[AE.Meta] On the balance...
Last night, when I realized it was about a minute to midnight and I was still putting the finishing touches on my newsletter, I had a couple of immediate and conflicting impulse.
One was to give up and go to bed and deal with the newsletter in the morning, if it still made sense to me to do it then. After all, according to the clock and the calendar it wouldn't go out until "tomorrow" either way.
Another was to front-load the draft I'd written with a long apologetic explanation of the whys and wherefores of the situation and then send it.
And a third was to go over the draft again from top to bottom to make sure it was really solid, and maybe add some more content to it, to make sure that the late edition was worth the weight or otherwise add value to make up for the lateness.
What I went with, initially, was the second option I mentioned there... but a little bit into the apologetic foreword I decided to cut it out, acknowledge that I've been finishing my newsletters off late at night directly before going to bed, and see if I had any thoughts on the matter after I had a chance to sleep on it.
It turns out, I do.
I'm very focused on the newsletter streak right now because I have spent so much of the last several months... since I started ADHD meds... working on myself rather than, you know, working, at least in any sense that immediately pays the kinds of dividends that can be exchanged for food or internet.
And this newsletter is not currently a huge moneymaker nor undergoing any kind of steady growth in revenue or readership... but it's something. Something I can do and put out in the world for others to read that isn't Twitter ephemera, somewhere I can lay out my thoughts for an audience other than myself.
And it has been a good and growing source of income in the past, and it might again in the future, if I put in the work on it.
And as it's a somewhat less introspective and much more sharply bounded alternative to my meandering daily journaling, it can be a place where I can combine putting the work in on myself and putting in work.
Since I started ADHD meds, one of the main things I have been working... first working on realizing and then working on resolving... is how much of my unmedicated life was about ping-ponging between extremes.
When it comes to accomplishing a task on a particular day or by a particular time, for most of my life there were only two possibilities:
Either I had a plan of my own devising that I would follow to the letter unless and until I encountered a single obstacle, at which point I would give it up for a bad job and maybe try again another time or forget about the whole thing.
Or I would go into such a state of obsessive hyperfocus that I would forget about everything else and just do that one thing, right through mealtimes and bedtimes and just keep going and going and going until I got sick, burned out, or fell into a different obsession.
And I know that no part of that sounds great on the surface, but the sheer range of things that could count as an obstacle is ridiculous. It includes but is not limited to: someone asking me to do something else, a noise happening while I'm trying to do it, or a single unexpected variable that required even a moment's consideration to deal with.
This particular dichotomy is not the only such set of extremes I've been trying to find a solid place to stand in the middle of, but it's one of the big ones when it comes to getting anything done, whether in my personal life (like household chores and repairs) or professionally.
Making sure that I get a newsletter written each day and sent out even if it means putting the finishing touches on and sending it out the virtual door on my way to bed... it feels like a balance? And a workable one?
Like, I know it's not going to be sustainable for me to be awake and in my office at 11 or 12 at night every night... but a pattern of two nights in a row does not foretell a new and unending status quo.
I can keep a commitment in the face of uncertainty and unpredictable disruptions if I'm willing and able to be flexible and to sometimes take some extra effort, and I don't need that effort to be an all-consuming obsession... in fact, it's better and more workable if it's not.
That preceding paragraph... I look at it and it's weird to think about how reasonable it is, to the point that it seems obvious and unremarkable. I could have given someone else advice that sounded much like it at any point in my adult life.
But I couldn't have made it work for myself, and now I can and I am, at least (so far) in this one area.
The miracles that come out of medication aren't all huge and dramatic, but they all feel miraculous.