I've been putting in a lot of hours lately. Not because I have to, but because I can't seem to find an off-ramp at the end of the day. If there is work to be done, I work on it until the job is done. Website work isn't a one-sitting project, so I wind up putting in late night and early morning hours to catch up, when the truth is that I don't really have to catch up at all. My brain does not understand that it is possible to stop at some point and pick it up the next time.
It's exhausting.
Fifty Emergencies
With ADHD it is so easy for a brain to feel overwhelmed even when the situation is objectively under control. Mine sees a task list with 50 things on it, and instead of sorting out what has to happen today from what could sit for a week without anybody noticing, I see 50 emergencies.
Today Versus This Second
There is a real difference between something that has to be done today and something that has to be done this second at the expense of everything and everyone else. My brain files almost everything in the second category. That is the part that is hard to explain to somebody whose brain doesn't work this way. The alarm is going off, and it keeps going off until the thing is finished. That's the whole of it. It has nothing to do with the work mattering more than the people in the room.
The alarm is going off, and it keeps going off until the thing is finished. That's the whole of it.
And the list is never done anyway. Things go on it, things get done, things come off. I have never met anybody who got to the bottom of theirs.
What It Bleeds Into
Living in that state bleeds into everything else. It changes how I sleep. It changes how and when and what and how much I eat. It gets to the things that have nothing to do with work at all — hobbies, the stuff I actually enjoy, family time. When I'm in emergency mode, all of it registers as a distraction from the emergencies.
It's exhausting.
The Lodge
My Masonic lodge doesn't meet over the summer. The first meeting of the new year was this week, and it wasn't even on my radar. I joined that lodge specifically to get out of the house and leave work behind for a couple of hours. A whole summer without a meeting, and on the one night it finally came back around, work had taken up so much room in my head that there was none left for the thing I joined to protect.
Even writing this post, I feel like I have to get through it so I can move on to the next vital thing on the list.
Again. It's exhausting.
Where the Cost Shows Up
There are stretches where I am better at this, where I can look at the list, sort it honestly, and understand that the world is not going to collapse if I slow down and breathe. Then there are weeks like this one. It is a constant battle going on inside my own head, and weeks like this are when I get reminded that ADHD is a real thing with a real cost — and that the cost shows up somewhere other than the work. The work got done. The meeting is what I lost.