I tried to dial in on creating things, but ended up burning myself out on it. So, I took a step back. Or tried to, at least. It’s not my job to create things. I create on my own time, because I like to do so, not because I make myself do so. But here I was, trying to force myself to create, I think reasoning that the only thing keeping me from creating was myself, and if I could just make myself do it, then I’d be happy.
But I didn’t create anything, and making myself try didn’t make me happy, and making myself try started to make less likely to want to create anything, and eventually I gave up. It’s a perfect failure loop. I should be creating things; my ADHD is getting in the way of creating things; I’ll ham-fistedly try to accommodate my ADHD by creating a system that should allow me to work around the ADHD. But it turns out you can’t accommodate ADHD by simply trying harder. And then you fall into the age-old trap of, “It’s on me, then, because I didn’t try hard enough.”
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the amount of ableism flowing through my veins. I’ve only thought of myself as disabled for just a couple of years, compared to nearly five decades of thinking of myself as abled, just lazy, just not trying hard enough, if I try harder, I’ll get it this time. It’s really weird, really hard to not think of the problem as being the fact that I’m not trying hard enough, working hard enough, that if I just tried, all these problems would go away.
A big problem is what I should be doing. And it gets huge when I’ve got most things done. I’ve got so much free time now, time that I can spend how I wish, directed towards what I’d like. But whenever I start thinking about something that I’d like to do, I’m usually the one who starts killing the joy of it. Oh man, killing the joy is what sank me Sunday morning when I was trying to make waffles. I was feeling down, and I was trying to think about joy, about finding the joy in what you’re doing, when my brain flashed to an childhood memory where the joy was killed, and it’s crazy to find that five year old me is still holding onto the anger at that murder, still waving about to show how mean she was to us, after she’s long gone and never to return.
And I’m finding it goes so much deeper than just struggling to get things done. My body is just weird and sends me weird signals that I don’t really know how to interpret. And it ranges from being hungry to being sad or angry, and I really am having a hard time reading it. I find myself ruminating about things, people who’ve wronged me or hurt me, situations that caused me pain, and I can’t stop thinking about them, going over them, over and over, imaginary conversations in your head, and I’m getting more and more upset. And then I’m reading about rejection sensitive dysphoria only to experience it shortly thereafter, and it was so familiar, such a dynamic in my life and my interactions, and now it has a name.
dorkFarm 