About Me and My Research Process: A Chaotic Look into my ADHD/ASD Brain

AI-generated artwork of a dark gothic library using Bing’s Image Creator powered by DALL·E.

I love transparency almost to a fault. Very often, I can be so transparent that people doubt my truthfulness, as they believe I’m trying to convince them of a lie. The truth is, I simply overshare. Constantly. I’m certain there’s also a level of imposter syndrome there, too, so really, I’m trying to convince myself of the truth as awkward as it may be to do.

In the case of research, I feel it’s less about oversharing and more about allowing people to see a glimpse into my thought processes and provide others a path to follow if they want to start their own research.

To be clear, I am using the term research as defined in the OED.

To engage in research for (a book, article, or other work).

While I would love to engage in research of the “Systematic investigation or inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject”-type, my day job isn’t in academia or any other capacity where I can do that. So a review of the literature is what I am focusing on. And this is true for ADHD, ASD, cats, or anything.

Now that I’ve laid that out, I would next like to introduce myself, or at least, introduce what I feel are my accomplishments. This will be a long article, so get yourself a glass of water (HYDRATING IS IMPORTANT) and strap in!

About Me: Accomplishments Edition

In 1980, at the age of 10 and in the first grade, I received swats from the elementary school principal. This is not an accomplishment. However, the reason for the swats was. We were assigned to read a Dick and Jane book. I finished mine in mere moments and then opened up the chapter book I’d brought from home. I think it was King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry but it could have been Call of the Wild by Jack London. I don’t know when exactly I started reading. My grandparents that raised me are both dead and I can’t ask them. Anyhow, I was accused of not doing the work and taken to the principal’s office where I received the aforementioned swats. The next day, my grandmother pulled me out of that class and put me into another.

In the 3rd grade, I was selected to be a room helper for my math class. I was supposed to just be grading papers, but I learned BASIC on our shiny new computers and I also learned BANNER MANIA on my own so I could print banners and posters for my teacher.

In the 4th grade, I was placed in the 5th-grade English class due to my advanced reading and grammar skills. They wanted to move me up to 6th-grade English, but my grandmother said “One is enough.”

The following year, myself and another student were placed in a gifted program where we were bussed to another school on Tuesdays and Thursdays to meet with other gifted kids and start doing things like “brainstorming” and “essay writing.” I spent 5th and 6th grades in this program.

At the end of my 6th-grade year, my teacher wanted me and the other student to write essays (since we apparently knew how to now) about “Why we want to be President of the United States.” I didn’t, so I wrote about “Why I don’t want to be President of the United States.” I got an A and the title of “precocious” which for the longest time I thought meant “difficult” or “a brat.”

In 7th through 9th grades, I was in two separate gifted programs. The first was on the campus of our local university where a smaller cohort (gifted kids in low-income families) was bussed to on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We were paid $15 a month to be in this program. In the summers, we lived at the main campus in the dorms, took college-level courses, and were paid $30 a WEEK. Big money for young teens in the 80s, to be honest. The second was school-based, where all of your core classes were taken with the same group of kids doing AP- or higher-level work. This one lasted until 11th grade when I switched schools.

In 7th grade at the age of 13, as part of the gifted program, we could take the SAT. I absolutely LOVE tests so I took it. I scored 1000 out of 1600 (400 math and 600 English). Not impressive for a 17- or 18-year-old high school senior, but I was pretty proud of the results. So was my school.

I was made a school reporter in the 7th grade on the junior high newsletter and continued doing that through 9th grade. In the 10th grade, I submitted a writing portfolio from junior high and a new piece of my choosing. I chose to write about the recent Metallica concert I attended. I remember the first line: “It was dark and the lights throbbed through the hazy synthetic smoke. Everything smelled like sweat and excitement. The crowd moved like a singular beast, swaying to the slower sounds of ‘The Unforgiven.’” I was given not a reporter’s slot, but the Editor of the Entertainment section. In the 12th grade, I was made Editor-in-Chief.

In 2009, after the divorce from my son’s father, I went back to college. I finished college with a double major in English Literature and Creative Writing with a minor in Women and Gender Studies. During my college career, I was in the honors program and completed a few honors projects, including a 67-page thesis involving an essay on Beowulf, the dragon, and the Christian contrarian, Job, as well as an attached fictional novella titled Whispers of the Wyrm. I presented this work in front of a review committee and sat, subject to their questions and challenges. I walked away with an A on the project and an email from one of my primary literature source authors on how impressed she was with the thesis.

Cover art I designed for the Whispers of the Wyrm project in 2011. Yes. That IS Deathwing.

In 2011, I won a college writing award for a project regarding a fictional transwomen’s diary titled For Tatiana. I interviewed trans friends for this project and the result made my professor and the people that read it… and me… cry. It doesn’t have a happy ending.

I won the same college writing award the following year for a paper and Prezi titled “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Vampire Detective.” I was told, “We don’t like to award to the same student in consecutive years, but we loved this project.” Want to see it? It’s not quite the same without the speech I wrote to read along with it, but you can get the gist. Fun task: When you get to the first of the photos taped to the bookshelf (4th click, I believe), ask yourself if each person in the photo is a serial killer or not before clicking again.

Bonus: Prezis that I was particularly proud of, but, like the Sherlock Holmes one, they are missing their associated essay. I’m not a “read the bullet points” kind of presenter. Those are boring.

• Skin Deep: Portrayals of the Black Female Body
• Medieval Sexualities

I was one of 15 students to be awarded the 2012 Provost’s Academic Achievement Award. I spent all but one semester on the President’s List (Zoology hit me hard, so one semester I only achieved Dean’s List).

I was an intern under the executive editor of the horror line at a publishing company. I was tasked with pre-reading submissions and advising the editor if he should buy them or not. I also completed full manuscript edits for him. I left there with a glowing recommendation letter.

Screen capture of my recommendation letter.

More reading? Check out my writing samples linked on a defunct blog of mine: Bleeding Ink. I may move everything here to Medium. Unsure.

I’m self-taught in the entire Adobe Suite of creative products, Crystal Reporting, and SSRS. I also research anything of interest incessantly.

No, I don’t have papers published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, but that doesn’t make my research/literature review and the things I learn from them any less valid. The only thing that stood between me and a degree in Psychology (my declared major prior to switching to the English double major) was the fact that I had a very difficult time with all of the memorization required in the science classes, so I would have A+ papers and C/D/F multiple choice terminology tests. Unsure if that’s an ADHD or ASD thing, but it sure wasn’t for a lack of trying.

My Research Process: With and Without EBSCOhost Access

First of all, this section is MUCH shorter than the last one. You’re welcome! Second of all, after finishing the Me section, I feel I could split these two things into two articles because they seem a little disparate, however, I do like having my experiences and bonafides in the same article as how I research. It makes sense to my ASD brain.

Now, on to my research process!

Without EBSCOhost access my process looks a lot like this entire “train of thought” research piece I recently wrote: (Me) Apparently, I Can Be Non-Verbal. (Them) NO, YOU’RE NOT, YOU FAKER! The resultant articles and/or essays look a lot like that as well. They are more casual. They are less trying to lay out hard numbers or data or to prove a hypothesis and instead are meant to just explore a topic of interest in depth.

If I go into non-EBSCO-researching with a specific topic and goal in mind and not just a curiosity-driven traipse through a rabbit warren, you wouldn’t see so many asides and following said asides as you do in that story, but the process is basically the same when it comes to vetting my sources and how I use search. But the result is no less a casual yet deep exploration of a topic.

Screen capture of the EBSCOhost search page.

When I have access to EBSCOhost (or others; EBSCO is just my preferred) and can get past paywalls, I do things a little differently. At first, it’s pure chaos but slowly morphs into something useful. And that something is more along the lines of literal research papers with sources. Here’s the basic process I used throughout college on all of my papers, and I also used it after college when I wrote a handful of more deeply researched articles for various blogs and projects:

1. Determine my hypothesis and/or topic. What is the thing I am researching? What is the question I hope to answer?
2. Do a quick Google search with the hope of a Wikipedia hit. If there isn’t a Wiki hit, I skip Step 4. If there is a Wiki hit, I read the entry to see if there are specific references to my question/topic that can jump-start the process. Don’t diss Wikipedia. You can get a ton of great links to sources to get you started on a topic.
3. I open up a new Google document where I will gather links. This is NOT where I weed them down. My goal is to get anything and everything that at a quick glance looks like it might be of interest to my project and to do it fast without overthinking anything.
4. I create a section called “Wiki” and throw all of the links of interest from Wikipedia into the document.
5. I create a section called “Google,” open a new browser tab, and do a basic Google search on my topic without quotation marks, minus signs, or other code to weed out topics. I then throw all of the links of interest from the results into the document.
6. I create a section called “Google Scholar,” open a new browser tab, and do a basic Google Scholar search on my topic without quotation marks, minus signs, or other code to weed out topics. I then throw all of the links of interest from the results into the document.
7. Finally, I create a section called “EBSCO,” log into the university or library site that gives me access to it, and do a basic search on my topic without anything to weed out topics. I then throw all of the links of interest from the results into the document.
8. Now comes the fun part: Reading. I just start reading. I read the entire source and, if it seems it will continue to be of use, I do a Print > Save as PDF and save it to a folder. If it doesn’t seem like a good or useful source, I delete the link.
9. Once I’ve gone through every link I compiled, I then go back to my new collection of PDFs, open them in a program where I can mark them up (or print them), and re-read them. This is where things get deeper and more specific to my question/topic. This is where I start highlighting statistics or quotes or research results. The important data. This is also where I highlight other references linked within the papers that I want to go review.
10. Once I’ve done that for all of the saved documents, I go back to my link document, create a section called “Further references,” and add the highlighted references from the docs that I want to check out.
11. Then I basically repeat Steps 8, 9, and 10 until I feel that I have enough data or the references are taking me too far from my initial topic/question.
12. This is the point I gather my thoughts to decide on a starting point for my essay/article/whatever and craft my intro paragraph(s). It’s during this process that I determine how exactly my paper/article will be laid out. I do something about halfway between “pantsing” and outlining. The intro is definitely “pantsed” and the intro is where I lay out what’s to come in the remainder of the paper, which is similar to an outline.
13. And then I write.
14. And then I edit.
15. And then I add references.

And there you have it. My two types of research processes. Let me know if you have any questions. The steps seem intuitive to me since I’ve used them for the past 15 years, but between the ADHD and the ASD, I assume a lot of things are common sense when they aren’t (much to my dismay).

Thanks for sticking with me this long!