[AE.Personal] Habits & Habitations
Content Note: This one's going to talk about alcohol use, and the reasons I found it useful. Feel free to skip if that's not something you need to read about.
So, the streak is broken, as of yesterday. I made the decision when I went upstairs to go to bed that I would actually go to bed, and not sit down in my office first to spend an hour or so hammering out some thoughts, lightly reformatting them, and sending them on their way.
I made this decision because I was tired and my body needed rest to recover from its recent injuries, and because I didn't have a particular topic in mind or anything I felt needed saying in this space, but mainly because I thought about how focused I've been on keeping the streak alive and decided it would be a good idea to let myself fail now before it became more of a thing.
The idea of keeping a streak alive can be terribly motivating in some circumstances, but in others it can just be terrible. Such pressure! Such tension! Such an easy way to lose sight of the point of an exercise and simply continuing do it for the sake of continuing to do it.
I've managed to improve the consistency of my newsletter updates... and thus, incidentally, the consistency with which I write prose for the consumption of others... by resolving to not restrict or censor myself when it comes to topics, if I have something to say. I think it's just as important to not cudgel myself when I don't have anything to say, or the time or space or energy to say it.
Thinking about how a thing that can be an aid to motivation in one circumstance can be stifling in another got me thinking specifically about how so many of the things that I used as coping tools and strategies for what turned out to be untreated ADHD are now superfluous to my process at best, and how I'm still tripping over those things, sometimes by discovering that they're actually counterproductive now.
I used to drink a lot, mostly in the sense of "frequency of occurrence" but punctuated at regular intervals in the sense of "volume". One of my stock Twitter jokes was "I put the 'ctional alcoholic' in 'functional alcoholic'," which was my way of both acknowledging how much I was drinking while also reassuring myself that I was using the alcohol, not abusing it.
I drank to lower my inhibitions, which I have long perceived to be the biggest source of writer's block for me personally, and also to reduce the intensity of sensory input I receive from the world to a duller shade of roar and the pace of my own thoughts to one I found more agreeable for the ordering thereof.
Before the pandemic, I had a habit of going out of the house to try to spend a day writing in a different venue, in order to break out of the pattern of sitting around the house not writing. I mostly sat in cafes or bars, drinking either too much caffeine or too much alcohol, and trying to write, and sometimes it worked.
The pandemic put a pause on that habit, but since starting ADHD meds, I don't go through nearly as much caffeine as before, and I've almost entirely stopped drinking alcohol. The latter wasn't a decision so much as a circumstance; I temporarily stopped imbibing while I was acclimating to the pills so I could be sure of what I was experiencing, and once I was settled into a routine there, I didn't feel the need to put a splash of Fireball in my afternoon Dr. Pepper. When we would break out wine for a holiday dinner, I found it hit me differently than before... a mixture, I'm sure, of the changes effected by the medication and of a reduced tolerance.
I don't feel a need to make a conscious declaration towards abstinence at this time, but that's definitely closer to how I'm living than not.
I discovered another such shift in circumstances: for years, I have had a habit of immediately changing the color scheme of any writing tool I use to anything other than black text on a white screen, as I found blank pages intimidating and a virtual piece of paper being marred by virtual ink felt more like an empty canvas than something that was more clearly an electronic construct.
And I would change the background color and font color fairly often, in order to keep it "fresh", as that somehow made it more engaging for me.
Yesterday, I found myself looking at the relatively dull background color I had been using and the relatively low-contrast font color I had been using, and I thought, "Well, this is kind of putting me to sleep," so I changed it back to the default color scheme and immediately felt more actually alert and engaged.
And the old familiar sensation of facing an intimidatingly blank page I must somehow try to improve upon has not reared its head. I don't know if that was ADHD or how it was ADHD. It's possible that I've simply removed enough other obstacles and stressors from my life that I can get over that hurdle no problem... actually, as I think about it, it probably is just a straight dopamine thing. Dopamine problems lead to the perception of trivial obstacles as insurmountable.
Making that change made me look at other things in my virtual work environment that were artifacts of the Before Times. One of the things I did last year, not terribly long before I had my first ADHD appointment, was set up about a dozen different virtual desktops in Windows, so I could hit Ctrl-Win-[Arrow Key] left or right to page through my different projects and interests, each of which would always be open and on the top layer of its own respective space, because ADHD means out of sight, out of mind. I found that useful for keeping relatively on top of things (when it worked) and helping me shift gears between the mindsets and skills needed for very different projects.
Lately, though, keeping maintaining those desktops has felt like a chore more than a lifehack. Each time my computer restarts, whether due to my actions, an error, or an update, I have to go through them and open the right programs, files, browser tabs, etc. And my medicated brain sees an easier to navigate middle ground between "a desktop for every single thing" and "every single thing on a desktop"... i.e., while one desktop is too cluttered, having individual desktops for each thing is too sprawling.
I don't know that I've hit the right balance yet, but right now I have a home desktop for when I'm doing nothing in particular or none of the above, a fiction desktop for working on stories, a games desktop for working or playing games, and a non-fiction desktop for endeavors like this one.
I just set that up today so I have nothing to report on how well it works, but I certainly like the feel of it so far.