You don't want to call them bad things, because then the piling up would become overwhelming, and before long you would have to start thinking of your life as intolerable. Instead of "bad," you think of them as difficult; challenges, to be divided and conquered. You sort of hyperfocus and try not to notice all of them at once. This (you say, surveying the wreckage) is only difficult, I only worry about the problem that's in front of me, a mountain to be scaled, nothing more. And after that, it will be the next mountain, and the next, instead of some intolerable mess of suffocating badness, like being strangled in a sea of cooked spaghetti.
It works, most of the time. I think a lot of people do this.
Here's the dilemma; how do you do one mountain at a time when you're ADHD? Seriously. I've recently observed that I can jump into something and stay consistent, put time into it every day--for more or less three weeks, at which point my attention attempts mutiny. Problems don't seem to come in bite size chunks. . . God forbid I should need a bigger mouth?
2 comments:
I really like this post. I don't think I have ADHD (who really knows what they don't have?). But I do have a voracious desire to learn and to fix. I saw a little of myself in your description.
I start to work on a problem and then another one comes up. Now I think I need to work on that one. Oh, but there's this other one over there. I try to multi-task and work on all of them. You can guess how well that works.
Thank you for commenting on my blog. You mentioned a PTSD text, but not by name. May I ask what you were refering to? I loved what you said about it and would like to read more.
Of course, wouldn't we all love to go back and give advice to our childhood selves, especially about trauma?
Thank you for writing your blog. I really like it a lot.
The title is "traumatic stress." http://www.amazon.com/Traumatic-Stress-Effects-Overwhelming-Experience/dp/1572300884
If I ever get a copy (which I'm planning to), you can definitely borrow it. I tend to research. . . well, you know how some people clean when they're emotional? Excited, upset, angry, sad? I research.
When I got serious about fighting my PTSD, I tried to research but discovered that local libraries are sadly lacking; almost everything had to be ordered through interlibrary loan.
This book was really soothing; it really described a lot of my most strongly-felt inner conflicts, and it said they were so common their was a whole field of study about them. Weirdly and incredibly reassuring.
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