The first step is the hardest

I’ve been back from 2 weeks of no internet, no air conditioning, and no crazy city life for 3 days now, and I’ve only put a dent in my to do list in the last 15 minutes. I’d like to point out that a good portion of this to do list needed to be done in July.






I find things hardest to do when they are already over their due date. It’s like, well, I already fucked it up, why even bother? Of course, lots of things are still perfectly fine if they are done late, but it is very hard to get out of that high expectation rut. It is one of the reasons that I hate To Do Lists. They end up staring at me, pointing out the things I failed to accomplish.Then I fail to accomplish more, and it is one big spiral down to that happy-fun-ADD-depression.






The only thing that sucks more than fear of failure is actual failure. It is really hard to face it and say, yeah, I fucked up, so now I should do the best I can to fix it. It’s way easier to ignore it and hope it goes away. Sitting here typing, I can be like, hey Nic, that is a stupid plan, but I keep doing it, in school, in life, and romantically. It really sucks watching yourself make the same damned mistakes, over and over.






So that’s it. First step done. I sent those overdue emails. Now, to do the cleaning that I planned to do sunday, and then I will finish dealing with my fucking school loans tonight.

Counter-Intuitive

I have something that I doubt you’ve ever heard someone who is ADD say: There is something very relaxing about organizing, for me, at least.

I feel at peace when I lose myself in an organizational system.

Part of this, I am sure, is that I am usually organizing to procrastinate doing work, as I am tonight. I mean, yes, I can’t do this project until I find all the sheets I need in my messy binder, but there is not reason I need to organize the binder as I do it. I mean, dude, the class ends tomorrow. (Well, technically today, it is after midnight)

But I think that it is deeper than that.

In my educational psych class, we learned about disequilibrium. Short summary, it is when your mind is a little out of whack, and you need to be in disequilibrium to learn something. For example, a child sees all things that swim in the sea as fish, and know that fish don’t breathe air, then see a dolphin breathing air, they must go through disequilibrium and confusion to learn this new fact, and assimilate it.

My theory is that because of the ADD, my brain is always a little out of whack, always trying to keep up with everything I am trying to process. When I lose myself in an organizing system, I do what the system tells me to, and my brain can calm down, relax, and just rest. It doesn’t get to do that much.

I wish I could figure out how to achieve this piece when I’m not in the middle of a crisis period, though.