Heyo, and welcome to my second newsletter!
In case you're new or are receiving this in your email because you've followed me at some point and have completely forgotten who I am (since I forget the people I've subscribed to all the time, too), I'm Jūlija (or Ju for short), a multipassionate med student with a wandering mind and a passion mainly for medicine, linguistics, classical music, and writing.
Even though this newsletter was published in November, most of the things I deal with here are related to my focal points and experiences during October, upon which I can only fully reflect once the month has passed. Either way, I hope that this newsletter should be useful to you no matter the month. Before we get into it, here's a brief overview of this month's topics so that you can jump right to the part that interests you the most:
In Honour of the ADHD Awareness Month
At the beginning of October, I realized that I really am an ADHDer, not just someone who relates to some of the characteristics and finds ADHD productivity tips more useful than the "neurotypical" ones. Funnily enough, just the next day or so, as I scanned through some incoming email newsletters, I found out that October is ADHD awareness month.
Here's what I noticed that led me to the decision:
too much focus & a need for more stimulation to turn it on --> I do actually struggle either to focus (which also leads to forgetfulness) or not to focus on something that has pulled me in due to either interest or stress; besides, I have a tendency to multitask to reach the required level of stimulation but I exceed it and get overstimulated
restlessness (not in the physical realm but in terms of ideas) and a feeling that I need to be doing something all the time because I have too many ideas and not enough time and also everything is so interesting and why don't we everything at the same time since everything is so interesting and important and yes I have to do that now --> predisposition to overwhelm & burnout due to overcommitment and overstimulation
time blindness and a lowered sense of urgency --> difficulty getting things done by the same time frames everybody else manages to get them done in until the tasks become too urgent and I get them done in less time than I should be able to
difficulty controlling what I focus on and when --> struggling to finish tasks without accountability because my attention has a mind of its own and switches cyclically between interests
burning obsession or meh
some level of dissociation from my body and surroundings, especially when I'm excited, which might lead to me not noticing that I'm tired or cold
common deja-vu feelings (which turns out to be a symptom of ADHD related to time blindness)
No, I haven't been to a psychiatrist to confirm the diagnosis. You could write me off as a self-diagnosed attention-seeker obsessed with mental illness, I guess, but the truth is, I don't even really care about this label that much. It changes nothing, and I wouldn't want to change if I was paid for it.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that in most cases, ADHD is not a disorder. Sure, there are people with genetic disorders or traumatic injuries that impair their ability to focus, and their symptoms would be described with an ADHD label. However, and I'm not the only one saying this, many ADHDers are not even slightly handicapped or mentally ill; it's simply that their brains function differently than those of most people. I would argue that instead of a disorder, at least certain types of ADHD are just a personality type with weaknesses that are really nothing but the back side of the same coin, on the front of which you would find strengths such as:
non-linear thinking,
pattern recognition,
curiosity,
idea-generation and forming connections between ideas,
flexibility and love for change,
passion and hyperfocus (yes, hyperfocus),
the desire and energy to experience more and change things for the better,
and, as a consequence,
multipotentiality.
Yes, my superpowers come at a cost. Everyone's superpowers come at a cost. But the cost is worth it when you accept the way you've been made to be and learn to use your strengths to get around your weaknesses.
Why is it then that normal people who just have a little rarer personality type might get labeled as suffering from a disorder? Or, if they are the so-called highly functioning ADHDers, why are they still labeled as disabled when they get ahead due to their strengths, and, as do all people, struggle in other areas? Well, let's flip the coin. Suppose ADHDers were the norm (no, thanks, the normal distribution of personalities makes sense) and so-called neurotypicals were the neurodivergents of our little fictional world.
We would call them gifted, yes (just as a significant portion of gifted children have an ADHD diagnosis and many more, I suspect, are undiagnosed because the other differences go unnoticed). Such superior focus, memory, productivity, and ability to get ahead by pure will would certainly get at least some of them the reputation of a genius. At the same time, the poor people would have to struggle hard so that they would not be perceived as, say, narrow-minded, lazy (yes, lazy), and sluggish of mind. "But they're none of that!" Well, yeah, and ADHDers can focus. It's almost that their focus is stronger but needs a stronger stimulus to be activated and, well, has a bit of a mind of its own.
It's just about who sets the standard and who struggles to keep up with it, and what the majority faults the most in those who differ. Even if that's not the root cause of their problems, nor even a good explanation of the symptoms. I would argue that focusing on a collection of weak traits, rather than the brain type behind both the strengths and the weaknesses (which, by the way, diverge for all the subtypes), might hinder "diagnosis" for ADHDers who might need to hear that it's not that they're not doing anything wrong, it's that their brains are different and thus need to be handled differently. Or perhaps, the label is highly overused and society could benefit greatly from learning to appreciate personality differences.
On that note, I'm wondering about the relationship between ADHD and multipotentiality. Those of you here who are multipassionate, do you have ADHD or, if you don't have an official diagnosis, how strongly do you relate to its characteristics?
Whatever the correlation between these two traits is, I'm quite certain there's at least a level of overlap between them. Before we get into some important tips related to stimulation and burnout for ADHDers or multipassionates, I would like to share my latest project, which has the potential to be a game changer for those learning German.
Project of the Month: How to Learn German Word Order Using the X-Bar Structure
One of the greatest struggles people encounter when picking up German is the notoriously unintuitive word order.
Recently, I've picked up German myself and decided that sentence structure might be a good place to start learning its grammar from since
knowing it would help me both understand and generate new sentences more easily,
it would provide a framework where I could fit every other grammar rule.
Plus I wanted to try analyzing syntax using that interesting theory I'd just read about in my introductory linguistics textbook.
Well, that theory turned out to be a real gem.
I did a brief search and found an exhaustive article on German sentence structure, drawing X-bar structures of the example sentences under every rule.
Sweet Chomsky, the article (and others on the topic) was full of "it's difficult to define but" and "it's hard even for the natives" and, my favourite, "it's more of an art than a science" for something that, given the right tools, was indeed simple science. As I drew the trees, I realized that whole lists on where to put what type of word in what situation were actually describing the same single structure. Reading all the rules and exceptions, I could only exclaim in a half-excited, half-exasperated, eager-to-help voice to the obviously listening article, "But guys, that's just the same thing over and over again!"
In this article, I share my framework so that you can learn German word order the easy way, too: https://vocal.media/education/how-to-learn-the-german-word-order-using-the-x-bar-structure
+ a special offer!!!
For a limited amount of time and people, while I'm putting everything together and figuring out how to explain this best in detail, I can offer up to 3 40-minute Zoom calls for a casual-style tutorship for diving deeper into the German sentence structure from an X-bar perspective, in return for a symbolic donation to my BuyMeACoffee account in support of my journey of self-studying language and sharing tools for others to do the same. If you're interested in understanding German syntax, instead of memorizing a bunch of rules or purely absorbing them through immersion, you can buy me a cactus 🌵 and apply in the comment, providing a way to contact you via email, Discord, or WhatsApp.
Alright, so now we can get back to
Managing Multipassionate/ADHD Overwhelm
October was quite the hustle for me as a student, cramming everything I could for tests upon tests. No wonder that in the end, I got really close to burnout. Well, I suppose I did fall right into it, except I managed to get back up rather quickly.
It was a long Wednesday with two parts of a histology (study of tissues) colloquium, which I had barely had any time for previously, so I had to cram a lot of info in quite a memory-heavy subject. Since the test had two parts, I had to muster up the catecholamines (adrenaline and dopamine, aka stress and motivation) twice a day to prepare for the same subject, which, though without doubt fascinating, was not the kind that energizes me the most.
Afterward, neither of us had any brain energy left, much less for the anatomy class later that day or the physiology homework we had to send in that very evening. Not even after 2 hours spent chatting and laughing (instead of preparing for anatomy as planned). Not even after an additional hour spent scratching fat off the blood vessels of corpses (which we med students find a therapeutically calming activity, in case you're not sure what to think of it).
Long story short, my catecholamines ran out, leaving me exhausted and apathetic towards stuff that should have excited me. It's not that my brain felt muggy - I actually felt like working (no more input of information, though, please). It just felt like my head was exploding with a weird, draggy kind of sleep pressure, and I felt neither like doing something, nor like not doing anything. Even the next morning, I felt very little motivation for my favourite subjects (though, obviously, I had to do them anyway).
Then I bounced back. Here are my strategies for avoiding and treating overwhelm, coming from a multipassionate ADHDer med student.
Decide which day is going to be a day of rest when you do nothing related to your main activity (e.g., school/job). For me, that's Sunday, when medicine is forbidden and rest is a command. Unless an extra hard test is upcoming, I do keep this habit.
Regulate external stimulation, especially when you feel any burnout-like symptoms kicking in. When understimulated, you can add more stimulation, sure, but not all the time, and make sure it doesn't exceed the optimal range. Let yourself enjoy the moments of silence and mindlessness granted to you and use them to let your mind process everything and wander idly where it must.
Quit your obsession with fake productivity. Drop the guilt. There's zero need to fill every little moment with fun, whether said fun is a worthwhile project or even work-related stuff 🙄, or your comfort show. Avoid overcommitment and cut unimportant optional things from your [mental] to-do list whenever your intuition tells you to. I know these pursuits give you dopamine, but even the most energizing and satisfying activity can drain you like a bone when overdosed on.
If possible, give yourself time for activities vastly different from your main ones, not only in subject but also in the type of mental mode required.
Last, but not least (actually, it should probably hold the first place), take care of your body. Eat, drink, sleep, and move. Do NOT compromise on these things, no matter the reason. (Yeah, you, too, Ju 😒😏)
Balancing between the need for dopamine and the risk of overstimulation can be quite a challenge for ADHD type of multipassionates. Still, it's something you must learn if you want to survive as a restless mind in an already busy world. And another thing you must learn is to make choices that simplify your life while not reducing who you are.
Excel for Career Choices (no, not for bots)
As the type of multipassionate that I am, I often repeat that you don't have to choose and should not reduce who you are to fit some consensus-based pattern upheld by just a few fit for it and a legion of those unaware of or too lazy for other options.
The way my passions work, I wouldn't even be able to build one big group hug out of them, as Emily Wapnick, one of the first and most prominent multipotentiality advocates, calls it. I'm not interested in speech therapy for singers (does that even exist?). I'm interested in medicine, music, and language separately (though the intersections are, of course, interesting and useful to understand since they aid more than one of my pursuits), and losing any of those would be as if a huge, vital fraction of who I am just broke off.
However, it is true that you are one, not many, and time is indeed limited. Though you should not reduce who you are, you should try to minimize the chances of getting spread so thin that you never achieve anything in any area you love and instead burn out like a smoldering wick.
If you are the type of multipassionate energized by variety in daily life, not just over time seasonally or through sequential undertakings, then, even though you love doing many different things daily, too many things at the same time probably still wear you out. Besides, there's not enough time to do everything, so you do need to specialize and reduce to an extent. For this reason, finding an interdisciplinary or overarching umbrella career that covers your interests in at least one field and gives you the variety you crave along with the simplicity you need is an important step in nurturing your multipotentiality.
Thinking about my future path early on has helped me to choose the study program that would fit me the most, so, although I still have 5 years to go till specialization, I am determined to explore the options available to me as early as possible with minimum pressure.
For this reason, I have made an Excel table. Well, at first, it might seem like a feelingless strategy for bots, not multipassionate humans, but the point is not to have the computer make the decisions for me but to keep track of the career paths I find intriguing and to evaluate them based on
how many of my interests each of them covers,
how much potential for interdisciplinarity they have,
how attracted I feel to the discipline itself (versus liking it based on its connections with the other disciplines).
Here's what I did.
In the first column, I listed all the specialties I considered even remotely, sorting them according to their category based on work type and study path. The goal was not to lose any idea so that I would see as much of the whole picture of my medical interests as possible, so instead of deleting the discarded options, I made an 'unlikely' category.
In the head row, I listed all my medical and related non-medical interests that I could think of. Then I indicated how much each specialty covers each interest with a number between 1 (can find a connection if I want to) and 3 (literally about that). Finally, I wrote a formula to calculate the sum of all the interest points + the scores of my most important interests again so that those would get the most weight in determining how much a specialty covers my passions.
Since I seem to like connections between things almost more than the things themselves, the potential of each specialty for interdisciplinarity is an important factor to me when making career decisions. To determine that, I listed the same specialties horizontally and evaluated the interdisciplinary potential between every 2 specialties on a scale of 0 to 3 (the more compatible, the more points but being the same specialty or overlapping too much yields 0 points, since that would be specialization, not multidisciplinarity). To calculate the interdisciplinarity coefficient, if we could call it that way, for each specialty, I calculated the sum of all the interdisciplinarity points, as I did with interest scores.
Since interdisciplinarity is not my only concern and my interest in the specialty itself is just as important, I assigned a number from 1 to 3 to each specialty based on how attracted I feel to the specialty itself, as opposite to the interdisciplinary connections it offers, and multiplied both this and the interdisciplinarity coefficient to find the most interdisciplinary specialty that I like the most for its own sake.
A vital aspect of any career path is the work specifics, so I created a score based on my preferences for theory (1 to 3) and a calmer work environment (with negative scores for emergency-heavy specialties).
To integrate all the scores (interest score, specialization × interdisciplinarity coefficient, and work preference score) and compare the specialties, I created two columns for two versions of the final score - an additive one (sum of the three scores) and a multiplication of the three scores. The multiplication one turned out to be more useful since it yielded a negative result for the options with a negative work preference score.
Additionally, I've added a column for the time it would take to acquire each specialty.
In the end, you can disregard the result or rather modify the criteria in a way that represents your inclinations. This table is not even supposed to be unbiased: its purpose is to unload the weight of possibilities from your head to a more tangible place, help you brainstorm, and summarize the arguments for pursuing each option so that your heart (or whatever makes the decisions for you) can make the appropriate choice when the time comes.
In case you're wondering, for now, the top option is rheumatology combined with research in the field of the human microbiome. I still have a lot of doubts and, blessedly, almost 5 more years to go till I make the choice. Meanwhile, I hope you find this useful in navigating your career or education-related decisions as a multipassionate.
Thank you for reading! Hope this newsletter inspires and supports you on your journey to seeking curiosity!
Don't forget to apply for a sentence structure tutorship at a (huge!) discount if interested! Feel free to comment or email me if you would like me to expand on anything I've touched on in this letter or if you would like to share any related thoughts with me.
Write to you in a month.