Chapter One

Spinning hand in hand forming a psychological vortex were two of my worst attributes: an inability to select a single priority to work on, and difficulty focusing on just one task.

Memorial to an Unknown Adult

My difficulties in being able to focus on just one task led to all sorts of problems. One example of this was the piles of papers that grew in various places in my apartment. The largest of them sat on my kitchen table, while smaller piles on shelves resembled birds’ nests.

These piles were made of all sorts of things, but many of them consisted of items plucked from my wallet: store receipts, cash machine receipts, fast-food coupons, and names with telephone numbers jotted down on scraps of paper. Besides that, the piles also contained a good deal of unopened mail, like bills and bank statements, plus restaurant menus that had been slipped under my door and hastily scribbled notes that I hadn’t yet dealt with. It was those handwritten notes that were my greatest cause of frustration. How could I have so many of them, what should be done with them, and where should they go?

Where did they come from? What do I do with them all? Which do I keep and which should I toss in the trash? What if I threw out something I should have kept? All these questions, plus my lack of answers, caused terrible feelings, such as bewilderment, confusion, fear, frustration, and anger, within me. That last emotion, anger, was the one that bothered me most, because I wasn’t terribly certain if my anger was directed at those bothersome stacks of papers, or at myself.

Each time I glanced at them, they almost seemed to eerily communicate back, mocking me. Sometimes, I’d make a half-hearted attempt to take action upon them by combining the smaller piles into one large paper mountain of sorts. Of course, just one look at this staggering heap was too much, and I’d quickly walk away from it and do something sensible, like turning the television on. For me, this mountain awaiting action became something of a “Memorial to an Unknown Adult.”

One evening, full of self-loathing, I confessed this inability to function normally to a neighbor. He drew a breath and said, “You’re bigger than those stacks of papers, David. Just do it! “My neighbor’s words made me feel worse.