And stole my sanity!
When I started my essay on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, was being waist deep in information about proper hosting etiquettes on my agenda? Not really.
Did I find myself memorizing each anecdote about Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen’s disastrous host-guest relationship? Yes, as soon as I possibly could actually!
Did I stop there and get back to writing my essay? No.
Did I search up Charles Dickens’s sons, his house, his parties, the guest list, the theme, the outfits, the menu, the weather, and if the chicken really crossed the road? Yes, yes, yes, and yes!
Do I regret it? No. (Yes). The anecdotes are a hit at parties (I am so behind on my readings that I am starting to believe they invented new words while I was memorizing my fifteenth anecdote), so it was worth it!
As the English say, please allow me to explain. At age seven, when a girl should be out running in a field, consuming endless hours of cartoon shows, or forcing their little brothers to play house, I found that my time was better spent scratching an inquisitive itch. In particular, how many individual kidney beans would be in my serving of rajma if my mom used the whole one kilogram packet? I created a methodology (questionable), set a day (entirely unnecessary), and got to work (if you can even call it that). Needless to say, when my mother found me on the floor of the storage room between my tally chart and kidney beans, she had questions. No matter what her question was, my answer remained, “I just needed to know, Ma, I was curious!”
Something did not add up. I had wasted a precious summer day locked inside a storage room… over a bowl of rajma? Well, the answer came a few months later in the form of a diagnosis: ADHD.
It has been 14 years since then, and I am now an intellectual contributor (seriously). The internet has changed the world, but two things have remained constant: I still love my mom’s rajma deeply, and I still find myself (metaphorically) counting kidney beans. I know my role in society is to be productive, and to do that I am not supposed to let myself get distracted with ‘futile’ experiments or anecdotes that add nothing to my critical analysis. But I cannot stop! I know it’s bad and I can see the sun setting on my empty Google Doc. The question remains: Why do I continue to do it over and over again?
To this, I say, “Great question! Would you like to hear the story of how Hans Christian Andersen invited himself over to Charles Dickens’s estate, Gad’s Hill, and asked one of Dickens’s sons to give him his daily shave because it was apparently a custom for hosting male guests in Denmark?”
And stole my sanity!