I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life.
I always seemed to get bored with them. And that’s a very specific description of what happens, but not really accurate.
I get bored and I have ADHD and bored with ADHD is like poison.
Bored is quite specifically a recipe for disaster. If I don’t move on from the thing that is causing me to be bored I will screw everything up.
Okay, not everything …
I can recognize what’s causing the boredom if I recognize that I’m bored. And often I can fix it so that I’m not bored. One of the many coping mechanisms my mother taught me without knowing that she and I were “coping with ADHD” was to make things more complicated when we got bored.
I often tell the story about already knowing how to read when I started school and my teacher requiring me to hand in work on letter recognition. It involved circling all the letter A’s, underlining the B’s and drawing a box around the C’s or other inane acts of ridiculousness.
My mother told me to rush through that and then see if I could find words in the random letters. Sometimes I’d try that, but sometimes I’d spend the work time looking out the window.
The point is …
When I tried it her way, it worked.
Fast forward to years later. I still didn’t know I had ADHD, and the only way I could immerse myself in a job was to zoom in on the details and set myself additional challenges.
You see,
If I got bored, I’d often find something else to do. If that other thing didn’t include the work I was supposed to be doing it didn’t take me long to decide to change jobs.
Farm hand, construction laborer, printing press operator, auctioneer, digital graphic artist, computer programmer, computer technician, handy man, writer, musician, contractor’s assistant, the list goes on and on.
But recently …
I clued in to something kind of cool in later life. It’s something that makes my life easier, and more difficult at the same time.
Instead of having a job, I actually work for myself doing a myriad of things. I am almost never bored anymore.
And the diversity of what I do amazes even me.
Occupation: Diversifier
I still write, I write lots of things. And I edit for others as well. I host radio shows and TV shows, I do odd jobs, handy man jobs, grunt work jobs like hauling stuff to the dump for people. I play music. I even cook and clean and do laundry when I can squeeze those things in 😉 … and I’m always open to new ideas.
This month I’m going to become a promoter for a show. If that works out there may be more shows in the future. And I’m going to keep my eyes open and my ear to the ground for other things that interest me.
I’m going to continue to diversify and conquer. I’m going to make being a diversifier a real thing. I invented the word, and I’m inventing the occupation.
Kelly Babcock, Diversifier extraordinaire!
