Welcome to My Brain
Hello! This is an interactive website in which you will get the chance to experience a taste of what it’s like to have ADHD. We recognize the limitations of this project, but hopefully it starts a productive conversation about ADHD.
We’ll be going through the narrative of one of the creators, MarKaye, in which she journeyed to a diagnosis while in college. Make sure to copy this link to come back to the main timeline!
https://hh-editing.com/welcome-to-my-brain/timeline/
This website includes pop-ups. If you want to experience the site or page with medication, leave ad-blocker on. For an experience unmedicated, pause ad-blocker.
Click here to get started!
Artist Statement
A project on ADHD, made to mimic ADHD, from the disorderly brain of someone with ADHD, trying to show the way that projects are made through ADHD, is destined to fail.
That does not make it a failure, the project’s existence alone is a success. But it can never be everything that it was possibly going to be. The scope of that is too large to catch.
MarKaye has described the process of making this project as something similar to giving birth: an excruciating process of separating part of yourself from yourself. In the case of ADHD, the child is parasitical and inhibits the creation of anything at all. Thankfully, Hannah is a really good midwife.
So what this project IS, is a conglomeration of a hundred ideas vomited onto a single space, connected to each other in a way that seems logical, but which interrupts itself and has a difficulty explaining what is it supposed to be in the first place.
It is also the very raw, real story of someone’s experience with ADHD and finally getting a diagnosis. At times it is disjointed, while at other times it is able to say what it means. It was technically demanding and required a lot of time to figure out how to code and put together. Simple things like timed popups and linked web pages took hours of troubleshooting and lessons on web design. It’s fitting that they seem simple to the casual observer, but took a lot of invisible effort.
There is unquestioningly a future to this assignment. It takes place within an important conversation, of mental health and the value of diagnoses, and demands more time and exploration. Already, there are 45 more minutes of footage from the 5 girls with ADHD sitting in a living room, and all 5 of those girls would like to say it’s going to become a full-out web series.
Right now that’s a very real plan: a series as disjointed as its subjects. Pinning down someone with ADHD is pretty hard, so the episodes would only ever be two people who made their schedules work, plus those who happened to be passing through the room at the time, Attention Deficit or not. Telling stories within a community is easier than telling them of yourself.
A web series could have the simplicity of structure that this project needs, while the subjects wander through topic after topic and show the disjointed nature of their lives. Then, finished episodes can be accompanied with links – in case you want to jump to where so-and-so actually finishes their story, or where such-and-such actually introduces themselves 45 minutes in (Ironically, we only got through introducing three of our 5 subjects, after an hour of sitting in a room together in front of a camera.)
