FOCUS
I hate the word, "focus".
Beyond just describing my deficiencies, it summarizes a concept that flattens my experience of the world. It's invalidating — inadvertently weaponized. An ill-fitted construct that leads to disbelief when I repeatedly insist, "it doesn't work like that..."
Focus is not what I seek. There's a reason (well, beyond being contraindicated by likely stress-induced high blood pressure) I'm staying away from ADHD medications for now, given the support and (lack of) demands I currently have. I don't have a single word to show you what it is that I want, the mode of existence which keeps me sane. Instead, let me take you on a walk.
It's 2AM above Helen Lake, somewhere above 10,600 ft. elevation. We're leisurely marching towards Mt. Shasta's summit, 3,500 vertical feet above. Standing on the frozen snowfield, the cold cuts at any exposed skin. Your jacket blunts the chill, but it still slowly embraces you, constricting your limbs. The ice reflects your headlamp back up, slightly blinding you. Despite the sharp, biting essence of the moment, you don't mind any of it. With each further step, the frozen crust crunches and sinks satisfyingly between your crampon teeth and ice axe in an alternating, rhythmic fashion. The orientation of your foot placement and consistency of the ice's bite appears effortlessly and constantly in your mind, just as much part of the environment as the uneven sloped snow ahead, the menacing cliffs to your sides, the serene sky above. The swishing of your outer wear, their bulk and location, is ever-present, like an extension of your skin. You, your gear, and nature find connection, and the whole obliterates its parts.
Right foot, left foot, ice axe. Right foot, left foot, ice axe.
Despite it being parked only a hundred feet below, you have already fully forgotten about your sleeping bag and tent.
Looking up, you see a few stars trodding across the slopes.
Looking back, you shine your light on me, and my gaze rises in response.
My mouth is obscured by a ski mask, my eyes hidden behind reflective goggles. No matter — they're expressionless anyway. Our headlamp beams meet. My head tilts quizzically. With a slight shake, you set your sight back forwards and take another step.
On this 70 percent grade slope of ice, you are just another three-legged animal.
The world demands your full presence, lest you lose your footing.
There is no mental room for "you".
Wants, worries, and wanderings all are extinguished by the overwhelming presence of action and consequence. The boundary between the internal and external dissolves in the present and its configurations. Every perception, every vision, every prediction is integrated into a whole sense of some kind of environment. An environment with a nature, with emotion and color and mechanics. A coherent state which evolves with each subsequent step forward.
Needless to say, when I go out to hike (as in, not going out to hike with people, but to hike), I prefer not to talk. Other hikers and climbers become strange animals on the path. If you ever wonder why I often don't say hello / gesture back to passerbys on the trail, or only manage a meager, awkward, "hey", that's why. The demands of conversation break the immersion, ripping out of the earth a designated individual "self" governed by should's, obligations, impressions, and roles. A coalescing fragmentation, a filter which groups and categorizes perception according to artificial boundaries. Disconnecting from the world, exiting zen.
If you understood that, great. A starting point. If not... well hopefully you will find something in the growing abstraction to hang onto.
The more invigorating the environment, the greater ease I have in shedding my skin and slipping into this state. Facilitators such as assaulted senses, high risk, and intense exertion come with an outwardly-paradoxical attraction. Scrambling or free soloing on sites with high exposure, pole vault, sprinting, and maximal-intensity workouts all can cause me to slip into this state, signalled by a sudden relaxation in my expression in spite of the physical challenges. A fiery intensity is somehow calmly expressed, utterly naturally, no longer forced.
This state isn't unique to physical activities. If you've read entry "orange", you see how it arises in chemistry experiments (at least, most easily outside the context of classes, and in absence of insanity). Drawing is intriguing because of its seemingly goal-oriented nature, but if you develop the baseline hand coordination to control your lines, it gives a fluency to the motions allowing one to let go, experiment, and freely explore a world of perception and visual associations.
With respect to academics, this used to be the way I recognized as my form of genuine engagement. An unforced, freely-expanding presence in the world of words, forms, and relations. Unconstrained natural exploration. Losing myself in my laptop screen, isolated in my dark room, proceeding long past after everybody else has gone to sleep. I used the dark to fix my eyes and music to shield my ears — upon slipping in, the once pleasant and upbeat songs become stripped to their nature, rhythmic noise boxing me in at the edges of perception, accompanying the transformation of the world. Wikipedia pages and textbook exerpts shuffling around in my head, information clustering, rearranging, shuffling...
All of these are accompanied by a unique and complete contentedness. Not pleasure or happiness, but the unadulterated, unspeakable serenity of disappearance, submersion, self-immolation. The sensation of time ticking through the self deconstructs, yielding to pure observation.
To be clear, in high school when this was routine, I had no proper conceptualization of this state. I just said, hey, I can focus for hours and hours studying and learn things really fast sometimes. It doesn't feel difficult at all, and it appears mostly under my control...
Unfortunately, the insufficiency of language and mundane constructs, the lack of a commonly understood phrase to communicate this state, severely impairs any attempt at driving support for me to repair myself — not only towards others, but towards myself. Ultimately, self-control is only a fictitous, relative relation; what I'm trying to convey is maligned and amputated by the ill-fitting boundaries of focus as a construct. Neither of these two conclusions are obvious from daily life at all.
- - - - - - -
It has been so long since I've tasted that with respect to academics, in spite of all my varied and persistent efforts to "focus" (including being on ADHD medication).
The last time I can remember was a year and a half ago. My philosophy of quantum mechanics essay was overdue now. I had read and reread and reread all the highlighted reading for my topic starting diligently when assigned, and even made notes on many extra readings provided by the course in an attempt to kickstart any ideas. It was probably around 3AM and everyone else had gone to sleep, leaving me sitting (where I had been for many hours already) in the dark, trying in vain to make any headway into formulating some scraps towards an answer before office hours later in the day.
Out of sheer exhaustion and frustration, my ADHD medication having long since worn off, I shamefully gave up and gave in. I pirated some random mechanics textbook I saw recommended on Reddit and flipped to the section about special relativity via 4-vector formulation out of boredom, kidding to myself that I'm still "working on my essay" by "studying" something tangentially relevant. And suddenly, the slip occurred, accompanied by absorption, expansion, release. The geometry of the 4-vector formulation unfolded a world in my head. I thought about my essay again, and immediately, the answer I needed to write was simple and obvious. Sleep-deprived me was unreasonably excitable and optimistic in office hours that day...
Due to the unforeseen scheduling of when my essay was to be actually completed, I found myself in Joshua Tree National Park, staying up all night, nestled on a cliff for cell reception, typing out my essay in one shot on my phone via Telegram messages (my laptop had poor battery life, so it was reserved for the final conversion to pdf and submission).
In lieu of me summarizing, here's an excerpt of the feedback:
This is a creative essay that shows a solid understanding of the readings and an ability to go beyond them. You’ve put heavy pressure on Griffiths’ claim ...
(would have been an A+ essay if not for lateness...)
The prof was surprised at how I seemed to feel the fundamental nuance I saw was obvious (and even more so when I said I wrote the essay on my phone while curled up on a cliff overnight).
I, personally, was ecstatic — I'd never been a particularly strong essay-writer, with all my previous academic essays feeling dull and empty to both myself and the grader... I find it not coincidental at all that no other had been a product of this state. In spite of initially setting out just to "get something in before I receive a zero," I had turned in this essay feeling like it was finally something I could stand behind, and the reception I got more than verified this.
In some sense, I am reminded of one story of a specific Buddhist monk desperately trying to attain enlightenment. Constant meditation, unending focus, vigorously practicing. One day when he had finally grown tired, he lay down to rest. As soon as his head touched the mat, arahantship was attained.
- - - - - - -
The above instance, while being a lucky success story, sneakily depicts the hidden contradiction plaguing academics for me.
A sharp distinction in quality lies between the state I describe and the "focus" given by ADHD medications: my usage of medication gives an experience that is linear, controlled, directed. It is centered and oriented, lacking any sense of disappearance and unfolding. I find being on medication to bring a sort of singularity to my being which allows for new beginnings.
On the contrary, in order for a world to unfold, it must blossom from an established bud. I cannot simply sit with any random book that suits my practical academic demands and expect it to work. Given too explicit of a goal, my state vanishes — it is incompatible with direct task completion. I can spend endless hours in my state unfatigued if the calling material is enticing enough. Entering the state is completely independent of external motivation: you could promise me anything, threaten me, etc, to no avail with regards to summoning the state. All enticement must exist solely in my perception of the call for me to successfully answer. The more distant the world, the more proactive I must be in assisting the shedding of my current senses.
By the standard I was admitted by, Caltech expects work and learning with a rate I can only produce by disappearing into the state. It is rather unfortunate that classes are antithetical to the structural requirements the state needs. Now don't get me wrong, stimulants work. In terms of the abilities it gives me, it is night and day coming from a near-zero, "this is exhausting and impossible for me," to, "eh, I'm like. average at this now." But the average person would flame out of Caltech's first term of core. I only survived for so long due to my self-studied cushion of knowledge, which I have now fallen off the edge. Maybe if I had a few more years to experiment with stimulant medications and introspect, I would be equally fluent in both modes. I see how they should be synergistic with each other in role, and how they could possibly merge into a more easily traversed continuum. Maybe I'd even move beyond seeing medication solely as a tool and find an inherent appreciation within that kind of "focus". Yet, with being diagnosed with ADHD my junior year of college, none of that is the case.
But the central thing is, academics holds a prestiged position in my life. My ability to engage sits as a measure of self-worth, my life in school places it as a central obligation to fulfill, and it stakes a large portion of my identity as a member of society. Medication does offer a sort of freedom to my self, allowing me to do what I want according to my social identity. But do I want what I want?
I want good grades. To graduate with a degree. To move forward with a career.
But the thing I want is to stay in this state. For all of my life, it has been the primary way I know to slip away and find peace, yielding a form of actualization.
A relevant excerpt from my first journal entry:
"I've lost myself. I never wanted to be a researcher, a scientist, just for the sake of being one. My energy in the past was fueled by the incessant and inextinguishable drive to seek that which I was seeking. To taste and consume, to digest something that blossoms inside me and gain life thorugh this synergistic experience. I just looked to the career as a best fit to my mode of growth. But in losing touch with who I am, I have lost the drive for this societally acceptable goal, something which was merely an expression of that true intrinsic desire. No amount of discipline and willingness to sacrifice can overcome the sheer self-sabatoging apathy I am left with from years of snuffing my instincts in an effort to do what needs to get done. Nobody but me alone can force myself to move, so I must let myself free."
- - - - - - -
Discipline, grit, and the ability to persevere and pursue the difficult choices, paths, and sacrifices — that's said to be what I'm missing. I must learn to "become disciplined". Tell me then, explain to me how I had the discipline in high school to get the prerequisite A grades in difficult classes I couldn't care less about. How I had the will to drag myself everywhere on 3-5 hours of a weekday's sleep while simultaneously being a varsity pole vaulter, while self-studying for and managing a Science Olympiad team, while having built the codebase for the school's robotics team and teaching students under me. How that magically disappears when I enter Caltech, a place I entered with the explicit purpose of flaying myself open for the sake of classes, a place I treated with a mindset of humility and openness for so long... In high school, I am exceptionally aged. In college, I am an immature child. Discipline as a trait makes little sense to me.
I think the idea of a generalizable trait emanating from a self does not fully explain the appearance of patterns of behaviors that get grouped under the label of "discipline". Rather, in addition, they all necessitate a productive alignment between self and environment. Couch potatoes who undergo a transformative yet strenuous exercise program persist because they either eventually learn to find joy in their activities, or they get addicted to the reinforcement progress adds to their sense of self. Grade perfectionists take pride in their own standards, getting stoked with each perfect score, underhandedly bragging about their status... that, or they're riddled with anxiety over imperfection. or both.
In some manner, the idea that one is "disciplined" always is upheld by the real reinforcer (e.g. pride, in the case of the "tough guy" identity). One can build one's self around that through any difficult or unpleasant activity, perpetuating "discipline". When "discipline" is "obtained", people feel like they are able to wield this so-called "discipline", when really the situation is more like a spinning figure skater, pride in one hand, "discipline" in the other, pulling both closer to themselves and spinning faster and faster in the process, grinning with glee. One may be "disciplined", but one cannot have "discipline". It's a curious notion that spreads itself by describing its propagation and promises innacurately while still yielding some kind of power to its proponents, leaving nobody really wondering.
For myself, the only reason I could get through the workload of my high school environment unscathed was because I lived for the release of the state, combined with a genuine hope for a future where I could manifest a coexistence between this state and society. This was my singular, true motivator, and I inadvertently culled it when I decided I needed to "get serious about school".
What never changed though was my willingness to sacrifice. Sacrifice is an easy choice to make. It's easy to quit watching Youtube. It's easy to quit playing video games. It's easy to lock yourself in a room and keep yourself there with a stockpile of food. All it takes is a single act to cause a large impression. I conflated this with discipline while being simultaneously inundated with messaging about how I just need more self-control. The reinforcement of my identity against the floodwaters was enough positive reinforcement to keep this behavior going, even in absence of any significant change in outcome. I just need to take all my "wandering thoughts" around the study material and shove them aside, get to them "later". I must control my mind and stay on track when engaging with the text. I was convinced that I must learn to learn the "correct" way, independent of the state, and that the state was wrong, antiquated, detrimental to the relationship between my current environment and me.
I trusted those around me to tell me what was best. I sat for many hours every day during my first segment of involuntary leave, studying from books I would rather have vomited on and engaging with math with such rigidity that the artist within me cries, staring at the pages, pushing the symbols, suffering to move towards my long-term goals. I was practicing "discipline" so that I could be ready when I go back to school. My subconscious knew something was wrong, that I was dying and being ripped apart. Yet without the framework to communicate my needs, experience, and motivations, I was fooled by language.
The state and its fruits are cruelly valued by the outside world in which it perishes. This cruelty is inadvertent. I have tried for years to gather this understanding of why things are going wrong, to work around the attractive misfit ideas that deny myself and others the internal truth I want to convey. I am invalidated by my partner who instinctively cannot believe my rough descriptors around this state when I use the word "focus" to approximate it. Only my tears bring him pause and consideration over my unmet needs and contradicting words. To simultaneously describe the state as a sort of "focus" while using the common conceptualization of the word to wipe away decades of my experience understanding this phenomena, each new instance topping off years of others... it hurts. I harden and I crack.
If you never had to deliberately focus again in your life, if someone was allowed to proceed carefree forever, I think the common understanding would be that this life is blessed. This state, on the contrary, is a complex way I've found to dance with my environment, to form relationships central to my existence. I slowly wither without being allowed to traverse this dimension of my life. I am starving, and I lash out like a scared, mangy animal in a dilapidated zoo. Overt denial of this existential suffering is a most confusing and dehumanizing sort of torment that I constantly bear when discoursing this topic.
I can no longer find the state when it comes to academic material, even when given complete freedom. I search and search... the pathways have been stomped on and disused for too long to form a whole. I detect sparks, but they fail just short of connecting. I find myself automatically snuffing the movement in return for that empty assurance that I'm staying on topic, as I have been trained. A victim of discipline.
Without sufficiently raw and nuanced dialogue about the meaning and intentions behind "discipline" and "focus", I have mistakenly allowed deep into my self a spot of corruption, causing rot and suffering. I only put in the effort to think so hard about this because I refuse to die.
I refuse to accept that I have "tried my best".
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Frankly, if you're not convinced of the independent or conceptual reality of the state, it doesn't even matter to my objective.
This writing itself is ultimately an exercise in cueing: using the words to elicit a desired response, nothing more. Athletes cued to "put force into the floor", "throw the ground behind you", or other relevant external cues result in more force and power generation, a more fluent movement. Bodybuilders, on the other hand, emphasize the "mind-muscle connection," using internal cues like, "flex your pecs", "push hard with your glutes", or "see the stretch in your hammies", spotlighting the activation of the desired muscles in isolation, ensuring their targeted hypertrophy. Generally, coaching athletes performing multi-joint movements with internal cues produces poorer outcomes. There are far too many muscles moving at once for one to adjust them individually. Even when an internal cue is directed at whole limbs and body configurations (e.g. "load your leg", "keep your heels low", "drive your hips forward"), they tend to be less successful than external ones.
The hypothesis is that internal cues direct conscious attention to the movement, yielding unwelcome stiffness and pattern breakdown. External cues, on the contrary, produce an automatic, subconscious understanding of the movement. Emphasizing a proper understanding of movement goals naturally harnesses automatic optimization of the athlete's body to achieve fluent execution.
One of my silly little pet ideas is that the power expressed by certain internal martial arts masters, attributed to manipulation of nebulous energies like "qi", is simply a mind trick of the practitioner: artificially generating an external locus to naturally channel a proficiency in generating surprising leverages and strength. Of course, the easiest way for this to manifest would be to believe in the reality of the spiritual energy, to fully feel its physicality...
So with regards to myself, the reality of the state is unquestionable. These are my honest words. The investigation becomes, what can I say to myself and what concepts can I hold in mind to most efficiently bring about the state? This is dependent entirely on my personal understanding of words and their connotations. What matters is the suffocating effect I sense carried by words like "focus" and "discipline". It makes no difference whether this is due to an actual qualitative difference in desired objective, the unique profile I carry which causes me to react how I do, or both. I refuse to work by the same advice that for years has failed to bring me to the state, endlessly hitting my head over and over while expecting something different each time around.
I know I still have the state. I can be transfixed by looping videos for hours, losing me within myself.
I know this state can be cultivated. With drawing, I used to be hit by visions roiling from my depths, accompanied by a sudden sensitivity for composition. I would compulsively sit for 8+ hours at once spitting it out onto the canvas. Drawing was the last mode of productivity which could be summoned by the state, hence I protected it by limiting outside influence, visibility, and validation towards my art direction. With a month's daily drawing practice, my sensitivity for lines and my coordinated hand now allow me to place the world out of sight and dance with a language previously opaque to me.
My current endeavor is to steer my drawing progress: can I direct myself from afar, acting as a puppeteer and guiding the evolution of the state to continually visit and revisit all the fundamentals I need? Simultaneously, can I resist the urge to interfere and shove myself onto preconcieved efficient paths? Just like how in the past, when studying for Science Olympiad topics over the year, I would somehow eventually cover the majority of the information I'd need by a sort of magic that defied all typical goal-setting frameworks, nevertheless leading to success when competition time came... I suspect that, here, the integrity of my furry identity guards me from being that cartoonist who goes to art school and comes out only being able to paint landscapes and portraits, now unable to doodle freely. In parallel, the disarming essence of furry protects me from my own toxicity.
I currently don't use ADHD medications, despite how helpful they may be otherwise, as they are so tightly associated with tendencies towards productivity. Medication doesn't cause any of this (in fact, it ideally would have the opposite effect, assisting me in calming all this nonsense), but having taken medication solely to engage with academics with the exclusive purpose of "being productive" while being coached and signalled on all fronts that this is exactly what I need to do... I am taking this medication to learn efficiently, to do what I need, perform what I otherwise couldn't — not simply to exist... all that combined with the sheer desperation I had to be "fixed" has conditioned something deep in me. The level of corruption "discipline" has brought to me is a rot that penetrates my unconscious tendencies. I am adept at seeing and deflecting these kinds of thoughts as they arise, yet that is simply another layer of self-centered chains and monitoring. There lies an obvious contradiction with the role the self plays between this condition and the state: one centers and barricades it, the other atomizes it. They are obviously incompatible. Simply, the rot must be cut.
With this writing, I am carving out a safe refuge in my brain where I can cultivate my desired relationship with academic material unperturbed. I set my future sights on math. Forget the prospect of research, forget my academic standing, forget how it might be useful to me once I return to school. This is what I see in math: engaged with in a certain style, there unfolds a distinctly clear world of structures that I can merge into. One that I can safely grow within. Free of the sharp, self-sabotaging voice yelling at me to focus. Shards of glass stuck inside an angry wound. My mind is the surgeon, and these words the dressing insulating this wound from society.
Only once the debridement occurs successfully, maybe then, I will be able to rediscover a better, more symbiotic relationship with medication and the rest of my academic interests. And "discipline" will come naturally. No more of this performative morally-tinged strong-willed shit.