My laptop has been open to a nearly-blank WordPress screen for a good five minutes now, prompting me silently to “Add title.” Meanwhile, I’ve been staring out the window, elementary-school-style, letting my mind wander. Embracing the random associations without the judgmental undercurrent.
My therapist mentioned in our session last week that ADHD brains tend to be “nonlinear” when it comes to organization, and will have several processes or thoughts happening at once. I was reminded of a video* she’d shown me several months ago, where someone had narrated their inner monologue as they were puttering around their kitchen, complete with overlapping reminders and random thoughts and a constant earworm, and I had felt totally seen.
I feel fortunate that my therapist has a background in ADHD, with both her clients and her family. She picks up what I’m putting down and rearranges it from a different perspective. I suppose that’s what therapists do in general, but having someone who understands how my brain is processing — sometimes better than I do — is huge.
I think that’s one reason why I don’t blog or journal as much as I once did: I no longer feel the urgency to get stuff out of my head and into words to essentially psychoanalyze myself. (Or use CBT, or ACT, or whatever.) Instead, my tendency to write and document and plan gets channeled into my weekly planner spreads, where I do my damnedest to script the critical moves in advance.
My mental health is very much a work in progress… but at least I’m progressing.
* I intentionally didn’t to try to find the ADHD Simulator video until I was sure I was done writing, because I knew if I went down that rabbit-hole, this would never get this posted, and would go into my Drafts folder with all the other blog entries I’ve started and never finished. I found this video first, which is by the same woman but wasn’t the exact video I was thinking of. It’s worth including a link, though, because it captures the frustration I feel when I’m trying to backtrack through all the prerequisites of a single task.
On one Friday each month, the karate dojo hosts a Parents’ Night Out. Sometimes it’s a video game night. Sometimes they plan a Pokemon trading party. Sometimes it’s a Ninja Ball tournament. But sometimes — like tonight — it’s a Nerf War, where kids bring their Nerf guns and the dojo supplies a massive amount of standard Nerf bullets.
Connor’s not always interested, especially as he’s now one of the older kids — but he’s always up for a Nerf War.
For the price of our usual “Fun Friday” pizza delivery, Connor gets to hang out at the dojo, shooting his Nerf gun and eating pizza, while I get two and a half hours of “me” time.
As drop-off time approaches, I always daydream about how much I’ll accomplish during those two hours alone. Maybe I’ll do some sewing, or declutter my storage spaces. Maybe I’ll do some weeding, or catch up on all the things I’ve been meaning to blog about. Maybe I’ll do an evening of digital detox — no phone, no laptop, no TV.
That never happens. None of it.
First, what happens is dinner. Sometimes I order out, or sometimes — like tonight — I scare up something simple for myself from the freezer or the pantry. My iPhone keeps me company while I eat, and continues to keep me company for a while after that.
Then the realization dawns on me: two hours is not as much time as it seems, especially at the end of the day, and even more so at the end of the week. If I’d planned a little more carefully, I could have knocked off a few tasks — as it is, though, it might be a better use of my time to sit in the sunroom and enjoy the sounds of spring. Feel the breeze. Watch the sunset. Calm my judgmental inner voice.
Yeah, that sounds good.
By then, the sunset has reached the cotton candy phase of blues and pinks, with a turquoise backdrop. It’s time to put my Mom hat back on and go pick up my Nerf warrior.
I made stickers from the screenshots I took from the Finch self-care app. Now my buddy Yeet can adorn my upcycled notebooks, my planner, and my analog life in general, reminding me to Do All The Self-Care Things.
Thanks again to Dani Donovan (creator of The Anti-Planner and ADHD Comics) and her Finch, Taco, for introducing me to the Finch app! Separating my self-care tasks from my other tasks has been instrumental in helping self-care not get lost in the daily shuffle.
On one hand, it’s been a hell of a week. On the other hand, it’s been a mostly low-key week.
On Monday, I went to the dentist for the first time in over a year.
The last time I was there (January 2022), they couldn’t schedule me for my usual three-to-four-month timeframe, and scheduled me out six months. I was surprised, but figured that there was no point in pushing back if they had no availability.
As the date for my appointment approached, I saw that I had another important thing on my schedule for that day and time that couldn’t be moved, so I called to reschedule. They told me that if I decided to reschedule, I wouldn’t be able to get in until January 2023. I didn’t have much of a choice, apart from finding a new dentist, so I rescheduled out yet another six months. (Keep in mind that I receive regular periodontic maintenance due to past issues with gum disease.)
A few days before my rescheduled appointment, I got a call from the dentist’s office saying that the dentist wasn’t going to be available for my post-cleaning exam that day, so my appointment would need to be rescheduled. That pushed things back yet another two months.
Which brings us to Monday. I went in feeling apprehensive, but looking forward to having clean teeth again. After the preliminaries of updating paperwork, seeing that nearly the entire support staff had turned over within the past year, getting full x-rays, and having a pleasant conversation about Studio Ghibli with the dental assistant, I got my perio charting done and learned that I now need root scaling and planing.
Which they can’t get me in for until June.
You know what? Fuck you. I’m finding a new dentist.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was scheduled to attend some meetings at my work’s downtown campus. These meetings involved a consulting company working with users of some new-to-us accounting software. I’m peripherally involved in the reporting aspect of this software, so it was suggested that I take advantage of being able to see how the users use it.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been in the building where these meetings were held. The building across the street, however, is where I spent the entirety of my work life from November 2007 through the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and sporadically through 2022. We officially moved out of our cubes (for the second time) at the end of 2022, when our department went fully remote. Even so, there was still a cube with my name on it where I could call home for those two days.
At the end of this month, several departments are being relocated to other buildings on the downtown campus, and the company will be leasing out floors to other organizations.
It was a weird couple of days. Things were almost like before, but so very different.
The commute was the same one I’d been traveling for the past 15 years. It’s changed slightly over time, with contruction projects here and there, but the route is the same.
As I pulled into the parking garage, my right hand habitually started to reach for the spot where I used to keep my monthly parking card, up in the sunglasses compartment, even though I knew I’d need to push the button and pull a ticket to park now.
In the office, my cube was right where I’d left it, in its barren state, with dual monitors I couldn’t use without the dock that’s now hooked up in my home office. Someone had been calling my work phone and not leaving a voicemail; the screen said I had 12 missed calls from the same number.
I went into the pantry to fill up my Tervis with water, and couldn’t help but set the clocks on both the microwaves forward an hour for Daylight Savings Time, even though it didn’t really matter.
The best thing about being back in the office for a couple days was getting to see people. To talk in person. To run into people by chance, and be fully present in that moment, with the knowledge that this may well be the very last time I see these people face-to-face. To eat ramen with my co-workers, and to run into other co-workers at the restaurant.
The meetings were worth attending.
On Thursday, a long-anticipated work project was scheduled for deployment. We were taking all of our hundreds of reports and dashboards and moving them to a new server, with new URLs for all the reports. There was a non-trivial amount of loose ends that needed to be tied up after the main move, including updating links and configurations, plus deploying some updates to reports.
It had been through development testing and QA testing, and still we expected something to go sideways.
The Universe did not disappoint.
I’d had to completely overhaul the report we use to report on the reporting — Report Usage, we call it. It’s a meta-report that shows who uses which reports and how well those reports are performing, among other things. And I couldn’t get it to finish loading up all the metadata, even though it had worked fine in testing. I spent all afternoon Thursday and a good part of Friday troubleshooting; since it was the last piece of the puzzle, and it was just internal to our department, we moved forward with getting all the links updated at end of day Thursday and we turned off the services on the old server at noon Friday. I finally managed to get Report Usage working after lunch on Friday, and we thought we were good to go.
Until someone submitted a ticket to the Help Desk saying they couldn’t access their reports.
Without getting too much into the weeds with the details: we had to turn the old server back on, change back some of the links, and let the old and new report servers run in parallel over the weekend until we can coordinate all the necessary departments to fix it for real come Monday morning.
The above is, of course, all firmly categorized under the umbrella of First World Problems. I recognize this, yet I still feel like this week has been mostly shit-show with glimmers of not-suck here and there. My co-workers, my family, and Krav Maga all helped get me through this weird-ass week.
When do I get to feel like I’ve actually got my shit together again?
The term “self-care” gets thrown around a lot, especially via social media. It’s a legitimate concept, but the popular idea seems to be that self-care equates to taking time away from the daily grind to pamper oneself, and that isn’t the only part of self-care.
Self-care is also the everyday things: the little bits of maintenance that keep us from breaking down. Going outside and getting some fresh air. Taking some time to doodle. Putting away the smartphone. Drinking a glass of water. Sitting with your thoughts. Writing them in a journal or a blog.
Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
