So I’ve joked for the longest time that I’m ‘probably neurospicy’. I can’t remember where I stole the term from, and I can’t entirely remember when I realised that my brain probably didn’t work in a neurotypical way, but genuinely for the longest time I presumed that it was pretty marginal.
Like “eh, maybe I’m a bit neurodivergent but probably not at a level that’s diagnostic.”
Ha.
Ha ha.
Ha ha ha.
So over the past few months – years, if I’m honest (which I said to my therapist yesterday and she was like “well, yes, this is therapy, the point is to be honest.”) I’ve noticed a… shall we say, a deterioration in my work performance.
Like I’m still doing okay in the ER – clearly – like I’m still running the department fine – but unless we’re hammered and I’m entirely adrenaline I don’t feel like I can focus to the degree I used to. I have to keep going back and finding the threads of what’s going on to make sure stuff is happenening and yes – I get shit done – because it’s the ER and I need to, but I don’t feel the level of total understanding of what’s going on I used to. I used to know where every patient was in their journey, what the plan was, and so on. And part of that is the difference in culture between the US and the UK – I talked a lot more with the doctors about the plans in the UK. And I was a lot more in control of the plans in the UK. It was my responsibility – here the doctor is much more in charge. But I blamed that feeling on being burned out.
And literally, as I’m writing this I’m having more realisations.
Fuck.
This is just how it’s going to be for a while. So the realisation: there was a bit of time when I started feeling like I was doing better. I was feeling closer to my old self. It was when Biden was elected. And suddenly I felt a bit less stress and was more generally copic. It wasn’t the burn-out improving, was it. Well it might have been. But it was also…not feeling constantly attacked by the entire mechanism of the US government. It was my stress levels dropping and me being more able to focus.
Wow.
Okay.
Anyhow. To return to what I was going to say before my unscheduled realisation.
What I’d noticed recently was that I was increasingly struggling to focus on anything. To focus on writing scripts, to focus even on writing my fiction stuff, to get any project over the line to actually finished. And I was on the discord (for the work of the awesome writer Alyson Greaves, you should read her stuff), and having a nice chat about something or other and someone posted something about their ND traits and I muttered something about y’know, at some point maybe I should get checked because I feel like whatever coping strategies I had are not working well anymore. And a couple of my friends popped into my DMs with a quiet “yeah, maybe you should.”
And I flailed around for a few hours. Cried a bit — not because I was upset about being neurodivergent – that’s been pretty fucking clear for a long time – but because it’s just one more thing, and right now the last thing I felt like I needed was one more thing.
But it turns out that is what I needed.
Because I sat down with my therapist, and she pulled out the screening questions, and I just laughed.
Because it was literally like this (thanks to another friend for this link, it’s perf):
Like the first question is do you have trouble finishing projects…
And right at this moment I’m sat in our house which is an 8 year long unfinished project. Opposite me is a CD player that still needs some capacitors changing – but it works enough – and a record deck that needs a bunch of stuff done – but it works enough – and next to me is a piano that I never finished restoring and… and.. and…
And like all down the list it was so fucking obvious.
And I just laughed.
I just sat and laughed.
Because all this time.
All this fucking time I could have done something.
I can be shitty to myself.
I’m the first to admit that (except when I’m joking with my wife about how I’m always lovely to me). And it turns out a bunch of the stuff I’m shitty to myself about is ADHD traits. Stuff that, well, is just the way my brain works. And yes, I need to continue to work on ways to support myself and scaffold success or whatever the current terminology is. But the fact I’m fucking atrocious at finishing things? The difficulty getting started on things? The distractability when it’s a repetitive job? The trouble following people when they’re talking? The inability to relax?
Fucking hell it’s so obvious it kinda hurts.
In fact if one more person says to me “Oh, I thought you knew.” I am going to run into the forest and scream. Because no, I didn’t. I’ve just been “Well this is how brains work”ing my whole life.
I got in the shower yesterday and mid-shower realised that in the two-step process of turning on the heated blanket so it’d be cozy when I got in bed I’d failed to achieve step two of turning it on, after step one of plugging it in. And again, back to laughing.
My life has just constantly been full of these ‘I get half way through a process and get distracted’, and christ on a bike it was so fucking hard to study. I did okay and then when my dad got sick I just wasn’t able to – and I put it down entirely to grief. But actually, now, looking back I know I was so wildly unable to do it because me and stress are not good friends.
Stress in the moment – the adrenaline dump of the ER being on fire – that I can do. The way I’ve been getting scripts out the door is the “oh fuck I need this for tomorrow I need to write it right-fucking-now.”
And hilariously, the way I got the last round of trim done was the anger and adrenaline coursing through me the day after the election.
But the rest of the time?
Not been so much.
Anyhow. Imma get some drugs and see if that helps with focus.
