[AE.Personal, AE.ADHD] The title is this because I can't think of one, but I need to write something to send it.
I retweeted this on Twitter earlier today, the head of a thread about ADHD stuff that really resonated with me.
People with ADHD are often crushed by the weight of shame.
— Jesse J. Anderson • ADHD Creative (@jessejanderson) May 4, 2022
It persists daily.
Ready to strike at any point when you make some minor mistake, say the wrong thing, or forget an important detail.
I've been feeling like this a lot lately, as my creative projects dry up and my abiilty to hold my attention on anything -- much less build an audience around attention for it -- seems to wither away to nothing.
Shame comes bursting back into focus, built from years of falling short of others expectations.
— Jesse J. Anderson • ADHD Creative (@jessejanderson) May 4, 2022
You think, “if only I’d tried harder, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The whole thread is full of good stuff, both evocative explanations and possible coping tools that might work for a person.
Last night I had an insight that my days go better, in terms of getting stuff done that I want or need to get done, when I start my day by opening up my journal and writing in it, about what I'm thinking or feeling and what is going on in my life and what I plan to do for the day and how and when I plan to do it.
It's not a bulletproof solution for ADHD-related obstacles and other difficulties that may crop up, but it's helpful.
A later tweet in the same thread hit on a similar point:
Strategy: Journal Thoughts & Feelings
— Jesse J. Anderson • ADHD Creative (@jessejanderson) May 4, 2022
Writing out your emotions can soften the blow and allow you to discover the truth about your situation.
Forcing yourself to write down your feelings helps you to better understand the way you’re feeling and identify the negative soundtrack.
Journaling is often a daily activity for me, but I came into this month dealing with a migraine and its hangover/fallout that disrupted my routine and my ability to follow it.
In the month of May, today is only the second day I've actually journaled. Saying it like that, I realize that today is only the fifth, which means it hasn't actually been that long since I lost the daily habit, and I have now practiced journaling almost as many days as I did not.
I felt a bit of the shame spiral that the thread describes this afternoon when I sat down to open up my journal, and it almost stopped me... because the other half of my insight of last night was that if I start my day by opening my journal, my day goes well, and here it was after lunch. I had even repeated to myself that journaling was the best way to start my day this morning, and then didn't do it.
But late is literally better than never, and the longer I put something off, the later it becomes.
Also, it took me until I started writing this missive to realize that I saw the thread I'm singling out as having been very helpful when I opened up Twitter this morning, which is the very thing I've been sitting here kicking myself over doing, in lieu of doing anything different or better.
Back in my younger days, I had somebody reply to one of my posts about my struggles with deadlines and focus by asking me "Don't you have any shame?", in reference to the fact that I am a crowdfunded creator with ADHD... or rather, that I accept people's money even though I cannot spit out content like a machine.
Well, no one is actually immune to shame, but when I was younger, I feel like I was better at brushing it aside, and my response was to inform them that I have too much shame but no time at all to deal with it, that shame is the mindkiller, and that shame is not a helpful motivator for any activity other than wallowing in it.
Or that's my jumbled memory of the interaction, which may be a confabulation of multiple interactions, as that sort of thing certainly didn't happen only once.
Shame is not a great motivator in my book, but spite can be, and when I glimpse an off-ramp from a shame spiral, one of the things that helps me kick into gear and push my way over and through to it is the idea of spiting the people who would shame me for not already being there.
Is that healthy? I don't know. It seems more so than several alternatives. It can certainly be useful.
Anyway. I am not sure what this newsletter is about, except to say that I'm dealing with a lot, I feel more ways about it than I generally enjoy feeling (which, ideally, would be somewhere between zero and none ways), and I would like to share someone else's thread about ADHD stuff, both to help explain what I'm going through and in case any of it is useful to anyone else.
Or to sum it up in a more positive way: it's been a bad, hard week for me, for reasons that range from personal to national to global, but I'm journaling, and that's helpful.