Write as if nobody is reading because nobody is.
I'm in the middle of a semester I'm flubbing magnificently while trying to manage job-hunting, the divorce the job will make possible, launching adult and nearly-adult children, home-management, and a slew of items that I can't remember right off hand, while trying to reconfigure my coping mechanisms in light of the ADHD diagnosis I received three or so years ago. I have a lot of mental scripts telling me that every failure is because I'm failing on purpose, because that's all I heard from parents and the educational system for so long I internalized it. My parents are dead, my high school days are three and a half decades into the past, but that script is going to be interred with my bones.
Because I'm doing such a dreadful job managing my fifteen-unit semester I've triggered my panic-response to homework. I put it off as long as possible because I'm terrified of it, terrified of the failing grade, terrified because my brain can't seem to make my eyes sit still long enough to read and absorb knowledge, and it becomes a vicious cycle where my anxiety makes inability to concentrate inevitable and the inability to concentrate feeds my anxiety. I will play video games for hours, surf the internet, and generally do anything but my homework until the very last minute, and college is not the place to play around in the last minute.
The bitch of it is that the three classes I'm having the most trouble with are the classes I want the most. They're all CADD classes, Revit, Solidworks, AutoCadd, and I love all of them. I'm behind on the drawings, have missed written assignments, and am a middling so-so on the tests. I'm sitting here at the computer trying to get myself to crack open the books so I can get, if not caught up, at least an understanding of the concepts I'm supposed to have.
The problem of the middle-aged late-diagnosis ADHD brain is having to recognize and redirect maladaptive coping mechanisms, of understanding that, despite what my well-intentioned parents and school counselors said, I am not doing this on purpose and have zero control over how my brain is going to process the input it gets. I'm having to repurpose advice I gave the Banshees while they were growing up: What you feel is what you feel and there is no right or wrong about it. How you choose to react is within your control, however, and you're responsible for constructing framework that's as fair as possible to everybody in the situation - yourself included. My brain is going to react the way it's going to react and there is nothing much I can do about that, but it's incumbent upon me to create the framework that guides me into productive, not destructive, pathways.
So: Observation, hypothesis, gather data, adjust accordingly.
My hypothesis this week is that my fear is causing me to avoid that which must be done. Operating under this hypothesis, I'm looking for those choices that bring me closer to or keep me away from my goal. This is where I realized that I'm gaming, I'm web-surfing, my audio input is designed to keep my brain occupied by anything but homework. I need coping mechanisms that help me relax, focus, and get on with things.
Coping mechanism audio: background noise needs to be background, it can't be something that takes any part of my attention away from the tasks at hand.
Coping mechanism focus: Ritual. Breakfast, meditation, writing, bullet journal, organizing my tasks and then engaging with them.
Coping mechanism environment: Irony of ironies, the clean room my mother was always harping on is essential to my ability to concentrate. My world is too cluttered and I don't have time for an extreme decluttering, but I can make the effort to get my laundry clean and put away. The laundry piles are ninety percent of my clutter-influenced brainlock. The rest of it has be dealt with in the moment: Notice trash, throw it out. Notice book, put it back on the shelf. Not all of the trash is getting picked up in one day. Not all of the books are making back onto the shelf in one day. The little efforts will not be noticeable day-to-day but will have a long-term effect.
This blog is going to have more on it because it's going to be part of my writing meditation. I'm writing as if nobody is reading because nobody (but me) will be.
brb
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