One of the benefits of keeping a Bullet Journal is that, over time, you can begin to see patterns in your behaviour and thinking. The same is true if you keep a Daybook to record all the random ideas that flood the ADHD brain over the course of a few years. Prompted by a conversation last night with a friend, I decided to dig out some old note books and was stunned to discover just how amazingly recurrent certain ideas have become.

One example involves my bi-annual visits to the FUDGE roleplaying game, which you’ll recall I wrote about a few days ago. It turns out that this is regular feature of the December break from school, as well as during July, and that I have been cycling around similar applications of that game for at least three years.

Another example is the way in which my solo play cycles through a certain set of imaginary worlds, tempting me to begin very similar games which I then (unfortunately) abandon. Some themes are particularly recurrent, such as my love for prehistoric fantasy and the desire to revisit my original teenaged realm of Mykovnia.

The interesting thing about the conversation was that I recognised the need to commit myself to something and see where it might lead. In looking back through old notes, it’s evident that the cost of not digging in to a project is that it keeps haunting my subconscious mind and then resurfaces later on. In other words, if I leave a project then there’s a tendency for it to boomerang back for attention. Often this recurrence is predictable to within a few days the next year.

The conclusion I am coming to is that, as my friend said yesterday, these ideas are not going anywhere. He meant it in the sense of the ideas sticking around, even if I am focusing on just one at a time. There’s nothing to lose from working on one thing and seeing where it goes because the other ideas are all still in the notebooks. My conclusion is that these ideas are also not going anywhere simply because I am not progressing them.

Building on yesterday’s thinking, perhaps it is time to root out at least one old idea and put it through its paces. For me, the strongest and most persistent recurrences revolve around solo roleplaying. The fear of these games being crap is strong but, according to my notebooks, these games are also demanding to be played. Who am I to stand in their way?

Game on!