Dreams-and-nightmares - Lost In Time And Space

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!

clio m.w. hamilton, “still life as a dreamscape on pause”

Okay, new cleaning strategy.

Bad at self-discipline, good at acts of love through service. So I'm gonna clean my house pretending it is the house of someone I love who's been too depressed to clean. She's gonna be so surprised.

When you’re an artist, it’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jeté, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it’s always the same. It’s the emotion there isn’t a word for. The feeling that’s too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable—people who are content—they don’t create art.

Jodi Picoult, from The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine, 2020)

Anne Sexton, from “The Truth the Dead Know”, The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

"Yes, Think" – Ruth Stone

Mother, said a small tomato caterpillar to a wasp, why are you kissing me so hard on my back? You’ll see, said the industrious wasp, deftly inserting a package of her eggs under the small caterpillar’s skin. Every day the small caterpillar ate and ate the delicious tomato leaves. I am surely getting larger, it said to itself. This was a sad miscalculation. The ravenous hatched wasp worms were getting larger. O world, the small caterpillar said, you were so beautiful. I am only a small tomato caterpillar, made to eat the good tomato leaves. Now I am so tired. And I am getting even smaller. Nature smiled. Never mind, dear, she said. You are a lovely link in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born.

feels like every few weeks I have to relearn how to exist, that I do need to sit in the sun and move my body and not drink too much coffee and dress in clothes that make me feel good and talk to my friends and journal and get off my phone sometimes and eat vegetables and drink more tea and generally reclaim the space in my life for myself ya know

Adhd really is like… bedroom is slightly messy it would be nice to tidy it some

bedroom is very messy I really should tidy up

bedroom is chaotic I NEED to tidy but my brain says no. Why. Whyyy.

I guess I’ll just have to watch where I step in here for the rest of my life. The mess is everywhere. I’m one with the mess.

A sudden Need to Clean™ makes you get the room looking like some fancy homes magazine cover, and you think “I’ll never ever let it get that bad again, and then…

bedroom is slightly messy (uh oh)

emotional processing is so funny because sometimes you’ll be violently sobbing on your bedroom floor over something that happened 4 years ago and then you’ll just. get up and make coffee. and go to the grocery store. and take all this fundamental sadness for a walk. and ponder the cosmic experiences of humanity while eating a sandwich. and that’s healing.

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?