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?

"if she's right, and the majority of Twihards aren't necessarily interested in Team Jacob or Team Edward but on Team Female Protagonist Who Isn't Drinking Cosmos And Bitching About Her High Powered Magazine Job Whilst Wearing Designer Shoes And Looking Like A Movie Star. . ."

Dear Yoga,

thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.

nothing like breath to make you feel not-drowning.


love,

Day

Tired, and so many things left to work on. Need to study for work stuff before I go to bed; want to goof off. Want to call a friend. Want a hug. Dishes, laundry, lawn needs mowing, haven't made any progress on the driveway for days, bloggy things I need to write, various portions of my house direly need cleaning, sleep--all of this feels pressing.

What I have done today: made a new friend, confronted my therapist, wrote in my journal, read two chapters of a trashy vampire story, slept when my back hurt, went on a long walk, thought about life, slow gentle yoga. And now this. Priorities, priorities.

But, I feel OK. This is what it's all for?

How do you say, “I'd like to finish your class, but trying not to want to kill myself seems to be a full time job?”

I wonder if I'm not doing something right, or if I'm just irreconcilably broken. Maybe that crucial part was knocked off long ago, like the rear view mirror came off that Cadillac when your teenage son backed it in too close to the mailbox. Or the time he didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he tried to rebuild the engine.

Some days I wake in the morning and my skin feels tauntingly intact. I would give anything just to be held, but my craving for someone to take a baseball bat or a knife to my back seems like a more honest version of the same desire. So I do the dishes; try not to cry, shake it off. Keep moving. Get dressed. Do something else. Fight. Remember to want to fight. Try, at least, to remember.


It's tempting to just tell her to give me a fail, leave it with everything else in the wreckage behind me. There's legitimacy here; I am trying, really, to build something new. New things need space to grow. The idea of tapping out is liberating, but also, angry and frustrating and sad. I love this work; I don't just like it. It uses me, all the intellectual muscle built up from years of reading useless crap that was never going to be any good to me if I was a physicist or a dancer. It's about taking the things I was inexorably drawn to, almost against my will, and weaving them into something useful and beautiful and real. I don't want to loose it forever.