This week I started reading a book called 4 Weeks to an Organized Life With AD/HD. Usually I turn my nose up at “self-help” books, as I find the whole genre a little too new-agey and wishy-washy to take seriously, but this one caught my eye. For the first 100 pages, I felt like the authors had written a book all about me. All my emotional and practical struggles were laid out before me in plain, simple terms. I have already found myself using what I read to explain to others the difficulties I face in everyday life.

4 Weeks to an Organized Life relies heavily on the left brain/right brain concept, and explains how in a left-brained society, creative, visual, right-brained thinkers lose out. When faced with a number of thoughts or tasks, it is difficult for us to put them in a logical sequence, prioritize them, and figure out the order of the steps between Point A and Point B. This explains well my tendency to get overwhelmed easily when I have to manage multiple tasks or even one task with multiple steps. I never even realized that skill of sequencing and prioritizing came naturally to most people.

I could go on about this forever, but the point is, those first 100 pages really got me. I was sure the four-week program that followed would help me get my life together. Then I actually started reading the daily activities.

During the first 100 pages I had been okay with being described as a “visual thinker” -- of course, I have an art degree, right? The activities in the second half of the book are all visualization activities. Creating a crystal-clear mental picture, the authors insist, is the key to harnessing the strengths of the AD/HD brain.

The truth and trouble with that is, holding a detailed image in my mind's eye is like trying to grip the edge of a cliff with my fingertips. It's why I fell in love with photography and battled with drawing classes in college.

When I try to visualize a scene in my mind, even if it is my desk at work, a place I see every day, I can't force the image all the way to the edge of the frame: it dissolves into white around the edges, what little remains in the center losing detail in bits and pieces as if I am trying to remember a dream.

What does come through crystal-clear is sound. As I'm “visualizing” a series of steps in a task at the office, eventually I lose the image completely. It falls away to reveal a complex world of sound: my purse hitting the bottom of the file drawer, the door latching as I leave, my footfalls as they go from hallway to stairs to hallway to sidewalk. Sounds, it seems, can be created in my mind with perfection every time.

When I think, I think in words, spoken by a voice in my mind. I talk to myself when no one is around. If I don't understand a text I am reading, I read through it aloud. There is always music running through my head. A great song will literally tickle my ears and give me chills, a sensation a piece of visual art could never fully evoke.

So what does this mean for me? In grade school I was frightened when I was categorized as a “visual learner” because I was hell-bent on becoming a famous musician. Perhaps I was labeled so because I typically need to see a concept written or drawn out to understand it: I cannot pull words together from the air as easily as I can read them. But all the same, I have to wonder why music always came so readily to me while I struggled to keep up with my peers in drawing and painting.

With AD/HD and visual thinking being almost synonymous, I find myself in the minority once again, unsure how to overcome my difficulties. Maybe it is my fate. My Meyers-Briggs is an INFJ: we account for less than two percent of the population. I suffer from AD/HD but the visualization strategies that help most people are powerless on me. I have a visual art degree but I don't think in pictures.

That is, unless I am looking through a lens. Then I see pictures all around me.

Becoming a college student again: it's a thought that rolled around my mind many times today. As I made my journey through Bolton Hill, crossing Mount Royal Avenue on foot and strolling into the heart of the MICA campus, I slipped between scores of art students on their way to and from class and surprised myself at how well I blended in. I looked like one of them, for sure, and for the first time I was adrift in a sea of people like me.

This was hardly a homecoming experience. After spending many months of my undergraduate career wishing I could share company with people like me, after eagerly plotting my escape from James Rouse's utopian city because I feel like there isn't a soul I can relate to in the whole town, the irony is not lost on me.

Suddenly I had to ask myself, is this where I will reach my full potential? Running up against everyone's expectations – family, friends, portfolio reviewers, teachers, even myself -- I am left with the realization that this choice is my own, and I need to approach it one-on-one, leaving all those others behind. So I am left alone to navigate this space in my life and land upon what is right for me at this moment.

My fullest potential may be waiting for me somewhere completely unlikely, a place where I will truly shine. Though I may still look like a college student on the outside, on the inside I already feel very far removed from the university. I question whether I want to fight this inertia and change direction now, when I have so much momentum in such a positive direction. I question whether I have ever stood above the rest and thrived in a place where everyone is reaching for the same thing.

In the end, it's all just choices, kinks and bends in a path that keeps leading me forward. Again I am reminded that promise is everywhere, that is one of the blessings of my life, and for now the biggest hardship is choosing between two parallel opportunities.

Since we're having a preliminary meeting with a real estate agent this Wednesday, it's high time to get going on cleaning out my old room at my parents' house.  Once I actually have a basement of my own, I don't want it to be filled with the unsorted mess of my life from ages birth-to-18.

For the most part, this is a chore in the worst way.  Most of these possessions, left behind through three moves already, are useless to me yet hold some kind of nostalgia that makes me hesitate to discard them.  Occasionally, though, I stumble upon a treasure trove.  Such was the case when I found this:

The Kodak Instamatic X-15.  This fabulous piece of plastic was the first camera I ever loved.  At age five I was gleefully snapping away whole rolls, turning them in to my mom and waiting eagerly for her to return with an envelope full of square prints.  The images lack clarity, as can be expected from the Instamatic's low-quality lens, but they document everyday life through the eyes of a child.  Simple as they are, I love my childhood photos because they are spirited and fun and, well, simple.

Somewhat unfortunately, the Instamatic was never truly mine.  An artifact from her own girlhood, the boxy plastic camera belongs to my mother.

However, there was another forgotten camera after all.  The Focal Micro 110 never got much use from me, perhaps because it used big flash bars as opposed to the more readily available flash cubes (does anyone else remember these?).

I find it especially cool because it slides apart to expose the shutter, and this motion also winds the film...kind of reminds me of a shotgun, in a way.

I have a tendency to buy quirky garments at thrift stores, only to re-donate them months later and purchase replacements which may or may not be consigned to the same fate. Last night as I was folding freshly washed t-shirts, I began thinking about the history of objects as they pass from one person to another.

A shirt is purchased at a trendy secondhand shop in Pennsylvania. Its novelty appeal for having a foreign-language slogan screen-printed on the front saves it from the purge when I move to Maryland, and it is packed away in a white trash bag labeled “summer clothes.” Later, I realize I have not worn it in months and place in the Free Box at work [http://www.greaterhomewood.org/, wishing it well in a new home.

I'm not sure if someone adopted it at work or if it was taken to the Goodwill when the Free Box got too full. I'm also not sure what path the shirt took to reach me at The Attic, where I purchased it for more than it was probably worth.

Years ago, I explored this idea with a camera. I had just visited a website which I cannot locate now, but was similar in spirit to Book Crossing. Disposable cameras were released into the wild and passed from person to person, with each taking one frame before sending the camera on its way. When a roll was finished, the camera would be mailed back to the artists, if they called themselves that, and the roll was posted on the website.

At age 17 I was even then a lover of words and images, so I began a similar project of my own. In a box tagged with return postage, I placed a disposable camera and a reporter's notebook with specific instructions: take a picture of something very important to you, record the frame number, and write a few words about what the photo was about and why you had chosen that subject for your single frame on this communal roll.

My plan was to present photos and stories together somehow, weaving together a collective tale of scenes, memories, snippets of life experiences. I was prepared to wait for up to 4 years -- I had learned to expect as much from the original website, which listed cameras as being in the wild for 2-4 years on average. My first person was chosen carefully: a coworker at the grocery store where I earned my gas money, one of the quintessential aging ladies behind the service desk, the glue that holds together the front end. I trusted her and knew her well enough to explain my project without awkwardness, but I knew the box would not cross my path before its due.

More than 6 years later, I still think of that box from time to time. Where is it? Did someone open the gift early, developing the pictures themselves in selfish curiosity? Is the box resting in a closet somewhere, the pictures screaming to escape the confines of their shell? Whose closet? Is it still in Pennsylvania? I don't remember the camera often, but when I do, these questions burn in my mind.

Perhaps I should try again, but what caused my experiment to fail the first time? Perhaps it would help to establish a home on the web for my traveling camera, allowing recipients to log its progress from place to place. Perhaps now that I know how to conduct myself like a professional artist and make a project look legitimate, people would feel more accountable when they received the camera.

Or maybe the project could take a different form. I could use it as a study of my workplace, or the seventh graders at the school where I work. People connected by an office, a school, a block, could spin a collaborative story, capture places that had impacted them in their neighborhood. 36 sets of hands could trigger the shutter, and the film would return to me wrapped in plastic and cardboard. Finally, and object that is able to recite its history, its path.

This could be the community project I've been itching to start. It wouldn't be too intensive, so I could start it before moving to Baltimore and before I truly feel I have the time to give to a major project. Over the next couple weeks I will roll this over in my mind a few times. Maybe the project that had me so fascinated hopeful as a 17-year-old kid will be dredged up and resuscitated after all.