The Sisyphus Shuffle

I have writer’s block. Sort of. I guess it depends on how one interprets “writer’s block.” When it comes to fiction, my hurdles are workable ideas, plot, and character development; in the realm of poetry, my obstacles are themes, scansion, and enjambment. This leaves non-fiction (essaying, opining, memoir work, rants) as the most accessible form of writing to me, and I actually have plenty to say across that span…but I’m just not sure how to say it.

I’ve been working on a piece for this blog about babystepping my way to an organized home while navigating the echoes of my upbringing and the day-to-day reality of being ADHD af and autistic on top of that, hoping to slap it up here relatively close to the last entry about time management and spreadsheets. I wanted to stay thematically relevant—not that I have an editor nudging me to meet a deadline and stay on topic, just myself, but I figured it might help my consistency to build on an area of interest and a subject I know something about. Two weeks later, I’m still wrestling with the draft. I intended on focusing on my daily movie watching project, 366: Dos, and how I use a spreadsheet to wrangle that information, but along the way it meandered into something else. As it was still in the neighborhood of the idea I wanted to explore, I went with it. Again, there’s no editor asking for specific work; just a nascent essayist realizing that gathering a body of work takes effort, and that a piece self-published every week or two weeks will go a long way towards said body. Consistency seems to be key, and I’m no stranger to it; I write in a journal daily, even if it’s just two or three paragraphs, and have managed to keep that habit going for most of the last four years. But when it comes to writing that might be ingested by other people, the resolve crumbles. ADHD contributes its share towards this erosion, though as previously mentioned, I constantly construct ways to control the spread of its specific damage and actually get things done, not just writing. I am swaddled in to-do lists and reminders. I keep a daily book that I think of as an external brain where I keep track of every vital thing I wish to note or accomplish every day, including the time I took my medication, continuing my Wordle streak (67 days since the last break), logging my movie watching, book reading, writing, and drawing, and keeping health notes, which has become even more important since—after four years of vigilance, sticking only to necessary outings, and masking for each outing—I somehow contracted not just Covid but Flu B in the middle of March, and now I have some kind of post-recovery onset asthma fuckery going on, which stuck a very large pin in my Stupid Mental Health Walks and what they were doing to help stabilize my mood and boost my cognitive functions.

I do what I can to supplement my glitchy brain, is what I’m saying.

But it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I write “finish. The. Fucking. Blog. Post” day after day, I either have to reprioritize (dinner doesn’t make itself, unfortunately) or I’ve lost track of time (wasn’t it just morning? How is it 5:37pm now?). Or, occasionally, I’m avoiding it the way I used to avoid homework—less sleepily, but still. I have never taken so many naps as I did when I first went back to school in my 30s; it was a defense mechanism against overwhelm combined with genuine exhaustion from the drive to and from campus. I don’t know what I was thinking, taking a full course load and believing my unmedicated ass could juggle that many assignments. I managed it for two or three years before switching my degree focus from graphic design to writing, and just as I was burning out, 2020 dawned. I managed online classes so much better because they gave me time to begin healing from the burnout. Soon enough, though, schools all over the place no longer wanted to integrate an online model of learning into operations, including mine. I fought for accommodations based on the ones I already had for ADHD with the disability office and managed to convince the English department head and one teacher to go hybrid for the one class I could afford to take that semester, but I could tell he wasn’t happy about it. It benefited other students who were able to log in and still attend class when they were out with covid and wanted to avoid spread, or had other illness or injury, but this aspect seemed to matter very little overall. After that, I was too tired to keep advocating for hybrid classes and put my degree on the back burner indefinitely, focusing on applying what I did manage to glean from my classes with regard to reading and writing practices to my daily creative life.

I just tend to fall apart without direction, schedules, guidelines, and due dates.

Speaking of falling apart, here’s some other blog essay topics that have begun to take shape and been shelved in drafting/development hell:

• Navigating healthcare with a history of eating disorders when all doctors and specialists can see is your fat body and attribute every problem to it;
• Prayer as a conduit for meditation and connection with community when you’re an agnostic;
• The horror of having a pregnancy-eligible body when the law is hostile towards bodily autonomy, catering to the unconscious social more that pregnancy and childbirth is a just punishment for being sexually active;
• The tricky business of being estranged from one’s family while lacking a strong community network to offset that disownership;
• Figuring out how to facilitate actual honest, productive conversations about what it means to experience long term suicidal ideation without being given a number to a suicide help line and asked politely to go tell someone else; and
• The February Reading Roundup, But Also The March Reading Roundup, featuring the notion that I am creating pressure to do monthly roundups when the January Reading Roundup was mostly just me trying to post consistently and offer something halfway meaningful to other readers while not going full book-blog.

Despite the intent in those topics, trying to extend them beyond a two-thirds mark and find their natural conclusions remains an elusive pursuit. I end up circling subjects closer to home, like writing about writing and eternally clawing my way out of burnout. I want this space to house more substance than just “middle aged woman writes about trying to write and blithers on at length about how hard it is to do stuff.” I want, regardless of how lofty it sounds, to contribute my voice and stories to the chorus of folks working hard to destigmatize ADHD, Autism, and other neurodivergence. I’ve never been a person with much ambition. I think as a kid I probably wanted to be famous, but the older I get the less I understand why anyone would ever want that. I mean, I get that people want to be validated and loved and build a platform to be heard, but what exactly am I saying—and who the fuck am I—that you all should listen? Who cares what some random homemaker with three-quarters of a degree thinks? Other people are talking about the above subjects already, and probably doing them better. I mean, sure, we all (hypothetically) have the right to free expression and just because someone else has already talked about something doesn’t mean that it can’t be approached again and again by different people from different directions. But it can become a wall of noise, like when you’re browsing the comments on a YouTube video and 1,200 people have made the exact same unfunny joke reply or snarky observation. At a certain point it just becomes a mob of seagulls screeching over one another, vying for the lone french fry of a video creator’s attention. (For this reason my general policy for commenting on a video is: if someone has already made my larger point re: fact checking or debate, I keep scrolling; if something in the content was helpful, I might say thank you and specify how it was edifying.)

And while I know I could post anything I wanted—I bought the domain and pay to park all of this here—I’m drawn to the longer-form piece, something coherent that expresses a relatable sentiment even if it’s not strictly “useful.” I don’t want a visitor to this space to think they’ve wasted their time bothering to read all these words when they could have scrolled TikTok or Twitter for the same amount of time and seen a hundred other takes. I’m not a content creator; I don’t yearn to influence. I’m under no impression that creating a thought archive here will bring in any income. And I know that to do anything you love, whether to share casually or eke out a living with it, first you must please yourself. I love putting words together and it pleases me to put something out there I think is worth reading, but I am tangled in the briars of what if: what if it doesn’t make any sense to anyone but me? What if my opinion or position enrages someone else? What if I attract trolls? What if I don’t even attract trolls? On and on it goes, regardless of whether I have any particular goal or grand plan in mind, and other than “writing something, fucking anything”—I usually don’t. As I said, I don’t want to be famous, but I do want to be known. I want to say something worthwhile and make connections with others; I want to hold up a mirror to people who are routinely denied representations of themselves—not just neurodivergent folks, but fat folks, socially awkward and anxious folks, queer folks, non-conforming folks—and bring them the comfort of knowing they are not alone in all of this. We can only make community when we communicate. So I will keep trying to sculpt into paragraphs the ideas I feel compelled to share. I will pick myself up over and over again through the shadows of self-doubt and persevere through the whispered insults of imaginary naysayers in my head. I will keep putting one word after another regardless of what phantoms wait to undo the seams of my conclusions or shred the meat of my sentences from the bone cage around my heart.

I will, damn it.

P.S.: here’s some art I made in Procreate. I’m getting back into my doodle groove, mostly in my sketchbook, but I do like recreating them digitally.