Maybe I want to do something different with this blog. I have ADHD, mental health issues, and meditation absolutely helps me with both of those things, but I don't meditate as regularly as I think I would need to in order to maintain a meditation blog as regularly as I originally intended.
That's fine, I think. That's human, I think. That's ADHD, I think.
So how about I consider just using this space as a mental health blog until I find my "feet" (lol, that'll be a funny joke in a second.) These can be my ADHD "meditations" in the sense that it can be the things that are on my mind and where my brain is at the time, given the fact that I am an ADHDer. Cool. We'll go with that. At least for today. I might change my mind later.
Finding my "feet" (the ankle sprain of doom).
Literally finding my feet, actually. I sprained my ankle really badly about a week and a half ago and it has been absolutely hell on my mental health. For a bunch of normal human reasons in addition to probably ADHD reasons.
I'd planned a road trip to see family for the first time since before the pandemic lockdown, and my mental health won't allow me to fly or be a passenger in a car for very long, and trains are much too expensive and much too slow and much too inconvenient to be feasible for me, so driving was the best option. It took weeks to get my brain ok with the idea of taking a long road trip, but I got there. We made the plans. We booked a hotel. I took my car into the shop.
But then I sprained my ankle on a table cloth at an event exactly one week before our departure date. And ever since then, between the heartbreak of not being able to see my family and the feeling of helplessness that comes from not being able to do any of your basic normal things that give you a sense of dignity in your day, it feels like my entire life is on hold. I am just waiting for my ankle to get better enough that I can use my hands for something other than crutches, that I can get up the stairs again to sleep in my own bed, that I can take a shower by myself again.
I know it's not really healthy to let myself get stuck in this "my life is on hold" feeling, but it's very hard not to. Previously, I already struggled to give my life a sense of progress and movement, as my ADHD made it very difficult for me to stick with any of my interests long enough for me to build or develop a long term project or source of income. The best I could do was pursue what interests I had in that moment, that week, that day, and hope that I would make progress towards building it into Something Cool before my brain moved on to a different thing (or returned to a previous thing).
But now I have this additional barrier to engaging in any of those things: I can't walk. I can't pick things up or move them around. All I can do is sit on my ass.
Yes there are things I can do sitting down, like working on my fiction, learning programming, or making some kinds of art, but that's a really limited pool of things and I don't really get to decide what thing my ADHD brain is interested in doing on a given day. Yesterday I wanted to spin yarn, but I couldn't get up and go get the supplies. The day before, I wanted to work on candle making, but I need both hands on my crutches at all times if I am not sitting down, so I can't carry or move anything around, let alone work in the kitchen on candles.
All of this sort of adds up to this feeling of being trapped and constrained on two sides: one by my ADHD brain which refuses to let me be in charge of what I want to do, and my injury, which is limiting my options on what I even can do. And then on top of that, the depression and disappointment about having been injured in the first place really saps what little mental energy reserves I have available to try and persuade my ADHD brain to maybe become interested in one of the few things I CAN do sitting down.
So, finding my feet in my life has been extra hard lately, because I am only working with one good foot.
I know this is temporary. But ADHD time blindness makes it feel eternal. It's a lot of work just to keep going and reassure myself that I will get through this. I will have two functional feet again, and I will see my family again someday, and I will figure out what to do with my life that feels productive and earns some kind of income.
I will find my feet again. And in the meantime, I'll just need to make it my full time job to rest and heal and take care of my brain as best I can.
I think that's what today's blog post is about: I wanted to get this stuff out in a form where there is an imaginary audience and blog about my life sort of like I used to back in the days of livejournal... And this is as good a place as any.
Maybe I will return to blogging about meditation as an ADHD person later. Or maybe I won't. It's not really up to me, haha. It is up to my ADHD brain. At least right now it is.
If you are a human, and not a bot reading this, I wish you well. Comments are in moderation mode because of the influx of constant spam, but I'll publish anything written by a real human in response to this post if you feel like saying hi.
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