A DOOM Pile In The Right Place

The Executive Function Papers #1

Jan 22, 2025

I make piles. Papers on my desk, food scraps in my freezer, words in my notes app. Shit everywhere.

I’m going through one in the closet at my mom’s house, a bin full of black-and-white photographs I made in college and little Kodak snapshot folders from when we used to drop disposable cameras off at Walgreens, and there’s one of the bathroom I shared with my brother, both of us executively-dysfunctional kids.

You can’t see the counter at all, for the piles. My mom says she took it for evidence.

My surfaces still look like that sometimes, twenty years later. In the ADHD corner of the internet, this practice is called Didn’t Organize, Only Moved. Or: DOOM piles. It is, I am told, a symptom:

“The struggle with organization for children and adults with ADHD stems from their executive function deficits.”1^⁠

“ADHD is a biologically based disorder and a developmental impairment of executive functions – the self-management system of the brain.”2

“Individuals with executive dysfunction often struggle to analyze, plan, organize, schedule, and complete tasks at all — or on deadline. They misplace materials, prioritize the wrong things, and get overwhelmed by big projects.”3

This was supposed to be a research paper — I’d submitted an abstract to a call for critical papers on ADHD by ADHDers, organized by Dr. Dyi Huijg and Dr. Eric Olund. It’s such a cool project, and as a non-academic, I was stoked when my abstract was accepted. I spent most of last year reading and thinking and making piles of notes, but when I started trying to put a first draft together, I kept getting stuck.

A handout called ADHD and Graduate Writing says that it’s common to hit a wall during long-term, unstructured projects, because ‘success depends heavily on executive functioning.’4 Ironically, the paper I’d proposed was a political critique of executive function, written through the fog of my own struggles with it. I never made it to grad school (too tired, too much debt already), but there I was trying to sneak my way into academic publishing, anyway — me and all my piles, running straight into that wall.

Where is that thing I read? I trace breadcrumbs through notes I made months ago, shambolic folders full of loose words, half sentences, links to articles that say [FINISH READING] next to them; bookmarks I left for my future self, now scrambling.

How did I write papers in undergrad? The truth is: I studied art. There were no tests — instead we sat around a table for hours looking at artwork, talking and questioning and critically brainstorming. There were no papers, either — instead we curated photographic theses, or we made videos, or we put up wacky installations around campus.5

In the rare instance I had to write a paper for an elective, I would tuck myself into a corner chair on the top floor of the library, loop Drink The Sea by The Glitch Mob in my headphones,6 and stay there all night. Sometimes I bought Vyvanse off someone in the bathroom (I’d let my Adderall prescription lapse because I hated it), or drank an entire colada by myself (Miami)7 or did a few key-bumps of cocaine (Miami!!).

Once, I stayed up all night writing a ten-page paper due in the morning that I was certain absolutely fucking sucked. I turned it in cringing, telling myself that at least I was turning in something — only to get it back a week later, surprised by a perfect score. This is how I began to realize that I struggle to accurately assess my own performance — poor ‘metacognition’, one of the categories on Peg Dawson and Richard Guare’s Executive Skills Questionnaire.

Staring blankly into word piles at my desk last year, after the deadline for first drafts had been extended and extended again, I started to doubt all the data I had about myself — that I am good at this writing thing, that I know anything worth writing at all. But instead of staring up at the wall and feeling like a failure, I thought: maybe these words just don’t want to be a research paper.

It’s an idea I got from reading Fernand Deligny, a French educator whose work I’d been exploring as a counter-concept to executive function. In the late 60’s, Deligny founded a home in the Cévennes mountains for non-verbal autistics who otherwise would have been institutionalized. There, his staff studied what he called their ‘wander lines’ by mapping the paths they made throughout the day.

one of Deligny’s wander maps of the kitchen which shows ‘the movements of the three autistic children while bread is being made’

Deligny wasn’t interested in using this data to change the autistics in his care:

“..we were in search of a mode of being that allowed them to exist even if that meant changing our own mode, and we did not take into account any particular conceptions of mankind, whatever these might be, and not at all because we wanted to replace these conceptions with others; mankind mattered little to us..”8

In his book The Arachnean, itself a woven series of small essays, he returns to the theme of a project that makes itself over and over again — a spider doesn’t weave her web, for example, but ‘the web’s project is to be woven.’

Deligny thought it was a mistake for humans to view our species at the top of a hierarchy due to our capacity for higher-order thinking — the kind described by theories of executive function — and that in our ‘aspiration toward superiority’, humans lose the understanding that we are not the ultimate architects of the network of life.

Deligny wrote:

“To respect the autistic being is not to respect the being that he or she would be as other; it is to do what is needed so the network can weave itself.”9

Many painters, he wrote, talk about their work as a process of revealing the painting that lives inside the canvas already. People who do not paint take this ‘almost as a joke’, he writes, because ‘everyone knows’ that the painting comes from ‘the head, the soul, or the heart of the painter.’

Wryly, Deligny warns:

“It is a big mistake not to listen to those who know what they are talking about."10

I average about 2,000 words per post, so last year, I estimated about 56,000 words in 2024 — a small book’s worth, despite still being unable to figure out how to write an actual book. Blogging works for me because of the immediate feedback I get from my readers; the way my essays build slowly over time into something larger. They become a network that links back on itself, a web of my words you can navigate choose-your-own-adventure style.

Sluggish is my word-pile, and I feed it to you piece-by-piece.

Writing the Dopamine Dispatch showed me that I love to serialize, and that I work best when I can follow-up later, wander off on tangents, and connect everything with hyperlinks — an ADHD aesthetic, you could say. I decided to listen to the words and let them weave something else here instead. We’re going to call it The Executive Function Papers.

This is not going to be a denial of executive dysfunction — I hope in being honest about my own experiences, it’s clear that I don’t believe it’s just a matter of mislabelling or overmedicalizing. There are real differences, dysfunctions, and disabilities happening here. But at the same time, science is not a ‘view from nowhere’ — ideas about the brain grow out of ideas about human nature, which grow out of material conditions.

The concept of EF is no exception — it is not objective, neutral, or value-free. We’re going to explore the idea’s history and politics without dismissing or denying its painful reality for so many of us. Talk of EF in popular media is often focused on teaching ADHDers neurotypical ways of organizing, time-keeping, and achieving. But as I wrote in my piece on the dopamenu, we also have things to teach you.

A DOOM pile isolated on my desk is clutter, but there’s a saying in gardening: right plant, right place.

My compost pile is a DOOM pile, too, one that thrives without any top-down organization at all. Of course, there are neat, tidy ways of composting, but I have way too much chronic fatigue to regularly turn my pile, so I never do. Mostly, I dump my scraps and ignore her for weeks at a time.

you can tell which side the compost is on

The microbes don’t really need much of my ‘thought-out project’ — as long as I pile up an adequate ratio of browns to greens, they slowly and steadily churn waste into nutritional gold.

There are composters who look down on this as ‘not really composting’, because if you don’t turn the pile on a regular schedule, it doesn’t get hot. But cold composting has its benefits, too — greater diversity of fungi, for instance. It’s slower and less efficient than hot composting, but it still makes compost eventually.

The space where my compost sits started as an empty patch of dirt; it’s now the most verdant section of my garden, with the healthiest, bushiest plants. But I never look at that dirt-patch-turned-flowers and think, I did that.

I didn’t organize, only moved — the pile did the rest. She is a powerful monster — an organism made of a billion other organisms, like me — and turning my pile into flowers is a collaborative project. Not executive functioning, but ecological.

So, here are a few questions I’ll be exploring in this series:

Where did the idea of a ‘self-management system of the brain’ come from?
How does it reflect our political realities?
What other ways could we think about our functioning, and what possibilities could that create?

To find out, I’m going to make some piles.

Sluggish

A DOOM Pile In The Right Place

The Executive Function Papers #1

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