Words escape me so often that I’m back to using them in their simplest forms. I’m tired of being awake. I’m tired of breathing in and out. I’m tired of begging people to give a shit. I’m tired of bearing the brunt of reality. People dump their insecurities and fears at my feet and task me with absorbing their discomfort. I’m already in a perpetual arm-wrestling match with my brain, except my brain has resorted to kicking my curled-up body in the corner while I’m too overstimulated to move.
The past four years of my life have been nothing short of transformative. I’m removing lids, opening doors, sifting through cupboards, sweeping out attics, raking leaves, decluttering my bookshelves, and unlearning decades of internalized bullshit that I was force-fed for three decades. I can’t unsee, unhear, or unlearn any of this shit. It’s too, three, four much.
I’m once again at the mercy of an unmedicated neurodivergent mind and it’s… loud. Robustly. Incessantly. Frantically. Knowing about my executive dysfunction doesn’t make it go away; knowing about it just gives it a name. Muttering “oh, so that’s what that is” as it continues to render me immobile. It’s not entirely unhelpful to be aware of it, but I still beat my own ass about it sometimes. There’s just so much internalized shame and ableism that I’ve been sifting through and wallowing in. In a hyper-consumer, end-stage-capitalistic world, it’s hard not to.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have equitable access to healthcare. I’m broke. I’m unable to work publicly. I don’t have any huge career prospects lined up except to keep carving my own path with brittle plastic spoons. I’m trying to be more kinetic about my choices, but I’m just fighting to stay afloat within my own nervous system.
Living in a world that doesn’t care about your next breath is… sobering, to say the least. It’s also a quick trip down Spiral Street, in my case. I want to be able to move past the whirlwind of emotion that overcomes me when deconstructing the reality of the world, because I know that on the other side of that whirlwind is action. Movement. Progress. My emotions don’t hold me back, but they do stifle me sometimes. They’re so insurmountably daunting that my body can’t contain them and I weep. And I mean… sob. Shoulder heaves. Snot. Drool. The whole nine. And then I feel better, but spent. The cycle continues ad nauseam.
I have hundreds of ideas but an extremely finite amount of time to execute them. I’ll never be able to afford a team of help. I’ll never be able to even aptly describe what help I need. It’d be much easier to just hand someone the aux cord so they can plug into my brain so I wouldn’t have to navigate a Lego-lined path in my bare feet just to string together a coherent sentence.
I want life to be worth living. I want to be cared for outside of my circle. Is it an echo chamber to be surrounded by equity and love, or is the world just that unforgiving and frigid? Either way, I know I’m safe in my bubble, but I want to be safer. I want my loved ones to be safe. I don’t wanna have to scream and yell until I pass out; I just want to be heard. I’m a loud bitch with a brain to match, but it gets the best of me sometimes.
Time isn’t real and there’s so much self-inflicted pressure thrust onto my shoulders. Who the fuck cares? Oh… society? Right. Businesses and their pesky operating hours. Why can’t the world be more accessible for us night owls who stay up late as a form of revenge upon the lost time we spent just powering on our brains? I can’t help that my most productive hours are between midnight and 1 am.
I’m not proofreading this because my eyes hurt. It was an overwhelming day and I’m utterly spent. I want to get a handle on my unmedicated self so I can pick up where I left off in 2023. I’ve made tremendous strides as my authentic self, which I wouldn’t trade for anything, but without my ADHD medication, I’m back to being a dandelion seed in the wind.
Wherever I land next, I fully intend to take root and become an ungovernable problem.
