Hello and happy still technically Wednesday! Yes, this will officially publish on Thursday, and I could probably edit the publish time to make it look like I actually stuck to my intended MWF schedule properly, but I’ll let you see the back of the set. It’s a mess back here. Maybe I need to acknowledge how I actually operate and make it a Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday schedule!
Speaking of “it’s a mess back here,” I’ll just warn you now that even though movies and books are my general focus, ADHD is going to come up a lot. Like, a lot. It’s the bane of my existence. It’s my Sisyphean curse. It’s why my first post back from a six month hiatus—if you can call it a hiatus when nothing even started—was about timeblindness, and how explaining it feels like making shitty excuses.
It might be a little meta sometimes, especially when I talk about how ADHD gets in the way of writing (I spend a lot of time mediating the battle of The Wall of Can’t vs. The Choice Paralysis Demon), but I’m also just trying to make this word repository existent (also meta!), so if ADHD is in the front of my brain and I can tell you about it, it’s a win for building up my writing practice and any fellow ADHDers that happen to be reading. (And if you are, hi!! You’re doing great, sweetie. I promise.)
So on with the ADHD talk! This morning (Wednesday, remember) was supposed to be round one of “Routine Tryouts.” My morning routine currently consists of “wake up for six hours while drinking coffee and maybe get some writing or reading done if I can get my brain to sit down,” so I’m trying to come up with something that mirrors the flexible evening routine I developed the last time I rescued my kitchen from ADHD neglect hell. I’ll save the grisly details for a later ADHD confession, but the TL;DR is that I had a sink full of fungus and embarrassment, and for the last eight months I have not. I slowly built up a manageable nightly routine akin to “closing” the kitchen, the way I would close things at past food service jobs to end the night (but with fewer checklists and nitpicky managers). It doesn’t always need complete cleaning, but even if it looks barely touched I still wipe down the counters and stovetop, rearrange things if they’re higgeldy-piggeldy, empty the small counter trash bin if it’s full (every other day), check for things to throw out in the fridge, that kind of thing. I might not do the floors very often (I forget), but the structure is reliable and I can move it up or down as I wish. Sometimes I get my “kitchen close” done at 8pm so I can go to bed early as a little treat, which sounds entirely elderly, but I don’t care.
Anyway, today’s tryout was a wash. I woke up later than intended (did I set a P.M. alarm instead of an A.M. one? Maybe), and the “plan” I’d written the night before wasn’t even much of anything other than “read this thing and that thing, write this thing and that other thing.” That’s not a routine, it’s a to-do list! I did get a fair amount of writing done, surprisingly, and there was plenty of coffee, but I still felt kind of aimless. I need something to follow but I don’t know if I can do something ironclad. When it comes to life structure there’s a fine line that exists between “obsessively compulsively locked-down schedule” and “free-range hope for the best,” and I have to ride it to get anything done, especially when I’m unmedicated. There’s also a tendency for routines and plans and methods of organization to reach a sort of limit at a point, wherein I have to come up with some new way to trick myself into cooperating. I don’t need to invent something wholly original every time—I’m usually just rebuilding from pieces of other attempts at organization—but it’s tiring. It makes me feel ashamed that I can’t just be solid and consistent enough by myself, like everyone else. This is why the evening routine is my daily fist-pump. Like YES. I DID IT AGAIN. MY KITCHEN IS NOT A FILTH DEN. I AM IN SOME WAY A RESPECTABLE, SELF-RELIANT ADULT. I DO NOT WANT COOKIES, THIS ACTUALLY IS ITS OWN REWARD.
And just as I won’t let my fellow ADHDers/neurospicies be burned by useless shame, I’ll be kind to myself and celebrate that hey, I actually am still posting here. Even if it’s late. Even if it’s not the stuff I started writing this morning. It might take me a while to find my stride, and as long as I’m building little by little on the foundational scraps, I’ll get there. Even if I have to manage myself full-time with multiple notebooks and more index cards than a person should reasonably use in a day. If that sounds like you, too, then get in the ADHD huddle with me, bro! It doesn’t matter how late you start, or if it all seems like too much to overcome. I’m over here rolling out the red carpet for every single one of your little wins ♥️
P.S.: as I believe I promised Monday (which was totally the wee hours of Tuesday), here are two pictures of my cat Ziggy, my little orange gentleman to whom I sing songs and give many snuggly kissy bothers during the day:
Cosmic’s Read-o-Rama 