where i'm at, i guess

[jazzfish]

Today I read more than half of Fire Logic (finished it), and fed myself, and that was about it. I took a nap. I fired up the Unix terminal and did a tiny bit of homework / Unix practice, but quit once I'd loaded the Bootstrap tutorial.

I guess maybe I needed a day off.

I've done little other than school and try-to-make-myself-do-school for the last two weeks. When I got my first report card of junior year, the one where I was actually failing one class and not doing well in several others, I remember sitting in Analog Electronics next to Ron Taylor and deciding I was just going to focus on schoolwork, stop doing anything fun, because I absolutely needed to get my grades back up. It didn't take, then: I had way too many opportunities for distraction and way too many other commitments and way too many other people, who fell into both the above categories. I seem to be doing that now, though.

I don't really like it. I feel dull, I feel my mind slowing down and shutting down. Very little is of interest. I read but it takes effort to do so. I don't think I have the attention span to watch an entire 45-minute tv episode. Judging by other people's responses I seem to be losing my ability to make the stories I tell entertaining, or even coherent. This feels necessary to get through school, which is why I can do it, and I still do not like it

I also do not like my inability to retain focus, my tendency to get rattled by something even vaguely difficult or tricky coming up, something that might be as simple as "this problem's done, move on to the next one." I'm maintaining focus here, for writing this? Though even here I'm fighting the urge to alt-tab into a browser or pick up the iPad and play Honeycomb or Race For The Galaxy, my go-tos for Little Brain. (I have played neither of those today, and I'm a little proud of that.)

I want my resilience back, I seem to have lost it sometime between "started work at Simba" and now. I know I didn't have it at the end at MSTR. I think I had it again when I was still with Emily? I think I had it before moving north, before the plague? I don't know. I'd definitely lost it by last April, after moving and covid and stupid BMC job, and I hung on by my fingernails as long as I could until they cut me loose.

And I thought I'd regained it over the summer, when I very obviously hadn't, not being able to do music and write and bike all in a day should have been a Sign. To say nothing of the struggle to finish up Blood On Her Hands.

I'm scared that it's gone for good. I'm scared that everyone, any doctor, will tell me the same things I've been hearing and telling myself since at least junior year if not third grade: just do it, it's not that hard, you're being lazy.

"Lazy" is of course one of the main weapons deployed against ADHD folks. So maybe it'll be all right? Maybe there's help for me? I can hope.

Comments

[sartorias]

Ignore this question if it seems too intrusive.....Are you still doing your yoga and yoga breathing?

[jazzfish]

It's not too intrusive at all (I'm putting all this out there, I'm not sure what -would- be "too intrusive").

And, I'm not; yoga mostly fell by the wayside in ... July? I replaced it with biking, but that's also fallen off as of the start of school. Which is also not ideal. Now that the weather's starting to get serious about rainy winter it is probably worth at least trying to break out the yoga mat again.

[sartorias]

Hope it helps get the juices stirring again!

[reedrover]

I have a sympathetic response for you, but no real ideas.

Achaosofkittens (older than you and me) started college this summer. He is not ADD and he also does not have employment to pull him away from his classwork. Ever since the start, he has spent a lot of time commenting on how stupid he feels. In his perception of himself, school used to be a lot easier. Conceptual understanding used to be faster. Concrete processing used to be smoother. His logic chains formed naturally during learning intake. Now he has to work for all of those pieces and it’s all much slower to come together.

So maybe it’s not that you are “lazy.” Maybe it’s that you’ve got an adult brain that is suffering from a decades-long lack of practice in longer term learning. Then you get a bonus: the ADHD impulses are a buy-one, get-one situation when the learning gets hard. You get frustrated that you aren’t smoothly integrating the new information and your brain looks for an easier path to feelings-success by offering up impulses to do something comforting or shiny.

[jazzfish]

Thank you. And I hope it gets easier for him as his brain gets more used to the learning process!

I'm trying really hard to believe in "there's no such thing as 'lazy'."

At this point the actual 'learning' isn't hard for me, I don't think? These are all intro-level courses, so there's a lot of conceptual groundwork, but it all feels like "oh, of course, that makes sense." The hard part is, quite literally, just Doing The Damn Work, sitting through lectures and plugging through homework. Which has always been a struggle for me, and is why I pulled myself out of engineering (before they could kick me out).

In part it's as if the whole -idea- of learning something, of doing something new, is the problem, is what my brain is bouncing off of. That's what I mean by 'resilience,' being able to absorb ... not just new information but unexpected things, things that are different from the routine. ...this wants to be its own post, I think.

[shanaqui]

♥

I feel like my classes are sucking the life out of me, too. It matters so much to me, but I don't gain satisfaction back from staying on the learning treadmill when it takes so much work. It needs doing every week, and never feels "done" in a way where I can put it down and step back.

So at the very least I can say you're not alone.

[jazzfish]

Sounds about right. /: Thank you, and my sympathies.