For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
I struggle to write paragraphs covering most topics, even those I am familiar with. I can write a sentence 10 times over, before deleting it all together. My output is extremely jagged and frustrating. Finding the words to introduce ideas or to transition sentences is quite painful and slow.
My handwriting is also extremely laborious. I have to put a lot of time effort into making my writing “neat”, aka legible. Growing up, I was always the slowest kid copying down slides/notes in class.
Perhaps both of these are related to my ADHD, or perhaps I just need more practice lol. I have been making an effort these past few years and I’ve been seeing improvements.
Reading your first couple of paragraphs I was going to ask if you have ADHD, because they’re very relatable and I definitely attribute it largely to that. Practice and having a “system” for writing helps me a lot too
I had a similar experience until I read more books, specifically older books. Turns out when people had only written letters and books as the main media of communication, they wrote elegant prose. Who knew? lol
Also when struggling to find words to fill my paragraphs, I reached for connectives, and synonyms in a thesaurus. Without these, my paragraphs looked like a random assortment of sentences, repeating themselves to oblivion.
It could be ADHD. It could also be anxiety disorder. I was a history major in college, so I had a ton of papers to write. My anxiety made if extremely difficult to write anything. Like you, I’d write it out, delete, rewrite, delete etc. It was awful. At the time, I would actually start drinking to the point of being slightly inebriated. I found I could actually write better at that point, because the alcohol shut down that anxiety (and if I am honest, it made me give less of a fuck about what my professors would think of my writing). Obviously, not a great solution, but it was good short term and I always got good grades on my papers. Now that I am better medicated for my anxiety, I imagine it wouldn’t be so bad to write a paper now. Trouble is, my job really doesn’t require me to write much lol.