To Others Who Struggle With Executive Dysfunction, What Are Some Strategies You’ve Discovered

The best drawing advice I can give to anyone who wants to improve quickly is to use cheap notepad paper and ballpoint pens. I know it's tempting to buy the cool fancy supplies but then you'll feel pressured to not waste them. Use garbage materials and burn through them with zero thought. Only use pen because it forces you to commit and stops you from second guessing your lines and redrawing them over and over. Learn how to use your mistakes and then learn how to get it right the first time. I took numerous art classes and nothing taught me more than buying a big pack of Bics and legal pads and sketching anything that came to mind without hesitation. Fill a few pages everyday with the first thing that comes to mind. Don't rip out pages you don't like, just flip to the next page and try again. Watch yourself improve. If you really want to be a good artist, you need to learn how to draw from the ground up without relying on quality materials.

dam…….. that website “you feel like shit” (it’s like a questionnaire / troubleshooting guide for when you feel like shit) really works………………….. im not even all the way thru it and i even half-assed a lot of the suggestions and i already feel loads better

I think what Good Omens really cemented for me, personally, and forced me to realise and accept is that… I’m just never going to understand what its like to experience sexual attraction towards other people. I’m just not going to get it. 

Look, I watched the whole series start to finish at least four times before I went online and looked for fandom content. I’d never, ever, seen a relationship like theirs done so absolutely perfect before, in any media. I love it, I adore it, it resonates so clearly and purely with me. I was so completely wrapped up in them that it wasn’t until I came online and saw all this nasty discourse about queerbaiting and homophobia in Good Omens that it occurred to me that anyone could doubt the validity of their love. Even now when I watch it back, over and over, it baffles me that people don’t get it. They adore one another. They are completely devoted to one another, its so obvious, in their words, their actions, the way they look at each other, what they do for one another, its all just…. right there.

But that’s thrown into question because why? Because they dont kiss on screen? Because there’s no dramatic confession of love? Because, God forbid, they dont fuck? To me that’s just… ludicrous. Unfathomable. 

I just dont get the need for it. Love is more than kissing, more than sex, and I just dont understand why physical affection must be a requirement of love. I guess I’ll just never get it. 

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Sanna Wani, “Who is the Sun, Asking for Sleep?”, My Grief, the Sun // Brenna Twohy, A Coworker Asks Me If I Am Sad, Still

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. 

Sometimes (lots of times) (all the time), I have the urge to do a thing but i dont know what. Or, I feel weird, but can't figure out why or what to do to fix it. ADHD, executive dysfunction, how I feel, and the phase of the moon can all make it really hard for me to think of a solution to the issue -- or even know what the issue IS. And while meds and regular sleep certainly help, for better or for worse my brain just isn't wired for this.

So, I decided to outsource my brain.

I couldn't find an app that did what I wanted or was customizable enough for me to fake it. Therefore I built an analog external brain to do my thinking for me.

First, I bought a small, 100-or-so page notebook. It was about eight bucks at my Local Corporate Book Retailer.

Then, I logicked out all the possibilities I might have trouble braining, and started adding each step to the book -- kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

Here's an example path, which starts with me knowing what I want, and the analog brain telling me how to get there. I twisted my ankle a couple weeks ago and keep forgetting to do things to make it better, so here's my solution:

[image: Do you know what you want? Yes -> 1, No -> 32. Yes is circled]

Yes, analog brain, I know what I want! Let me flip to page 1.

[Image of Page 1: What do you want to do? Exercise -> 2 is circled. Other options include Read -> 13, Watch something -> 20, Eat ->31, Be creative -> 25, Have an adventure ->26, Clean something ->28, Learn something->29.]

Still know what I want, so I flip to page 2.

[Image page 2: What kind of exercise do you want to do? PT -> 5 is circled. Other options include Weights -> 3, Cardio -> 4, Yoga -> 9, Something quick -> 10, Hiking -> 11, Adventure -> 12]

Skipping some pages now! Since this is meant to bounce me around, it doesn't make sense to try and read it in order. (On the plus side, that makes it super easy to add new options to any part of the tree).

[Image page 5: What kind of PT? Ankle ->6 is circled. Other options include Knee->6a, Neck->7, Shoulders->8.]

(When I first numbered the pages, 6 and 6a werw stuck together, whoooops)

[Image page 6: A list of ankle PT exercises]

Eyyyyy my external brain showed me how to do my flippin' PT so my ankle stops hurting! Yay!

But what about when I don't know wtf is wrong or wtf I want? There's an app analog brain for that! (Yes I'm aware its called a decision tree or process flow or what have you. Let me have this).

[Image: Do you know what you want? No->32 is circled]

No, spacebook, idfk what's wrong, I can't brain today.

[Image page 32: How are you feeling? In pain ->33 is circled. Other options include Overstimulated->37, Understimulated, Panicky->43.]

(As you can see, I have plans to add a page for overstimulated but have not done it yet.)

Oh yeah my ankle kinda hurts, maybe I can do something about that...

[Image of page 33: What kind of pain? Knee/ankle/neck/etc ->35 is circled. Other options include Menstrual nonsense->34, Head->38.]

[Image of page 35: Joint/old injury pain: Take advil, Ice or heat, Massage, Foam roll, Warm bath, PT exercises. Under the last option are subsets Ankle->6 (circled), Neck->6a, Knees->7.]

...Aaaand now I'm back around to my list of ankle PT exercises! And I didnt have to think at all!

Anyway -- all it takes to make something like this for yourself is a notebook and some time to think the logic through. You can start by making lists (not in the notebook) of questions you have trouble braining in the moment, and what some solutions are. Then number your pages, and get started!

i am holding hands with a girl at the pet store. i love how her voice changes when she speaks to different animals. round and bubbly for the angelfish, high and breathy for the calico kittens, sonorous and slithery for the python. she loves them all, even the great hairy tarantula that makes me cringe. 

i am holding hands with this girl whose halo of hair glows banana yellow under the heat lamps in the reptile section, who offers her index finger to teething kittens. she asks “can’t we have one?” in the voice she uses for only me. a voice i can’t describe without using her name, but i imagine joan of arc heard something similar the day she picked up a sword. she is still holding my hand, and i feel like i’d sink into cartoon quicksand if i let go. so i don’t.

“are you two… together?”

this is not unfamiliar, but the woman’s voice, the voice she has chosen, is angrily acidic. this woman has laced her tone with arsenic, without even a passive aggressive teaspoon of sugar to hide her poison. she inhales, puffing herself up like a frightened lizard before her final words. 

“there are children here, you know.” 

in the future, i think of a thousand things to say. we were children too. two girls holding hands after school. two girls holding hands at the movie theatre, two girls in a booth at tony’s pizza, two girls sharing awkward first kisses after two solo cups of wine in someone else’s backyard. two girls holding kittens at a pet store on a saturday afternoon. 

i know now that they see us through funhouse mirrors: distorted, disturbed, our monstrous bodies taking too much space, spoiling innocent spaces with our imposing sexualities. our innocence never ours to begin with.

even with this, there is nowhere i would rather be than holding hands with her in a pet store, with her voice like rain on a hot day, her peach lips blowing kisses for fish, her grip tightening as if to say “i dare you to take this away from me.”

kaveh akbar, 'calling a wolf a wolf' // doc luben, 'love letters or suicide notes' // @/nutnoce, tumblr // 'my body's made of crushed little stars', mitski // @/ojibwa, tumblr // 'spring', mary oliver