Jane O. Wayne // Kate Jacobs

when kafka said ‘you wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it’ and when brontë said ‘if you ever looked at me with what I know is in you, I would be your slave’ and when Sartre said ‘if I’ve got to suffer it may as well be at your hands’

Franz Wright, from “Our Conversation” [ID in alt text]

My relationship with content creation and hobbies, in general, got a lot better when I started learning to reframe it as a simple act of human creation, and not a metric of my own self worth.

We’re taught competition, and perfectionism, and shame. If I say “I cook” I must add “(but not well)”. If I say “I run” I must say “(but I am not good at it).” I say “I code (but I mostly know frontend).” I create and express and my first impulse is to guard against embarrassment. Lest I fall so short of marketable competence. Lest I subject myself to the mockery of being caught creating poorly. I wound myself first so others may not.

Even the advice that fights against this says “your only goal should be to be better than yourself yesterday.” But why must I be in competition with her? What happens, after the initial rapid climb in skill, when I plateau? What of injury, and atrophy, and depression, that flake these skills away? Must I return feeling compelled to over-achieve? To wallow in embarrassment until I can surpass my own previous record? To hate my work until the reception, the notes, the engagement outperform an ever rising bar? I do not want to be paralyzed by the mountains I built behind me. Why should I look behind myself when there’s a wide swath of untilled Earth that stretches far out of sight ahead of me? I want to enjoy my work, and my mediocrity, moving forward with all its ebbs and flows.

At my worst, I was nothing. I was not a writer. Because I had forgone writing for all the fear and stress and damage to my self-worth that it wrought. I was not a coder. Because I was only useful for the niches of my job, and didn’t have the heart to create something badly, on my own, for fun, lest it confirm my suspicions of mediocrity. I was not even a runner - despite the extreme and exhaustive amount of time I sunk into it - because I fell short of my previous self, and I could not hold a candle to the actually-skilled runners, and I was forced to speak of this hobby in all those guarded terms - “but i am not good” - because of how much that ate at me. 

I was no cook, and no homemaker, and no creator, because when I did those things, (I did them poorly.) 

And when all these came together, I wallowed in emptinesses. (I still do, sometimes. It’s hard and complicated). Because emptiness is what was left when I stripped myself of the things and the pursuits whose lack of value could be used to hurt me.

The change for me - the change, I think - came at the time I started to recognize that I do not deserve self-punishment for my mediocrities, for the failings of my current state of being. It was not a revelation all at once. It was a slow and progressive flirting with the idea, found almost by accident on self-help youtube channels of a very particular ilk. It came with the recognition that I had trapped myself, wiling away my time and my energy, in a state of constant apology, and shame, and self-correction for the mediocrities I dare not unleash onto the world. I boxed myself up with the promise “once I am good enough, I will be allowed to come back out”, and that was a lie. I would never have come back out. I was chasing punishing metrics of self-improvement that I did not need, and would never actually catch and maintain, and which would never love me back.

It took a long time to internalize this. It took a long time to get angry on my own behalf. It took a long time to act on it, and write again because fuck you. To run on my own terms, at my own pace, for my own enjoyment because fuck you. To create with my hands again because fuck you. To lean into the happiness of creation that I had not “earned”, because fuck you.

I like creating because it fills an emptiness that used to be there. It’s so simple, and so lovely, that humans are like this. That we want to build with our hands. That we want to assemble and construct. That we derive joy from stacking pieces together, and stringing words together, and assembling colors on a page, and moving, and singing, and baking, and knitting. Humans love to build little worlds around them. 

So why must we so actively try to cut people off from it off from it? Why do we condition ourselves to fear its mediocrity? Why does this still our hands? Why do we suffocate it for ourselves, before others can? I don’t have an answer. I can only recognize the monster. 

I want to make bad art today. I want to make bad art tomorrow. If I am a worse writer tomorrow, I want that to be fine. If I am never more than a mediocre runner, I want to be at complete peace with that. Because if not, then I might box away my hobbies again, and my loves, and my pursuits. I might go back to empty. I might go back to nothing.

I hate that emptiness I lived through. I hate that nothing. I want to make bad art for the rest of my life. 

Me shortly,

“Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.”

— Herbert Read, The Origins of Art (via mesogeios)

What are some tricks for getting executive dysfunction to bugger off long enough to do the thing?

     Here are some ideas I’ve either found work for me or I’ve been told work for other people. Hopefully you’ll find some of them effective or, if not, maybe they’ll inspire you to come up with some brand new strategies of your own.

Declare your intent aloud. Announce to yourself (and other people, if they’re around) that you’re going to do the thing you need to do. Eg: “I will clean the sink.” “I am going to have a shower.”

Talk yourself through the task. Narrating the steps of my current task as I do them helps me to concentrate and follow through. Eg: “I am gathering the empty cups from the table and putting them in the sink.” Sometimes I can then even start narrating things I am not doing and I’ll automatically follow through because it’s become a habit in the moment. If a task involves reading, try reading it aloud.

Steal the energy from elsewhere. Engage with something that makes you feel good first, then ride that high to do the thing that doesn’t. If the task involves doing something physical, put on some energetic music that makes you want to dance and then channel that dance energy into task energy.

Hype yourself up. Channel your inner feel-good sports movie coach and start telling yourself how awesome you are, how you’re gonna kick this task’s butt and this task doesn’t stand a chance. Repeat random over-the-top motivational phrases until the motivation has no choice but to appear, like summoning an eldritch being by annoying them until they acknowledge you.

Break the task into steps. Very often I’ll have trouble tackling tasks, even simple ones, just because I don’t know where to start and the whole thing feels bigger than it is. In this case I find it helps to determine the steps that a task involves and do them one at a time, treating each one as its own job. Eg: Instead of “I will write an essay” try “I will write an introductory paragraph” or even just “I will write an introductory sentence”.

Write the steps down. Goodness knows I can’t follow verbal instructions for the life of me unless they’re given one step at a time. Rather than trying to keep the steps straight in your head, write them down and keep referring back to that list when you get sidetracked, lost, or stuck.

Do the task out of order. If the task allows it, try doing whatever part is most appealing first to ease yourself into the workflow.

Make the workload smaller. If jobs like doing dishes or laundry seem like too much work, consider if you can get rid of some of the clothes or dishes to cut down on how much work there is in the first place. If you’ve committed to too large a project, see if you can simplify it or distribute the work involved among a group.

Narrow your focus. Rather than tackling an entire task at once, try breaking it into easier-to-manage chunks. If you need to do laundry or dishes, specify that you’re only going to wash shirts or plates. If reading an entire book is intimidating, assign yourself a certain number of pages at a time. If reading an entire page of text is intimidating, try covering the page with a loose piece of paper and slowly revealing lines as you read.

Do it in five minute increments. Set a timer for five minutes and do the task for the duration. If you feel like you could do a little more, keep at it. If you’re still struggling, give yourself a break (you can also time your break if you find that helps) and try again later.

Use a buddy. See if there’s someone who’s willing to have a call going or who will come sit by you or even just check in every once in a while to keep you accountable. ADHDers are notorious for lacking internal motivation, so employing someone else to externalize it can make a big difference.

Be kind to yourself. Sometimes, no matter what you do, your brain just doesn’t want to cooperate. If you feel yourself getting frustrated, remember that it’s not your fault. Take a step back, have a snack or drink of water, give yourself some time to decompress, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Taking care of yourself will help you to actually be in good enough condition to do the job.

     I’ve also talked more in-depth about how I personally tackle doing tasks despite executive dysfunction here, and I have an ADHD Writing Advice post here that has some tips that may be applicable to tasks other than writing.

     To others who struggle with executive dysfunction, what are some strategies you’ve discovered work for you?

hope girls grow up knowing that there are infinite ways of being a woman. hope girls grow up loving themselves for who they are.

O DEATHLESS SEA / irene by simon harsent / the invading surf by frederick judd waugh / the mediterranean in the ancient world by fernand braudel (trans. siân reynolds) / stormy sea by ivan konstantinovich aivazovsky / dancing in odessa by ilya kaminsky / i lived the beloved name by odysseus elytis (trans. olga broumas & t. begley) / strong winds and high tides battered a coastal road close to newtownards, northern ireland by peter morrison /  shipwreck off the cliffs of dover at night with dover castle in the distance by eugène lepoittevin / the odyssey, book 13 by homer (trans. emily wilson) / seebild by ingo kühl

You don’t need to have dated someone to know dating isn’t for you!

You don’t need to have had sex to know it isn’t for you!

You know yourself better than anyone else! I trust you, and you trust you!

C.P. Cavafy, from The City (tr. by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard)