Turning it off and then back on again
Mar. 12th, 2025 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feldmanI'm approaching my two year anniversary of knowing I have adhd.
In the time since there's been therapy, grieving, processing, reading, experimenting, expressing, meditating, medicating, my job becoming economic roadkill, supporting my spouse through his job burnout and re-employment, going through seasonal depression while actually being able to dial down my committments to meet torpor-level capacity (hasn't happened since high school), confronting chronic lifetime parentification in the context of elder care and being cast as Nagging Mother in my own home, and a truly wicked case of pneumonia with several days of 103.5F, and a multiple chest x-rays to monitor recovery.
Physically, reaching sous vide temperatures while shivering and not eating seems to have cannibalized some of my structural proteins and muscle fibers. I need to rebuild my stamina, but my flexibility is shockingly better, allowing better biomechanics and balance, i.e., getting my right leg back into the main kinetic chain turns stress forces into strengthening forces, makes me less tippy, and eases the neck/shoulder tension that feeds into migraines.
Turning vicious cycles into virtuous, that's what I've been doing with myself for months now, reintegrating injured and derelict parts of my body and mind. I used to use anxiety as home-brewed stimulant, used to conceive of myself as choosing to swim against an inherent laziness by consciously constantly goading myself. This eventually stopped working, and it was all I could do to eke out the minimum by the time I sought therapy, but I was still surprised at the possibility of adhd when my therapist floated the idea after a couple sessions, surprised by the diagnosis, and it wasn't until I had my first dose of stim meds that I understood it wasn't just task initiation and some memory glitches.
I hadn't ever really felt a sense of accomplishment before, aside from brief relief. It's a soft warm glowing, like a full belly. So I went from having to light a fire under my ass to do every little thing (with the resultant energy drain and toxic cesspool of self-talk), to just...being able to set things to rights with almost no perceived effort plus bonus satisfaction jollies after-- aside from my habitual inner turmoil jabbing away, laying a caustic emotional coating on everything. That's taken longer to understand and dismantle, tied into all kinds of shit both heinous and mundane, but in practice it's simple and profound: I stopped forcing myself to do anything until I felt good/neutral doing it. Part trust fall, part work strike.
Noticing, addressing, and moving out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. Listening to the body and lavishing it with care and comfort. Figuring out how to eat around the medication.
I could take the meds and do the things, but the mental loops still played; I had to radically shut the loops down and then work through how to do things without mismanaging myself. Both off meds and then on, I tackled getting my house and my mind in order, DIY occupational therapy and re-parenting of the parts I'd ruthlessly controlled. Getting at the root of demand avoidance and finding a scared aching kid scraping her last spoon into a shiv, and having a long dark tea party of the soul.
I couldn't have done this part while employed. I knew I needed to before I could even look for a new job. I didn't appreciate at the time how deeply weird it would be to essentially reboot my whole orientation to the material world. "Can you get up and make yourself lunch without being shitty to yourself about it to get your body moving?" isn't a matter of turning off the self-talk like a radio when it's integrated into the fucking procedural memory. I couldn't even parse LinkedIn until end of January, then lost a month sick.
But now it's spring, my lungs are on the mend, I've rewritten the resume, got one interview so far, and I haven't felt more than a reflexive whiff of dread at the prospect of getting back in the saddle.
In the time since there's been therapy, grieving, processing, reading, experimenting, expressing, meditating, medicating, my job becoming economic roadkill, supporting my spouse through his job burnout and re-employment, going through seasonal depression while actually being able to dial down my committments to meet torpor-level capacity (hasn't happened since high school), confronting chronic lifetime parentification in the context of elder care and being cast as Nagging Mother in my own home, and a truly wicked case of pneumonia with several days of 103.5F, and a multiple chest x-rays to monitor recovery.
Physically, reaching sous vide temperatures while shivering and not eating seems to have cannibalized some of my structural proteins and muscle fibers. I need to rebuild my stamina, but my flexibility is shockingly better, allowing better biomechanics and balance, i.e., getting my right leg back into the main kinetic chain turns stress forces into strengthening forces, makes me less tippy, and eases the neck/shoulder tension that feeds into migraines.
Turning vicious cycles into virtuous, that's what I've been doing with myself for months now, reintegrating injured and derelict parts of my body and mind. I used to use anxiety as home-brewed stimulant, used to conceive of myself as choosing to swim against an inherent laziness by consciously constantly goading myself. This eventually stopped working, and it was all I could do to eke out the minimum by the time I sought therapy, but I was still surprised at the possibility of adhd when my therapist floated the idea after a couple sessions, surprised by the diagnosis, and it wasn't until I had my first dose of stim meds that I understood it wasn't just task initiation and some memory glitches.
I hadn't ever really felt a sense of accomplishment before, aside from brief relief. It's a soft warm glowing, like a full belly. So I went from having to light a fire under my ass to do every little thing (with the resultant energy drain and toxic cesspool of self-talk), to just...being able to set things to rights with almost no perceived effort plus bonus satisfaction jollies after-- aside from my habitual inner turmoil jabbing away, laying a caustic emotional coating on everything. That's taken longer to understand and dismantle, tied into all kinds of shit both heinous and mundane, but in practice it's simple and profound: I stopped forcing myself to do anything until I felt good/neutral doing it. Part trust fall, part work strike.
Noticing, addressing, and moving out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. Listening to the body and lavishing it with care and comfort. Figuring out how to eat around the medication.
I could take the meds and do the things, but the mental loops still played; I had to radically shut the loops down and then work through how to do things without mismanaging myself. Both off meds and then on, I tackled getting my house and my mind in order, DIY occupational therapy and re-parenting of the parts I'd ruthlessly controlled. Getting at the root of demand avoidance and finding a scared aching kid scraping her last spoon into a shiv, and having a long dark tea party of the soul.
I couldn't have done this part while employed. I knew I needed to before I could even look for a new job. I didn't appreciate at the time how deeply weird it would be to essentially reboot my whole orientation to the material world. "Can you get up and make yourself lunch without being shitty to yourself about it to get your body moving?" isn't a matter of turning off the self-talk like a radio when it's integrated into the fucking procedural memory. I couldn't even parse LinkedIn until end of January, then lost a month sick.
But now it's spring, my lungs are on the mend, I've rewritten the resume, got one interview so far, and I haven't felt more than a reflexive whiff of dread at the prospect of getting back in the saddle.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-12 09:15 pm (UTC)Oh man, does that resonate. Having (mostly) climbed out of the burn-out well and spending 3 years trying to game my brain into better health, I realize how much this work is, well, WORK. So. Much. Work. It is a full-time job.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-14 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-13 02:15 am (UTC)"the satisfaction of a job well done" when your cake-or-death meter can only show death
Date: 2025-03-14 03:26 pm (UTC)I could get negative reinforcement (bad thing is avoided or removed=relief), negative punishment (good thing is removed=probably deserved it), positive punishment (bad thing is added=price I paid for fucking up). But positive reinforcement (good thing added=file not found) like, yeah, okay, check it off the list, maybe remind myself of it later for rassurance it's done, but success had the same emotional valence as a grocery list.
And that satisfied glow is kind of like sourdough starter for baking future actions.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-13 09:30 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing your journey.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-14 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-14 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-14 05:03 pm (UTC)