ADHD, green onions + (some) thoughts on priorities

Babes and bots, 

It's spring! 

The flowers are blooming, the snow keeps falling, and most days it teeters between 30° and 80° F. This is Colorado, I suppose. My mentor recently gave me some advice: focus. Don't intercede every observation with "when I was 7 years old...", avoid narrative. Just write the thing. Smell the thing, taste the thing, hear the thing, feel the thing, see the thing. Rely on non-dominant senses to open your mind, empathize, and engage in a practice of radical noticing. So I did it, I crafted 8 pages of observations, some of which I talked about in my last post. This process was painful and time-consuming. The urge I felt to weave a narrative and disrupt intense observation with immersive, self-loathing dialogue or memory, made me hate myself. In the end, this was a good practice. It forced me to focus my thoughts, as it was designed to do, on a single thing. And that thing was a plant, or a swamp, or the feeling of whitewater, or snow. This was the vibe: 

eco vignettes 

slimy green onion bottoms, white, stuffed in a hydroponic jar. Coated in disintegrating layers, softening in hard water. Green onions are strange, swamp-like plants. They grow amidst the slime, making their own thick pools of water and sludge in the sun. 

moving on pt. 1

So, I know the eco vignettes aren't always interesting. You're bored? Maybe, maybe not. I can tell you I tire when I watch things grow. I lose interest and confidence in the project of radical noticing. My therapist tells me it's the ADHD brain swinging between two modalities: obsession and distraction, sometimes both at the same time. 

I am told there are methods of managing this: 

1. Breathing -- I already do this. In fact, I'm doing it right now. 

2. Meditation -- Since the month I spent in Australia, I have meditated less and less. Not as much time, I suppose. No guru to guide my practice (because things are easier when someone tells me to do them), no pressure from still and silent bodies in the room in seemingly perfect states of euphoria, nothing telling me to focus on my breath but myself (herein lies the problem; I am not enough for me). 

3. Exercise -- And as I told my doctor, who recommended exercise to a vegan outdoor guide and runner, I already do that. But let's, for argument's sake of course, say that I decide to exercise more, run a marathon or a half marathon, bike more than 6 miles a day, run more than 3 miles on the days I don't bike, or more than 2 on the days I do. Let's just say that I don't take rest days anymore, that I refuse simple sugars and simple carbs, and that these things slice fat from my thighs so that I appear appropriately trim. Let's just say that I start doing situps or jumping jacks for every 30 minutes of sitting, let's just say that I stop class to job around the building. Let's just say that at 14 I dipped below a size 00 from running and salad alone. Let's just say I have a family history of high cholesterol that was not considered. Let's just say a symptom of ADHD is obsession, and the doctor never asked me about that. Let's just say recommending exercise to this particular patient is bad medicine. 

4. Eat a high-protein diet -- I would be angrier if I didn't feel hungry all the time. 

5. Make lists -- finally, a good suggestion. 

6. Stay on task -- GREAT ADVICE. 

7. Prioritize -- Once, minutes before leaving with my partner on a winter camping trip, I decided to dust the entire apartment. As it turns out, I am comically bad at prioritizing. 

moving on pt. 2

I've realized recently that my ADHD has a much larger impact on my life than I previously credited. Just a few days ago I cracked my egg into a pan, then wiped the countertops and vacuumed the main house, and realized after some time that something was burning (my breakfast), that I was, in fact, very bad at multitasking. 

My incessant need to clean floors and counters and surfaces is not a Covid anxiety, though Covid did not help, but a desire for things to go in their places, a desire for control. Though, for me, organization and cleanliness have loose meanings. Clothes cannot be on the floor, but they can be on the bed. Trash cannot be around the house, but the trash bin can overflow whenever it likes. Once, I was driving late at night on a highway (going too fast) and slammed the brakes when I saw (through the mist) a herd of elk crossing the road. The bonsai tree in my passenger seat flung to the footwell and so did all of its rocks. Luckily, the tree survived. As I continued driving on my merry way, I dedicated myself to picking up as many rocks as I could. THE ROCKS, I thought, they can't just be EVERYWHERE. They have a place! And they needed to return there immediately!

Once again, I remember the term "priorities." During the months of my master's program, I've struggled with priorities. Teaching, for example, feels natural and good to spend my time on until I remember that I am here for many things, not just one. In those moments I feel as though I've failed, that I haven't managed to do what I set out to do here in Colorado. The fear that my students may think me incapable, unprofessional, or bad at teaching is far more motivating, it seems, than my own sense of balance. 

This is the way of things, so I'm told...

That's all for now, folx! Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me. 

xoxo BLT