Words are inadequate

Not journaling is a bad sign but usually I read it as a depressed bad sign, and I don't think that's what's going on right now. So I've mostly I guess ignored it. "Well, I'm not writing, but even accounting for my resistance to admitting I'm depressed I don't think I'm depressed, so it's probably okay?" There's something going on, though. The last ... week and a half, since Erin went back home, I've been feeling exceptionally unfocused.

Maybe before that as well, it's hard to tell from here. Before Erin came down in early May I felt like I was keeping together pretty well, though. I got my classwork done ahead of time so that I wouldn't have to worry about it while we were down at Sherry's. And then ... the chaos of the next week happened and it feels like that threw me just completely out of whack, and I haven't managed to re-center myself.

I am ... let's say 'not falling behind in a damaging way' in classes. That is: I'm doing fine on tests/quizzes. As for assignments: of the five, I'm keeping fully up to date in two. A third has moved into Group Work mode; the first of two assignments there is due later this week and it's complete, ready to be submitted once the other members of the group say "yep, looks good to go." The last two are Rob's two classes, in which I am behind but for which due dates are more like suggestions. I do exceptionally poorly with trying to -learn- from Rob's fragmented lectures. I got by in fall because I already knew half and could functionally teach myself the rest. The 'already knew' part is much smaller this time, so the teaching-myself is correspondingly larger. But at least the dates are flexible.

Apart from that. I went to a small larp on Saturday and had a great deal of fun. I'd like to get that written up in more detail but, again, difficulty Sitting Down And Doing It. Food last week was extremely catch-as-can, and I overcompensated by Cooking All The Things over the weekend and yesterday: cookies which went to larp and to Julianne who's gone back east (her mother is in hospital and may or not be coming back out again), freezer burgers, more bread, a pork tenderloin in the fridge to make into sammiches.

Money's been bad/scary, in both the short-term (running out of funds with no job relatively soon) and long-term (having done math it is unlikely that BC Gov, my desired/preferred employer, will pay me enough to live on). Doubtless some background stress around that kicking up, as well.

I have not missed feeding the cat, since he lets me know when food is supposed to be and conveniently it is also at my food-times, but I have missed the litterbox, more than once (not more than once in a row, thankfully). I put off going to get more cat litter for nearly a week, unrelated to not cleaning the litterbox. Objects are beginning to pile up on flat surfaces.

I seem to be not doing well and I don't know what to do about it.

Deep breath.

This is all sounding like at minimum a resurgence of ADHD problems. It's entirely possible that I need a meds adjustment. I am on not quite the lowest possible dose of Concerta, and I do notice a difference on big-pill days vs small-pill days.

Mm. Noted: This is not good. Will attempt to get a meds adjustment this week: calling tomorrow morning.

A couple of weeks ago I had an assignment that needed to get done, that I knew needed to get done, and that I'd been planning for a couple of days on getting done. So of course I procrastinated on it until sometime after lunch. Thing is, I could tell it was a normal (for me) procrastination, and I could also tell that once I got started on it I wasn't going to need to stop every ten minutes or whatever, I'd be able to just keep going. Which was in fact the case. It's so nice to have my brain back to not-working in ways I'm used to and expect. Yay drugs, basically.

This also feels like further evidence for the idea that something happened to exacerbate my lack-of-focus between two and, mm, five, years ago. I'm inclined to blame my case of covid in April '22 but who knows.

Anyway. It has been A Few Weeks, i tel yu whut.

( erin, steph, misc )

Oh hey, it's been a minute.

( ADHD )

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( Classes )

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( Cat )

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( Travel )

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Overall? Things are good, I think. I'm worried about money and the future but that's a future problem. Right now I'm ... mostly happy. It's nice.

I've been reviewing my childhood medical records. Looks like in third and fourth grade I wasn't paying attention in class or doing schoolwork I found boring or unpleasant. My fourth grade teacher (Mrs Weikel, who I mostly remember as "nicer than Mrs Leyden") suggested the possibility of ADD in the fall. One diagnosis and one Ritalin prescription later, and per her reports I was sitting still, paying attention, and generally feeling better about myself(!). Next year's teachers reported no ADD symptoms whatsoever.

The dosage gradually scaled back over the next several years. There were a couple of attempts to take me off it altogether; those mostly saw a return to pre-Ritalin normal, and I was back on it within six weeks.

I went off Ritalin for good the summer before eighth grade. My grades immediately started to suffer but in my defence that was the year my English teacher assigned weekly homework that included "write these twenty spelling words five times each" and got offended when I handed in reports that were written on the computer. And next year I was at a much much harder high school so of course I was struggling a bit, and when a couple years later I got bad enough for Professional Help my terrible therapist had never heard of hyperfocus so of course ADD was immediately ruled out, and the rest is history.

The other reason nobody noticed that I started doing worse when I went off Ritalin is that it was the summer of 1990, at Fort Bragg. Dad deployed to Saudi Arabia in late August for Desert Shield/Storm and didn't get back until early April. It's fair to say the Taylor family had a lot going on.

I dunno. I'm pretty sure "boring" isn't really right. "Unpleasant" is but that's so vague as to be mostly useless. As I understand it from here, there are tasks that my brain insists I'll be miserable while doing and won't be any happier having done. So I literally can't do them, at least not until some outside force makes them worth doing. Usually that's some form of deadline anxiety, which comes with its own host of problems.

More fuel for "I wish that had been different," plus "at least I know better now." Will see what the ADHDoc says this afternoon.

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.

( ramble )

The Telus Health appointment, in contrast, was entirely painless.

DOCTOR: Alright, why do you think you have ADHD?
ME: Well, I was diagnosed as a kid--
DOCTOR: OH! So you HAVE ADHD.

And we had like a five-minute conversation about "you don't outgrow ADHD, you just get better at coping" and why/how it was causing enough problems for me to seek treatment now, and we were done, and an hour or so later I got an automated email saying that the referral had been sent.

She did ask if I had any other conditions and I sort of died a little inside and said "I was diagnosed with depression at eighteen," and she just kind of waved it off. In retrospect I suspect she was maybe looking for whether I had an autism diagnosis? Because I was definitely not making much eye contact while speaking and stumbling over my words a bit and probably overexplaining as well.

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My ADHD-esque avoidance is definitely tied to anxiety: "this is gonna be hard despite everyone saying it's easy" or "this has some unknown bits to it that i don't automatically know how to navigate." So, dealing with the first causes there would probably help with the avoidance? But that takes time and I don't really have time, and also having some help would be nice. I do not, in fact, have to do things the hard/right way all the time. (I am also doing it the hard/right way but I would like some help in addition to that.)

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In other news, I hauled Mr Tuppert off to the vet for a toe trim and he was a Perfect Gentleman. Just sat there and let the vet wrap an arm around him and clip all four feet, no pulling away or anything.

Hmpf.

Shoutout to all the people who went undiagnosed in their childhood because despite never fitting in and feeling like you belonged, you got good grades, and that was all that mattered to anyone.

--@ skyler @ furry.engineer, 2023-09-23

This is of course an exaggeration. Other things also mattered, including "going to church every Sunday," "practicing cello," and, later, "Boy Scouts". But it was made real clear to me early on that "feeling like I belonged" was pretty much irrelevant.

(This isn't really about that. It's about ADHD. But that's a part of the story, so, here we are. CW: historical casual suicide talk below the cut.)

( AD(H)D, etc )

The core, perhaps, is that I used to arrange my life in such a way that I knew what was coming: not just "tuesday is dinner-and-rpg, wednesday is counseling, one saturday a month is a big boardgaming day" but ... the feel of it. There was a rhythm to my life that I knew and understood and felt, bone-deep and everywhere. And within that rhythm I had plenty of time and space to break out of it: there's an interesting thing to go do this weekend, or this evening I want to write about a particular book, or I should get xmas presents for folks near and far.

For whatever reason, when I am entwined with Erin (probably "with anyone") I lose that rhythm. I enjoy, sometimes more sometimes less, the time I spend with her; that's not the issue. It's that it becomes difficult to impossible to live in the rhythm of my own life. I've been trying to push through, to find the rhythm again around and within that, for three or five years now, with scant success.

Case in point: I have no year-end roundup for 2019 or 2020, to refer back to and see how things compared. Some of that's cowardice and depression, knowing I was doing poorly and not being willing to face up to it. Some of it's the plague year and the malaise it brings. And some of it's that reflection takes time and energy, and finding those when my rhythm is disrupted is hard, sometimes impossible.

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So. 2021. The Plague Year Part 2.

I did travel last year, unexpectedly enough: I squeezed in an August run to Niagara and the Gathering before (or more accurately, in the midst of the rise of) the Delta variant. And I went down to Vancouver several times, mostly for gaming with Holly, Zee, and James. I'd like for more travel this year: I'm signed up for both the Gathering in early April and Beach Week with my DC ex-gaming-group in late May. We shall see whether the plague cooperates with these plans. To the left, I have no particular desire to play tourist. There are places I'd like to visit, for various reasons: Wales, Rome, Santorini... but I'm more interested in exploring where I land, rather than going somewhere specifically to explore. Like, oh, Farthing Party was a good excuse to wander around Montreal. That sort of thing.

My financial situation is dire enough that I will most likely be taking out a short-term loan from a friend to cover moving expenses. On the bright side, I didn't have to dip into my RSP to fund the condo purchase. I have no idea what my finances will look like in a year. At least the potential trips to the US are paid for: there's money waiting in a USD-denominated account to cover everything except airfare.

There's a sense in which I tried to fill up the void of the rhythm of my life with Things: fancy books, boardgames and RPGs I won't play, that sort of thing. One hopes that there'll be less need for that this year. But that will also take some return to specific discipline, telling myself "no." Which it's about time for anyway. An advantage of having a tiny condo, perhaps.

The other thing about money is that I did drop down to 80% time and pay back in April. The pay cut didn't matter as long as I was living here and not going much of anywhere, but, well. I'm expecting to ramp up my job search in the coming months, and I expect that a new job will be at full-time and for more money than I'm making now, so it'll be a more than 20% pay bump. Which will help. I don't know whether going back to full-time will be a mistake or not but there's really only one way to find out. (Run a blind A/B test cycle.)

My physical condition has consistently deteriorated over the last three years. Exercise for the sake of exercise seems to be nigh-impossible for me; yoga worked because it was a Thing that I went to do and someone else told me what to do there. Again, hopefully this will change when things become within walking distance and there is not a large hill (and a poorly-sidewalked highway) between me and groceries-on-foot. I suspect, though I do not know, that my body will still adapt relatively quickly to being moved and used again, and that my lungs will re-develop basic functionality. With any luck at all this will also aid in sleeping and maybe even in my basic self-image.

My social network has likewise deteriorated, which, again, no surprise. I played in an online RPG run by Joe in DC, which mostly served to reinforce that multi-person videochats are really not a good social milieu for me. I spent a lot of time with Erin, which was quite good except for the rhythm-breaking per above. I saw Sarah once for a few days in August, and djinn not at all. I've still got a handful of Vancouver connections for when I'm in person, and a handful of people to talk to online when I'm feeling up to that. Turns out the isolation is rougher on me than I would have thought. Oh well. One learns.

So what have I done, with my plague years, my northern years? I survived, mostly. I started learning to play the bass guitar, and then put that on hold while I'm playing viola for Sound of Music with the high school down the road. I read a bunch. I bought a condo. I became a little more bold about publicly adopting labels like 'autistic' or 'nonbinary.' I learned some things about who I'm not, and maybe about who I am.

I didn't learn how to talk to people, or how to want things in such a way that I can express it, even to myself, without putting fire to what's around me. I didn't learn how to negotiate or compromise or even fight. Three (!) years ago I thought that At this rate I might be a functioning human being in another decade or two. Ha, well. I suppose there's still time for that.

i'll walk home with snow falling
deep on frozen lawns
and i'll leave
all those others celebrating
all the things that they have done