I SPY… ADHD?!

October 29, 2024

A few people who know me well know that I have always wanted to do this. The idea behind this blog was just to get stuff written down and stored someplace, all these random and ridiculous ideas I have that I hope to come back to one day when I have time to play. I also hoped to connect with other random and ridiculous people who would take the time to respond and connect. Here’s a snapshot of a day in my life… ADHD hyperfocus has taken over and my mind will not rest until I post this, but I have to be somewhere in an hour and a half and I have a LOT to do before I leave; this must get done before I can move on to the mundane tasks of life. 

Here’s how my day off work was supposed to go: 

• Get up and caffeinate
• Take holter monitor back to hospital
• Come home and do dishes
• Laundry
• Garbage/Recycling
• Laundry
• Walk dog
• Get garage ready for influx of wood tomorrow
• More laundry
• Clean out car
• Go to doc appt
• Go in to work to do paperwork and get organized
• Go to boyfriend’s to spend the night

I got the first two tasks done, but when I got home I decided to give myself an hour to watch some stand-up comedy. All work and no play, you know… Then I go to start laundry, but I have a headache that won’t quit… Where are my eyedrops? They must be in my purse. 

I start going through my purse. Too much stuff. Time to clean it out. DUMP!

And then I remember… PURSE DUMP I SPY!!!!

I have been thinking about this for, oh, about 20 years. The first time I told a friend about it was Boxing Day 2010 when we compared purse dumps (thanks to ADHD I have a terrible memory but stuff like this sticks photographically). She thought it was a brilliant and hilarious idea, but then she is a brilliant and hilarious person who I love and we’d had a few glasses of wine. I half forgot about the idea. Until the next time I had it. Over and over again. 

So today is the day that I pitch this idea to the great spy in the sky: the internet! I have always wished that someone would make an “I SPY” series of books featuring purse dumps. My child, and my grade one students, always LOVED the I SPY series of books, and I have read a ton of them over the years.  I once did a school project where each child took photographs of random objects and wrote their own I SPY style page. To this day, I have never seen grade one students so engaged in a writing task, and this was in 2009. 

Back to the grown up I SPY purse dump idea. Different titles could be “I SPY: Professions” where you guess a person’s profession by the contents of their purse. Or, “I SPY: the zodiac” where you guess a person’s sign by the contents of their purse. I assure you, the contents of my scorpio friend’s purse would be very different than the contents of my aquarius child’s purse. How about “I SPY: XXX edition?” or “I SPY: match the contents of the purse with the photograph of the person who carries it”. I could go on and on… but I won’t, because this is a quick and dirty post meant to share an idea and get feedback on it. 

FEEDBACK, PLEASE! In the form of your very own purse dump. I want to see the weird, the quirky, the mundane. The snapshots of our lives. Like a visual time capsule. The page of text accompanying the above picture might go something like this:

I SPY with my little eye:

• A tampon in the purse of a woman who hasn’t menstruated in eighteen months
• A bad mood
• A tragedy
• Difficulty breathing
• Too much makeup for someone who doesn’t wear it
• The best gum in the whole wide world
• Heartburn
• Luke’s father
• At least six indicators of my profession
• The only wallet I have had and used since age sixteen
• The only gift from my ex-husband that I cherish and keep 
• Two empty containers of painkillers
• NO EYE DROPS

There could even be accompanying pages with the stories of the tragedy, the ex-husband’s precious gift, the wallet, etc… There would obviously be a solution page because how would you know what the indicators of profession would be. I don’t know. This is an idea dump. And a purse dump.

Now, where the hell are my eye drops?! I have a headache, and no painkillers in my purse.