Over Thinking It; In A Good Way

It is stating the obvious that I am not the same person today as I was when I started this “blog thing” at the start of 2024. I hope I am correct in saying that, for the most part, those changes have been for the better. I won’t leave an elephant in the room by ignoring the fact that my disability and illness have, as degenerative conditions, got worse.

To tldr the year so far: I discovered I was on too low a dose of my thyroid medication and that this was driving a severe decline in my health and wellbeing. Having got that sorted (for the most part), my focus has shifted from managed decline and accelerated decrepitude to more positive things. I wanted my improvement to be dramatic; it wasn’t. Instead, my “new normal” is a lower capability level. I am doing my best to see this as positive after feeling at death’s door only a few months ago.

This stabilisation has opened up the opportunity for me to plan for the future. You know, think about things I would like to accomplish and how I am going to accomplish them. For the last few weeks in my journal, I have been thinking about how I could start to plan my days, not in the productivity guru, social media, hustle bro way, but by identifying the things I would like to get done and how important they are to me.

This part I thought would be simple; it’s a to-do list. A to-do list is all the things that need to get done: booking tickets, sticking down wallpaper, painting the bathroom wall, putting on a duvet cover, listing shoes for sale, booking the car for its service and making a shopping list to name only a few. This sort of exhaustive to-do list doesn’t work for me. I feel great while I am writing it, despondent when I read it back, and then I forget all about it. I am completely overwhelmed, and I just want a chocolate milk. If I am to plan my days so I can get the most out of them (whatever that may end up being), then I need to be doing things differently while capturing the essential utility of a to-do list. My solution is a “things I would like done” list. This much shorter list will fit in the planner I have chosen, and more importantly, this list is short. It’s not trying to be a brain dump or master list; it is simply things I would like to get done that day. My first entry was to book tickets, write a blog and get towels washed and dry. The priority task, booking tickets, was done by 8 am.

My plans for the day are not a stick to beat myself with; they are things I can choose not to do, a world might end task is rare, but yes, it would get a planner entry and at least one alarm reminder. Importantly, my list doesn’t include everything; it is not a brain dump of all the things I could possibly be doing; it is what I want to have accomplished. It is achievable things, not a tool for creating failures and ways to fall short that I can beat myself up about.

I did not expect that planning to plan would stir up feelings that I was “behind” or “failing” at life, but it did. The act of writing down what my limits and boundaries were felt a lot like being a failure. What sort of person can only have four items on a to-do list when one of them is to put the duvet cover on? You guessed it, this disabled one.

Writing down realistic and achievable daily plans that move me towards what I want to accomplish felt less like empowerment and more like capitulation. As an adhd person, I love the idea of a good planner, and I may well abandon this one as quickly as I have started it. By thinking ahead, I have realised that a hitherto undiscovered part of not being able to plan had nothing to do with my neurodivergence and everything to do with my relationship to my disability. Talk about falling down a rabbit hole.

I don’t think I am alone in not wanting to fully face the impact of disability, at least not daily. Where planning was once me embracing opportunities for success, it had become the harbinger of an uncomfortable reality. I accidentally stirred up the sediment of unresolved grief, anger and resentment. It was never really about the planning; it was about becoming comfortable with facts I had been avoiding.

I didn’t think that wanting to make a short to-do list would go as far as it did. I definitely overthought that one, but in what turned out to be a good way. I knew I wasn’t fully reconciled to my disability; what I didn’t know was that my philosophical, more meta, views on disability were directly limiting my daily operational capability.

Going forward, I will see how things go, try things out, and most of all enjoy the process. The whole point of planning my day is so that I can enjoy my days as much as possible. I may have said this before, but it is about the process more than it is about the output.