The Future

I make a lot of jokes about not believing in the future, but I had a conversation yesterday that made me realize that that isn't precisely true.

I know that time passes (at least in our perception). Things come and go. I know that the future will happen.

What I don't believe in is the longevity of things. Relationships, possessions, situations, jobs, etc. None of these things stick around. I have been given a lot of proof throughout my life that this is true. This is just how life works. I'm still trying to process that information and understand how it has affected my decisions over time.

It's not that I don't plan for the future. I just don't plan for the future that depends on anything being the same.
"Am I going to live in this apartment next year?"
Who knows?
"Am I going to be working at this job in a year or so?"
No way to tell.
"This D&D game is going to last the next few months."
Bold assumption, friend.

In a few months (67 days, according to the countdown app on my phone) I will be moving in with new housemates. I'm going to be relocating from Houston to Austin. I'm going to go from living alone, as I have for the past 18 months, to living with 4 other people. I'm moving in with one of my partners. Count the ways that could go wrong.

It is a stretch for me to believe that this thing will come to pass. I am hoping for it, I am depending on it, and I have a small voice in the back of my head telling me that it won't work out. The group won't want me. Something will go wrong with my finances. I can't do this.

So many events in my life prove to me that everything is fleeting. People leave. Hurricanes eat your apartment. Your storage unit gets broken into. Your mom decides to move to Virginia. Your mom moves home from Virginia and leaves half of your stuff behind. Your best friend stops speaking to you, probably because of a boy. You kind of planned forever in this relationship, but you've been unhappy for 6 months and it finally ends. Your contract position with that company doesn't get extended.

Things end. The future is unpredictable.

What the hell do I do about that? How do I live my life with that certainty in my head?

I think that I do what I've been doing for awhile now. Stick to the old cliché: expect the best, but plan for the worst. It would be too easy for me to fall into certainty that something will go wrong. I could refuse to make plans, refuse to move forward with my life, or refuse to buy things that I know that I need because I'll just lose it later.

Instead, I'm going to work on believing anyway. I choose to look my fear of and certainty of failure in the face, and I am telling them to fuck off. I am asking a lot of myself, but I'm going to try.

My motto lately has been this: Believe right up until the moment you can't anymore. Don't leave yourself completely unprepared for disaster, but don't hold yourself back from good things.

Keep your extra silverware. Don't sell your microwave. Sell the dining chairs you don't need. Move in with your friends anyway. Trust anyway.  Accept the possibility of loss, but also accept the possibility of failure.

The future might disappoint me, but it might bring me joy.

Good/Bad Days and Self-Care with ADHD

As a person with a couple mental illnesses, one of the things I have to be aware of is that I will have good days and bad days.

The depression-mania spectrum of bipolar disorder interacts with the function scale of my ADHD and executive dysfunction in interesting ways. I can control for some of these factors by managing my routine and medication, but sometimes it's just going to be a bad day. Or a good day that means the next few days are rough. With all that in mind, I have to prepare myself for either kind of day. Or week. Or month.

Today, I'm focusing that preparation on cleaning. I've got a guest coming this weekend, and my apartment is in mid-level disaster mode at the moment. It could certainly be worse, but I'm aiming to impress this particular visitor, so I'm hoping to get it up to untidy, at least. I've started making lists.

On the left is my deep cleaning list. This is the goal, on any good week. When I'm at the point where my apartment needs to be really clean, I'm going to turn to this page and see what's lacking. On the top of the right page is a breakdown of the Laundry item from deep clean. Bottom right is my list for when everything's gone to shit, I haven't seen a good day in a week or two, and I just need to be able to function in my space. 

Today's ADHD self-care is not judging myself for any of these lists. 

The deep clean list is broken down by room (my apartment is very small), and then by task, and then by the steps and pieces of that task. There are a few I probably could have broken down a little further, which is exactly what I did with laundry, but this is a good start. I've made a list that I won't look at and get overwhelmed, though it might seem like a lot to another person. I don't have to remember all of the steps to the process. I don't have to guess whether or not I've got something done. I get to check off extra boxes for every step! (This kind of instant reward helps give my brain that dopamine hit it's looking for.) It's a good list.

The laundry list is also broken down pretty far. Keeping my clothes clean is a constant struggle, and often it's a pretty low priority for me. Most people have the "I don't have clean underwear" line, and I have a similar one, but it's in a different place. I have a washer/dryer in my apartment, and I still don't do laundry near as often as I ought. So this list is, once again, my deep clean list. If I'm trying to get everything done, it all gets gathered, and then sorted, and then washed. And if I get really lucky with the energy and spoons and motivation, it might get put away. These are my sorting categories, and then the priority by which the loads are washed. Then I have where everything goes when I put it away.

The bottom list is for the really bad days. When I'm coming home from work and falling onto my couch and hopefully getting dinner before I'm done with the day. When I just need to be able to function. I need clean bowls because I eat all of my food out of bowls. I need to be able to sit in my spot on the couch. I need my side of the bed to have enough room for me. I need there to not be any food growing things or smelling bad. It doesn't make for a fun space, and sometimes it gets kind of gross, but it gets me through the day. And when I start noticing how gross it is, I know I'm doing better. When I can get up and run the dishwasher, I'm definitely getting better.

But I'm prepared for both kinds of days. And I'm doing that preparation without hating myself. Part of my self-care is also sharing this process. I hope it reaches someone who needs to know they aren't alone. I hope it shows people that sometimes, even the "simplest" task has too many steps to remember properly without help. And you can still be okay, even on the bad days.

Intrusive Thoughts

cw: obsessive thoughts

When obsessive thoughts, intrusive thoughts, and ruminating are part of both your mood disorder and your learning disability, it can make for interesting days.

You know that conversation we had two weeks ago? It’s running through my head, word for word. And that problem I kind of need to solve? I’m working on it constantly and probably journaling about it and I haven’t gotten anything figured out yet but give me a few more weeks and I just won’t care anymore. And that song I listened to this morning? There is one single line of it that keeps playing over and over and over and it won’t fucking stop. I also read over texts that I send and posts I write so many times, just bc the words are stuck in my head.

Still figuring out how to make myself slow down enough to work on mindfulness techniques.

Shopping is Hard

When your executive dysfunction cancels out your poor impulse control because you realize you need to make a better decision but you can’t figure out what would actually be the better decision because there are too many options one of which is just giving up and going home so you freeze and sit on the floor in the children’s section at Target staring at everything for 20 minutes.

Mental Health isn't Violent

PSYCHOSIS DOESNT MAKE YOU VIOLENT

MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE ARE NOT INHERENTLY VIOLENT

VIOLENCE IS A SYMPTOM OF SKEWED MORALS AND A DESIRE TO DO VIOLENCE 

(and a society that promotes, values, and does not adequately protect against violence)

Intrusive Sleep

So one of the symptoms of ADHD that I can't find talked about enough is Intrusive Sleep.

It is explained in an article on ADDitude in this way: "If... an individual with ADHD loses interest in an activity, his nervous system disengages, in search of something more interesting. Sometimes this disengagement is so abrupt as to induce sudden extreme drowsiness, even to the point of falling asleep." The next paragraph explains further "that brain wave tracings at this time show a sudden intrusion of theta waves into the alpha and beta rhythms of alertness. We all have seen “theta wave intrusion,” in the student in the back of the classroom who suddenly crashes to the floor, having “fallen asleep.” This was probably someone with ADHD who was losing consciousness due to boredom rather than falling asleep."

It also mentions the fact that this can be especially dangerous when driving on long stretches of boring road. Or, in my case, my afternoon commute home.

A lot of people that know me probably recognize this pattern in me. Interacting with life, everything is normal, suddenly having really extreme difficulty keeping my eyes open or my head up. Like clearly trying really hard and doing the "nod off and twitch awake" thing like every 15 seconds. It's happened in classes (all the way back to freshman year of high school at least) and at work, and like I said before, while driving. It fucking sucks. I'm trying to function and to focus. And my brain decides it's bored and and it's time to just check out. The only thing I've found helpful so far is taking a quick 15 minute nap, wherever I am, then getting back to my life. The driving one I still don't have a solution for. I blast music and sing along and keep my eyes open by sheer force of will.

I don't really have a good question or wrap up statement here. It just sucks.

Struggles

I am once again confronted by one of the constant struggles of mental illness- I can recognize the pattern, or the skewed thought process, or the challenging behavior... but that doesn't mean it stops happening. Recognizing "that's an irrational thought pattern" doesn't automatically make it stop being the default thought pattern.

Knowing might be half the battle, but y'all it's really only *half* the battle. And the part between knowing something is broken and getting it all put back together is tough.

Forgive Me For My Struggle

This is an update for my earlier post about the struggle of realizing mental illness but not being able to solve the issue right away.

There is another part of this that I realized as I talked through it later. I have to forgive myself for the struggle. Hell, I have to thank myself for the struggle. Yes, this is the hard part, but the time before I recognized the issue was hard too. It was hard and I was doing it alone and I could have kept doing it for a long time.

I'm not sure if it's something anyone else needs to hear, but it was something I needed to say to myself:

Not being able to solve the problem immediately isn't a flaw in me. It's part of the process. These things are hard and they're allowed to be hard. It sucks! And it's allowed to suck. I can acknowledge that without blaming myself for the feeling. I can live and work in this place where it's hard and I can get to the other side.

Fragile

My response to fragile days, at least right now, is to reach out. Not for help, but with love. I reach out to the people that matter to me and let them know it. Even though I'm afraid. Even though I'm really scared that my love is too much and I'm fretting over saying something wrong. I'm scared, and I want to isolate, but instead I'm throwing flowers. Sending little paper boats down the river and hoping that even though I can seem to feel good about myself today, maybe the people I love can.

Today I'm scared, of everything, of everyone, of doing something wrong. But maybe I'll brighten someone else's day. Maybe my impact on the word today can still be good.

Trigger

Back in July of 2017, I had one of the worst panic attacks I've ever had. At the time, I wrote and shared a description of the experience and my attempts to process that experience, with a few edits.

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I stumbled over my first trigger yesterday, and had a real honest to god panic attack. I’ve had them before, but usually not as a reaction to something specific.

I didn’t understand what that was like. Like, I got it in the abstract, but the actual feeling in the moment is ridiculous. There was this complete and utter disconnect between what I knew to be true and my emotional reaction and then a re-writing of reality to match that reaction.

A conversation with Benjamin about a completely reasonable emotional exchange somehow went sideways in my brain. I haven’t worked out exactly what the trigger was, or how to avoid it in the future, but I want to walk through the experience. I cobbled this metaphor together in a conversation with a friend.

Even at the beginning of freaking out I knew at a logical and intellectual level that things were fine. I was told that the situation was fine and I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I believed that. I knew it to be true.

But in some part of my brain...
A little boy is screaming. Everything was ending. He's standing in a grocery store and he's lost his mom, and he is certain that she is dead now, and he's all alone, and he'll never make it home again.

Primal fear of the unknown, panic and loss. And how do you listen to that little kid scream and not believe him? 
You know the little boy is wrong because you can see his mom right down the next aisle, she’s right there and everything is fine, but you can’t hear that little kid without giving in, at least a little bit...

How do you hear his fear and not think the world is ending?

My friend's answer was this: “Cause we’re adults. We’ve been there. We know the complete and utter terror, but also can suspend that belief for long enough to find help. You did this - you asked me to get you. You took meds. You went to a safe place”

I gave into the fear for awhile. I literally sat on the floor in a dark room, tucked into the corner, shaking and crying. But when I was there, I asked for help. I couldn’t hear the truth, not in my core, but I functioned. 

I stood and listened to the boy scream, felt my heartbeat pick up, tried to point out his mom. I went around the store and did my grocery shopping and picked out a couple nice snacks. I made it a quick trip. 

I asked for help. I pulled myself off the floor and out of the corner. I took medication. I got myself to a safe place. I made plans and got myself and my friend to a safe place.

Even with the kid was screaming right in my fucking ear I looked up and tried. I didn’t sit down next to him and sob.

I tried to explain to Ben what had happened. I tried, but I know the first attempts didn't make any sense. I was still sobbing too hard, and I still wasn’t ready to process what had actually happened.
Even when I’m wandering around the store, though, just buying things and checking off my list, I can still hear him. He's found his mom, he’s clutching to her skirt and sobbing on her, snot and tears and feelings all over the place. 

I made it through the rest of my day, almost normal. I hung out with friends and I learned things and I ate dinner. I made it home. I made plans and I laughed and I helped. And I shook. And every couple of minutes I looked sad and lost again. 

Mom and kid run a few more errands, but he’s never out of her sight. He hardly lets go of her hand. Won’t even go to the bathroom without her. He’s sniffling a little and might start crying again, but he isn't screaming every second.

I drew complex designs over my tattoo in sharpie. 

I patted the kid’s head when he walked by.

When I could ask for the real help I needed, I finally did. I asked for a phone call with Ben. I needed to hear his voice when he told me things were okay. I had mostly walked through the problem myself, but 

The little kid is still unsure. When they get home, mom puts the kid to bed and kisses his forehead, and he wakes up 20 minutes later and walks to her room, poking his head in for a second to make sure she's still there. Of course she is, and he knows she is, but he’d been so afraid.

Today… is this. I’m not listening to the kid cry anymore. 

He’s not crying. He’s home and in bed. He’s probably having bad dreams, but he’ll be okay.

And I read over the conversation again, looked at the words and the tone that were actually communicated. I could read it for real when the kid wasn’t screaming in my ear. 

Mom had tapped the little kid’s shoulder and said “honey I’ll be right over there” and he just didn’t hear her. When the little boy turned around, his mom just wasn’t there anymore. 

I rewound the tape and stepped back and saw the whole thing.

And the me that’s me and isn’t that little boy can see that things are okay. But damn my ears are still ringing from how long he cried and how loud he screamed. His bad dreams are still making him whimper and whine in my head. So I’m feeling fragile and strung out. I’m so tired.

The little boys is probably going to wake up a few more times and check to see that his mom is asleep in her bed where she’s supposed to be. He’ll spend a few weeks fighting a small flare of panic when he realizes he can’t see her. But here’s hoping he won’t start screaming again. And if he does, here’s hoping I won’t spend so long believing him.