I came to an interesting realization the other day after finding myself going through a disorganized practice session of 3A to 4A to juggling to washing dishes, that for most of my life, it was hard for me to focus on one thing at a time when it came to not just yoyoing but also everyday things in general.
I have adhd and it’s interesting for me to realize what that meant for my yoyoing progression as I grew up.
Despite Yoyoing for a very very long time both casually and competitively (casually since 98 and competitively since 03) I always found that I would get distracted when learning new tricks and as a result a lot of my forward progression was a bit slower than others. But while this was happening, I would get obsessive bouts of being so insanely dedicated to learning a certain move as well back and forth. But this would shift constantly! Take for example one day I would be thinking about trying a new 1A trick, I would try to learn it but constantly lose interest over and over and have to remind myself I was trying to learn this one thing. The next day, I strangely become obsessed with 4A and end up accidentally spending hours and hours watching only 4A, absorbing all 4A content, practicing only 4A and at times only one trick or move and not even realizing that the whole day is now gone by due to my hyperfocussed obsession with this one thing.
As a result, growing up with yoyo led me to learn “everything” . I couldn’t focus on 1A, so I took up 2A obsessively, then I’d lose that focus and take on 3A, which led to 4A, and then 5A, and then the alternate styles, which led to me soon branching Into other skill and flow toys.
I feel because of this I never completely excelled in a bigggg competition way in each of the styles, but did end up becoming decent overall in each.
Sometimes I wonder what my yoyo tricks or competition life would have been like if I didn’t have this sort of thing, but at the same time I feel it is uniquely me and allowed for me to have a lot of discovery within the yoyo world and skill toy world also.
My mind is a world of drifting off to other things constantly while also having the times of intense hyper focus. Who knows what I’ll be doing next I suppose haha.
For now, I just got out of a very focused few days of Kendama learning and for whatever reason I can’t seem to continue, but practicing 4a just to drop the 4a yoyo and forgetting to pick it up when I meant to led me to practice 2A again. So yay!