I recently watched A Bronx Tale for the first time. 

I don’t usually watch mobster movies—outside of The Godfather classics and a few scattered others, the whole genre sort of passed me by. No Goodfellas. No Casino. No American Gangster. It was good, though! Really good. It felt earnest – heartfelt but not saccharine. The result? I now want to watch every single mobster movie ever made.

Here is what I looked up:

It’s the ADHD – and one of the crueler (or perhaps spectacular?) ironies of that diagnosis is that it’s not really a deficit of attention—it’s an overabundance. I want to give my attention to everything. All at once. Forever. Just not, apparently, to country music (I do not know why this occurs, and I have this sorry-not-sorry feeling about it. With very few exceptions, something in my brain just refuses to attach to twang and pickup trucks).

I could give a song and dance about how hard it is to live like this, but there are aspects to it that I deeply and genuinely enjoy. There is a passion there that I imagine few have for life the way I do for the things I become interested in. But it does come at a cost. I mean, after A Bronx Tale ended I went down a rabbit hole of mob movie history, then mob history history, then wondered if I could write a screenplay about a mobster turned failed screenwriter with a heart of gold and a heavy trigger finger. Or what about a mobster who stumbles upon an ancient scrypt and goes down a path of insanity wherein he slowly transforms himself into the perfect being – OR awakens some deep secret that the human mind cannot comprehe…. I started doing it again. Then I started thinking about Italian-American identity in cinema. Then I remembered I hadn’t watered my plants, drawn my comic, mowed my lawn or….. showered.

That’s what it’s like.

Creative work becomes a kind of battlefield for this tendency. I want to make everything. I want to be a video game designer. And a novelist. And a comic book writer. And a hip hop artist. And a professional wrestler (Look, his name is The Russian, he wears red booties and matching short shorts. The theme music is the come-up part of A Mark has Been Made by Nine Inch Nails. He has a manager that waves the Russian Flag around and attacks other wrestlers with it. His cheating weapons are a hammer and sickle that he sneaks under the mat. He has a rich history, okay!?). But even if I had all the time in the world—and all the skill, which, let’s be real, I don’t (especially in the case of The Russian) – there still wouldn’t be enough focus to go around. 

That’s the real kicker of ADHD. It’s not just about struggling to finish what I start. It’s about wanting to start everything and getting crushed under the weight of my own curiosity. Every creative idea feels like the only one that matters for about four hours to a week. Then it morphs into a new one, or fizzles out, or gets consumed by a sudden obsession with how lighting works in Unreal Engine 5, which pivots to how lighting works in coloring of art (If it’s a green light hitting tan skin, what color does that make it!?). 

Sometimes I envy the people who stick to one thing. One hobby. One goal. One genre of film they like and that’s it. But at the same time—how boring would that be?

Maybe there’s something beautiful about wanting it all. Maybe I’ll never finish the graphic novel, or the concept album, or The Russian’s memoir. But maybe I’ll keep sampling them like a chaotic creative buffet. Maybe that’s enough.

Or maybe this dragon encyclopedia I got from Goodwill last weekend will start this cycle all over again… now what lore can I derive from dragons….