Slowly Moving Forward
Much of my life is the tug of war between my novelty loving adhd and my stable routine loving autistic side. Autistic anxiety has long acted as a stabilising brake on my adhd tendencies. Where adhd would push me to leave things to the last minute, my autistic side would convince my adhd that just leaving it late was the actual last minute. A bit like telling your always late friend an earlier starting time. Just like any friend my adhd has caught on the rouse.
One of the effects of becoming disabled has been that my adhd has managed to stage a takeover. My autism has been pushed into the corner and left to contribute anxiety. In the before times, things were different. My adhd might insist on piles of paper, but my autism would ensure that they were at least organised. My adhd would make a doom bag and my autism would remember what was in it. When my adhd had a food fixation, my autism would make sure I didn’t massively overstock that item. I have only realised how much I managed to juggle the demands of my adhd and autism as I have lost that ability.
The most immediate result of this is that my journal contains the word overwhelmed a lot. Becoming disabled and the onset of chronic health conditions has decimated my resilience. While it hasn’t been easy losing my physical strength, something of which I was very proud to have built, it is my loss of mental resources that I have always relied on that has hit me the hardest. I can’t say that I have been massively successful in combating that. It is a daily challenge and ongoing grief.
This last week has been all about tackling those challenges. My health and mental capacities, while improving now that I have a functional level of thyroid hormone, are still unpredictably variable. Not feeling like I am actively in the process of dying has definite advantages. I now feel like I should be planning and diving headlong into my goals for the year, as we are now halfway through and I haven’t ticked one off yet. There are practical questions, such as the return on investment for things like my Adobe subscription and website hosting fees, for example, that have to be addressed. I feel increasingly at sea and drifting aimlessly as my health has made attending poetry events in person and online impossible, while preventing me from practising or writing material too. The plus side is that this last week, while my physical health put me out of action for practical purposes, I was able to read. Previously, reading had been too much, although I did admittedly fall asleep a few times with a book in my hand.
Small steps are still steps, and I am celebrating that I have made enough progress to get frustrated with where I am and to feel like I should be doing more things. There was a point where I was looking at accepting the downhill slide that was already underway, and not what I could be getting on with. Motivation is running ahead of my ability right now, and it has been a while since that was consistently the case. Being frustrated feels like being alive.
This week I feel like I should be pausing and addressing some of my backlog tasks constructively to build a platform to assess and chase my goals. However, the state of feeling constantly overwhelmed, the lack of structure, routine and the chaos of my living environment are not states in which I am able to strive towards anything. I have managed to get through the challenges to a point where I need to get myself in a position to move forward. So, like an expedition, the time has come to consolidate my positions and secure my supply lines before I move on into the unknown.
So far, I have made some slow progress, had a great weekend, and my personal trend line is still going the right way. While tired, I am also thankful, until next time.
