wondered if maybe, perhaps possibly, I was forgetful.Oh, everybody forgets things! It’s perfectly normal. For example, my mother routinely forgets my name. After bringing me into this world many long and hoary decades ago, you’d think she’d have gotten the hang of it by now, but there she goes again, calling me by na...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - May 14, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

Blind as an ADHD Bat
Ever been so ADHD that you can ’t see what you’re looking for, even when it’s right in front of your face?Given that ADHD has as many flavors as a bag of jelly beans, you might not all relate with ADHD tunnel vision. I, unfortunately, can’t say the same. If I had a jelly bean for every time something I was looking for was found right there in front of me, I could go into business and give Jelly Belly a run for their money.Today, the missing item was my iPhone. I got up from the table, left the kitchen, then wondered where my iPhone had gone. I went downstairs and searched for it. My daughter called it. I visite...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - April 28, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

ADHD: Here Are Five Steps I Use to Rein In My Focus
A lack of focus is the one common trait that all adults with ADHD seem to have, but focus isn’t as elusive as you might fear.The other day, a friend texted me out of the blue. He wanted a list of some of the things that I do to maintain focus. Initially, I panicked. I’ve been chronically ill since getting COVID–19 last October. I haven’t blogged in four months, so my ADHD advice muscles were all out of shape. Fortunately for my friend, I haven’t met a topic yet that I didn’t have an opinion on, so I worked up my courage and sent a list to him.Finding focus is a complicated issue foradult...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - April 23, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Goodreads Source Type: blogs

When Does Research Become a Fixation?
I pull back the curtain a bit today, revealing a deep, dark secret about myself —a secret so dank, surely I’ll lose the last three readers I have.I’ve been reading far too many Japanese light novels lately.It started as a form of research, but now I actually like the darn things. I can’t get enough of them. They’re my personal Pandora’s Box. I opened the beautiful, ornately engraved box, saw the plentiful wonders inside, and now I can’t shut the lid. Is this anADHD obsession, or a newfound joy? I can’t tell, which is why I’m troubled. Have you seen myGoodreads timeline? I r...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - January 28, 2022 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Depression Writing Source Type: blogs

Doomsday in December?
I’m run down and sick, so I’m posting something positive every day this week until I lift my spirits.There is a reason I’m depressed. It’s more than havingmajor and persistent depression disorder. I’ve had a surprisingly cruddy year. I have to admit that I’m frustrated because my coping strategies are failing me. This is the sort of year that could only happen to a protagonist in a dark comedy. I’ve already written before how I was severely sick for seven monthsbefore the pandemic began. This feels like slow death sometimes. I’m so isolated from others, I’m forgetting h...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - December 1, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression Family Goodreads Writing Source Type: blogs

Feeling Down, So It ’s Time To Be Grateful
Sometimes life gets me down. So what am I going to do about it? I ’ve been way too sick to blog lately or post here. I mostly lay in bed and cough. It’s a party! But I did get somebook writing in. One more chapter, and I’ll be ready to post it on Kindle Vella. Now I just need to design a fetching avatar for the book.I started feeling better yesterday …marginally. I had energy enough to remotely log into my four computers and setup SSH key pairs, moved some doge into a dedicated hot wallet, listed items on eBay, updated my dynamic DNS account to make sure my web and ebook servers were working, downgraded Calibr...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - November 29, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression Goodreads Spinning Visualizing Source Type: blogs

Good Grief! Where Have I Been All This Time ‽
My life was briefly put on hold, thanks to a certain virus, but now I’m back, more cheeky& cynical than ever!So much for new beginnings.A week after my knee surgery, just as I was able to feel more human than sore, I became sick. Then sicker. Then sicker still. A quick visit to the InstaCare on a quiet Sunday evening ushered me into my new life of exhaustion and fatigue.I’ve had five or six COVID–19 tests since the pandemic began. They were almost beginning to feel routine. That Sunday night was no different. I showed up to pick up my pre-registered self-test, then opted to be seen instead because I f...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - October 27, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression Goodreads Somnambulating Spinning Visualizing Source Type: blogs

What Gets You Down?
Sometimes external forces can induce depression. They can induce panic. They can control how you see the world if you let them.I’ve got surgery coming up this week, so I’m getting my blogging in early. I want to work on my current novel when I start to come out of the anesthesia. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m watching the crypto market implode …again.I decided to get into crypto last Spring —two days before China cracked down on Bitcoin miners and the Chinese banks that did business with them. I had only invested $10. It was play money, to be honest, but what a lesson that was fo...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 20, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression Goodreads Journaling Writing Source Type: blogs

Finding the Beauty in Chaos
A new beginning that looks an awful lot like the old one.When I set out to explore fractal art, I face a confusing array of controls& parameters. It has taken me years to develop the eye to select the best cropping, the most flattering palette, and the most interesting settings, then present them in a pleasing manner. Without this discipline, the fractal is an utter mess with no focus. By making a few poorly chosen decisions, the same mathematical location and the same color palette can appear completely different —and far less appealing.Of course, anybody with the time and desire to learn the software can produce pl...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - September 19, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: ADHD Depression Family Goodreads Journaling Visualizing Writing Source Type: blogs

Feedburner Is Dying. I'm Moving Email Subscriptions to Follow.it
Feedburner is being put to pasture by Google, so I have moved my Feedblitz email subscribers over tofollow.it. Thank you for understanding. My original RSS URL is sixteen years old, back from when I called this blogTHE Splintered Mind, long before I discovered that early blog indexers alphabetized their listings without ignoring determiners like " a " or " the " . SoA Splintered Mind was born, and suddenly I was at the top of the lists. Yep, I was sneaky. Then I discovered Feedburner which allowed me to track stats and such on the people who subscribed. Feedburner took the old RSS feed and gave you a new one to s...
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - July 5, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Somnambulating Spinning Source Type: blogs

Patience for Those Who Grieve
❝My son fricken tried to commit suicide, so I had to drive all the way over there to deal with it.A few months ago, I pulled up to the one remaining branch in my area that US Bank allowed to be open during the pandemic and tentatively approached the entrance. I had banking to do, but they had bizarrely limited hours and, of course, they were closed. So I entered the ATM area and began my bank transfers with hundreds of dollars tight to my chest, hoping nobody would come in and rob me blind while I was feeding the money into the ATM.As I was doing my banking in the comfort of their ATM fishbowl, a woman entered behind me....
Source: The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey - July 3, 2021 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Depression Goodreads Suicide Source Type: blogs