Me and ADHD

Three complaints

I’m not going to get whiny here but three things are getting on my nerves lately.

1) I keep forgetting to drink water throughout the day and then I wake up at night feeling like I have been in the desert.

2) I’m having extra trouble choosing where to focus so I haven’t been able to write some things I want to write. This isn’t writer’s block, it’s grief and I am trying to be kind to myself until this particular aspect passes. It’s frustrating in the meantime, though.

3) My body wants get moving, work hard, really get my muscles working. My brain and my metaphorical heart are insisting on moving slowly. If I try to push myself at all it either stirs up my emotions or I feel instantly exhausted.

I know these things take time but I wouldn’t mind if they took a little less time than this.

Working on a Workshop

I’m teaching a workshop tomorrow afternoon and I am having the same problem that I always do with workshop prep.

I’m trying to cram too much into a short session.

I know this is a common problem when creating workshops. It’s hard to know what to include, what is ‘enough.’ You want people to understand your topic and you want them to feel like they got what they came for but you also don’t want to overwhelm them.

And I think this is exacerbated by my ADHD desire for context.

When I pull a piece of information out of my brain, it never comes alone – it drags a whole net of related ideas with it.

And the word related is covering a lot of territory here.

Related might include other facts relevant to that piece of information but it also might include details of when and where and how I learned that fact, other people who have expressed similar ideas, metaphors and analogies that are connected by a very thin string to the original topic…

You get my point here.

So, not only am I wading through stuff I *know* is useful and relevant and winnowing that down, I am also wading through all kinds of stuff that *may* be relevant and trying to decide if any of it is useful for the topic of the day.

Needless to say that process is a challenge.

I’m up for it but it is still a challenge.

I do have one important guiding principle though.

The heart of my workshop is this idea:

Writing is a tricky business and it’s ok to find it hard but if you can get comfortable with your own process, you’ll get your words on the page.

Slow Start

I am moving at a snail’s pace this morning.

I wasn’t well (headache and general weirdness) last night. It threw off my sleep pattern and I woke up feeling like the bones in my skull had been rearranged.

That’s not a fun feeling, just so you know.

So, I am taking my morning pretty slowly.

The problem is, I have things going on later in the week and early next week that need to be organized now.

Someone else *could* do this stuff if I had written it all down before now but, at this point, I am the only one who can do it.

And if I just leave it until tomorrow, it will mean two things:

1) I’ll spend all day trying not to think about that stuff. Deliberately *not* thinking of stuff takes a lot of energy.

2) Tomorrow will feel rushed and frustrating

So that’s not appealing.

I wonder if I can figure out how to still do these things but just slowly and over a bit more time?

Let’s see how it goes.

A longer walk

Yesterday, after a meeting, I decided to walk home.

Most of the year, this walk would be pretty straightforward but with snow still in patches on the paths , it was a bit uncertain.

I still enjoyed it though.

I really like walking for transportation but my ADHD used to get in the way quite often and I would find that I didn’t have quite enough time to get myself to my planned destination and I’d need to take the car.

It was easier if I got dropped off because there was less timing pressure for getting home.

Now though, after years of meditation and conscious work on how to make my own ADHD life flow more smoothly, I can usually plan enough time to walk in either direction or I can decide on the best plan in advance.

All of this is to say that I had an enjoyable walk home yesterday and I felt grateful for a bit of time to move and think and listen to a podcast.

Also, I saw a cool tree.

A grey tree trunk with some parts of the roots above ground
I don’t know exactly what I find so cool but I really like this tree. Image description: the grey trunk of a (currently) leafless medium-sized tree with parts of some of the larger roots visible above ground. The trunk splits into two large parts (branches?) about 3ft from the ground and there is a whole in the branch (?) on the right side that looks like a monster eye. It’s surrounded by dead grass and leaves and there is a big patch of snow and other trees in the background nearby.