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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | Recapping a Life

Lately—for the past few years, to be honest—I have sensed a pattern to my TV watching, and it always goes like this: the first season of a show invariably gets me hooked. Maybe it’s the premise that I find intriguing—a man gets into a game of life and death to win a bonanza; a young man finds he has superpowers, and finds himself fighting his father to save the world; a bunch of rich white folk check into an exotic resort not knowing that death for one of them is part of the immersion. Maybe it’s the crispness of the storytelling [hello, Severance or Game of Thrones or Dark], or the world-building is so intricate [hello, The Lord of the Things: The Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time or Dune: Prophecy], or the intrigue of the format is so addicting [hello, RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Traitors US or Survivor] that there’s no way I cannot make myself watch. Maybe it’s the way the characters feel fresh, as though their existence has been meticulously sketched just for me [hello, Dash and Lily]. I can be enthralled by what I find on Netflix, on Disney+, on HBO Max. And I am also a completist, so I consume every episode with the kind of manic energy that can only come from needing—aching—to know what happens next. I can be obsessed with a TV show. And then the second season rolls around.

Somewhere in the tangle of new characters, shifting allegiances, and increasingly convoluted plot lines, my ADHD-riddled brain begins to short-circuit. Who is this new character again? Why are they suddenly in Westeros? Was this the guy from three episodes ago or someone entirely new? I watch, but I also… don’t. I invariably forget things. I rewind scenes but still miss crucial details. The sharpness of my understanding blurs into the background noise of a world expanding too fast for my neurons to keep up. So what do I do?

I read recaps. Religiously. I scroll through Vulture like it’s my salvation. I let YouTube videos made by pop culture aficionados to spoon-feed me the details I failed to retain [hello, New Rockstars!]. “Oh, so that’s why Kendall Roy did that,” I mutter to myself. “Oh, so the goats in Yellowjackets are a metaphor.” I have made my peace with this process. It’s a life.

Maybe it’s not just about TV shows. Maybe it’s about how my brain functions in general. The way I navigate the world, consuming fragments of knowledge in non-linear ways, always needing a narrative scaffolding to piece it all together. It’s like being an architect of my own understanding, building with borrowed bricks. But maybe this tendency to need a secondhand interpretation of things I love isn’t about laziness or even incompetence. Maybe it’s something deeper.



Maybe my adult ADHD is a rebellion against a world that refuses to accommodate minds that think in spirals rather than straight lines? Maybe all this neurodivergence is not a curse but a call—to live a creative life, an expressive one. To reject the dull machinations of an artless existence. To understand the world not through memorized facts and formulas, but through emotion, intuition, and an ability to see beauty where others see only the mundane. The inability to sit still or to execute a task so readily, to follow a linear narrative, to adhere to prescribed norms—I don’t think this is a failing. I think it is a refusal to conform to systems that were never designed for people like us in the first place.

My ADHD says: stop stuffing me with useless information. It says: let me live; let me carve out a life that is rich in meaning, in joy, in discovery; let me exist in a way that is fully, beautifully my own.

And maybe that is why I have always clung to art—to film, to books, to music, to TV shows, even with my kind of attention span—because I also like stories that sprawl beyond the confines of syllabi, that resist easy categorization. And yes, maybe I need a roadmap sometimes—a recap, a review, a trusted voice to remind me where we are in the plot—but does that make the journey any less valuable? Or does it simply make it my own?

Perhaps this is why I find comfort in my kind of creative chaos. I do not need to follow a narrative from point A to point B to understand its value. I do not need a perfectly structured essay to tell me that meaning is there, waiting to be unearthed. I am at home in the whirlwind of half-formed thoughts, unfinished projects, and sudden bursts of inspiration that sometimes fade as quickly as they arrive. And that is okay.

Maybe ADHD isn’t a disorder at all. Maybe it’s just an unwillingness to care for the crumbling order of an information age given to fake news and AI-regurgitated narratives. Maybe it’s a refusal to be herded like cattle, an insistence on taking responsibility for the shape of our own lives. Maybe it’s a radical rejection of limitation, of senseless rules. Maybe it is the quiet revolution of those who refuse to be boxed in. Maybe it’s an embrace of something better, something bigger. Maybe it is a way of being that is fluid, dynamic, deeply personal. Maybe it is a different kind of intelligence that does not bow to the rigidity of the world but instead reshapes the world to fit its own rhythms.

Maybe?

Maybe.

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