a day, a week, a decade, a lifetime of too much and when can I rest?

I have been trying to find the time and space  - and perhaps the right mental picture - for a week or so now about what it's like in my head. Or maybe it's about all of the different roles I have. It is partly so I can show …. Someone? Anyone? The internet? Myself … that my exhaustion is real. That I really can’t do all the things that are on my plate. 

When I try to google “managing all the things when there is too much adhd” I get articles explaining to me that the problem with adhd is one of time management. That I don’t value the future the same way as the present. Or else articles saying that I should make a list of all the things and then put them in priority order. One time, possibly over a decade ago, I was feeling overwhelmed and asked Marc to help me. We spent a few hours where I listed everything that was in my brain/on my brain/on my to do list out. He had more than two pages of items. He thought that maybe if he could put them into a database he could then organize them. (Is this a story about how engineers solve engineering problems, not brain/people problems? No.)  I am sure I don’t need to tell you the database never materialized. A process was never discovered that would help me. Some people might say that the things that didn’t really matter got dropped from the list and the things that did matter got done. But that is only true of the things that were obliged to other people. The things that were for me, that were of importance to my heart and soul did not get done.  

In the end I delegated some things to Marc, quit the business I was in, and then quit my job. And for a little while my only job was to rest and heal and I could manage then. What I have heard - and I think I'm starting to learn - is that burnout happens in part because you don’t have enough time for the things that replenish you. I started seeing an ADHD coach at least a year before I quit my job. She has a technique or metaphor or tool or what not that takes the traditional priority chart (Urgent across one axis and Important across another - I think you are supposed to make sure you are not just doing the urgent but also the important) and mapped it for adhd brains. 

This is my drawing of it.

And even a year before I officially flamed out at work I knew that most of my time was spent in the red/yellow zones and had very little of the Green. The Green being what refills you. I am kinda a self help junkie. I KNOW I am supposed to prioritize myself, put on my own mask first, make time for the things that bring me joy. But for most of my time as a parent, and for sure as a parent of two I have been unable to find the time/space for those things. Or only fleeting moments of them. This is partly because those things are important but not urgent and it is hard to let myself do the things that bring me joy when everything else feels like it could fall apart at any moment. 

I wrote a poem that captured the struggle sometime before 2015. I posted it to this blog in 2015, when I still had the New Project Energy about finally investing in my artist self and making the time/effort to share my work. It was a time where I was trying to share my work even if I was not sure what the finished state might be, but I never shared it on social media, and never encouraged anyone to read the blog. In August of 2022, after my burn out, as I was trying to get serious about healing, about allowing the little artist soul inside me out, about prioritizing the things that deeply matter to me, I set aside an evening to go to a friend's house who has a recording set up. I recorded that poem and others as well. At that time I couldn’t call them poems. I referred to them as spoken word pieces. I didn’t feel like I was allowed to call what I was doing poetry. In July of 2023, after my father’s death as I was trying to get serious about healing, about truly letting the artist soul inside me out, and prioritizing the things that deeply mattered to me, I set aside time and edited one of them. I have shared that finished spoken word piece with one person, still not sure what the final form will be. That’s not the one that is relevant to this post. I have not edited that one yet. Maybe it will have fermented enough to be ready to share when it is a decade old. 

In the roughly a decade that has passed since I wrote it, I have paid a lot of money to various professionals to help me, and I will say there has been some progress. I don’t blame myself as the problem quite so much. Also the flavor of the daily tasks have changed, less making other people take a bath, go to bed, get dressed, go to school. Basically I stopped trying to make other people do things. 

But here I am again, trying to make lists, to find a technique to get a handle on all the things, all the roles, all the to dos, all the balls in the air so I can let myself relax and do the things that bring me joy. Therapy now is focused on how to be ok if things do fall apart, because the things that bring me joy need to come first, or frankly show up regularly at all.  Some of the things that are on the list are things I have added because part of healing is spending time doing things you enjoy but those things still take up time and effort. Some of the things are just a product of parenting, especially parenting the way that we do, and it would not be in alignment of our values to do it differently. Some of them are choices we made as a family or as a pair that are probably too much, but have felt in alignment with our values. Some of them are things we couldn’t predict. 

Some of the categories

• Things for each child living in our house - they each get a list, it includes paperwork, skill building, appointments etc. (this is three bullets)

• House/Financial stuff - we are in the middle of switching banks, I have various insurance reimbursements I need to sit down and submit, various things on the to buy list that need to get prioritized/planned in - having two incomes meant we didn’t have to think about planning them in and also my insurance required less bureaucracy  in order to actually get things paid so a lot of this category got added since I quit my job.

• House/Organizing - so fucking much, some just lift and some the consequence of the years of construction. I will say the house finally feels like we have the various rooms ready to be moved into for the first time since we actually moved in. I have hope that those things could actually get done at some point now.

• Obligations for family members. These are things that are in alignment with my values to do. 

• Aech homeschooling. This is separate from the other category of general things for Aech. This is a choice we made. I feel like it was the only correct choice for my child and it is time limited. 

• Farm/Dead Dad stuff. These are things I didn’t ask for. I don’t want to yet. But they have landed on me and the mentally healthy choice is dealing with them, not just avoiding it all.

• Roxie Lune. This is my weird art shit. This is the one I want to be a main part of my vocation. This is the one that I chafe at not getting to the most. But after 15 years of continually putting it aside, and a lifetime of ‘knowing’ art is not allowed to be a real calling for a responsible parent unless it is bringing in real cash - let's just say this is a main focus of therapy.  

• Roller Derby. Both the work of showing up and improving, the work of getting my body to actually let me, and also, YES, the work I have taken on that is more administrative and for the league. This matters to me. It is work and it does replenish some. 

• Taking care of our pets. One cat currently is having some kind of allergic reaction, but to do the biopsy to see what it is we need an echocardiogram to see if her heart can take it, meanwhile we are feeding all of them the hypoallergenic diet. Then all need degrees of love and attention and feeding, and cleaning and making sure Shadow came in before we go to bed. They bring me joy. But I am the only one shouldering the work

• Running a home. Marc and I share these, and we are both kinda broken on them. Laundry, and cleaning, and feeding, and cleaning, and repairing things, and paying for things, and cleaning things. This is an area where we really have played the game “how low can you go” in terms of dropping stuff.

• Taking care of my body. I think for non adhd people this might mean prioritizing working out, but for me it also means; making sure I go to bed before 2, taking my night time pills, taking my morning pills, following up with my doctor about my meds, my breathing/inflammation issue, eating food - any food, drinking water, strength training so I can stop hurting all the time, remembering to relax the meat suit, and I guess personal care like bathing and teeth and shit but wow would you be surprised what you can learn to let go….

• Taking care of my marriage. It jointly shared, but there are tasks and work here, and fuck yes I want to do them, but still….

• Remembering to be a friend. To make time for my friends. Again this is replenishing, but I still have to find the time, the mental space for it. 

• Spiritual/Witchy/woo shit. 

• Home Repair/Construction. Separate from maintenance, separate from organizing. 

• Taking care of my mental health/burnout recovery/grief… this also includes the daily/hourly task of catching myself using shame, fear, negative self talk and trying to unlearn that path.

Some of these will ease/change mostly those related to the life/growing and death of other people. Some may be particularly big hurdles now that will ease up. But fuck y’all it is literally too much for my current tools. Meds help a little. More energy, more focus helps. Being burned out doesn’t help. 

My black and white adhd brain has at times told me that failing at any and all of this makes me a failure as a person. It offers such wonderful suggestions as 

• just don’t do anything that is for you, no one else will notice and at least you will meet their needs

• Just don’t sleep or stop or rest, just work faster? Maybe what you need is more guilt or shame or fear those have helped in the past to get things done.

• Maybe you should just be a hermit… if you just move out of your home, leave your family then you could handle what is left. 

I have tried asking for help. I have tried to outsource some. Let’s just say those have not typically panned out. 

Thanks to therapy I am getting better at not blaming myself, not feeling like I am failing because it is all too much, at defining some times to be down time, at trying to put the things for me first, even the scary ones.  I don’t think I need to feel on top of all of it all the time…. But when it all gets too much I go back to feeling like if I can just hold onto all the things tighter, if I can just not let things drop, then maybe it will be ok. In therapy I am working on knowing it will be ok even if I can’t hold onto everything, even when things do drop. 

 But the answer to how I am doing, what I have been up to is basically the same - it's complicated. Sometimes I make the choice to stay up late and read a book I am enjoying, and the next day I am tired, and it can take me days to find the way to recover that sleep… and yet that book gave me the energy to keep going, it replenished a part of me even while it depleted sleep. Right now that is how all the replenish things seem to work. There is a trade off, a cost. I think in fairy tales it's like getting a magical creature to do your spinning of wheat into gold for your future first born. I have to hope each thing I make the time for - take for just me - will be more replenishing than punishing for future me, but I don’t really know. 

I am exhausted, still, much of the time. It all feels like too much for me to handle. It can take me days, a whole month, years to get to some of the things, not because they are not important - I am actually pretty good at winnowing out the unimportant from the list - but because more urgent things have come up, and just a little bit, because I am trying to put the things that are just for me, just bring me joy, just matter to the little artist soul inside me that has been waiting very patiently for the time and to matter, and there just IS too much. 

I too, hate that I am a broken record about this. That the struggles are always the same fucking struggles. It is goddamn boring. It's very hard for it to not feel, in and of itself, like failure. I still wish that life was like a video game, or even school, that there were external measures. That you did good, did enough, completed this level, finished this semester, and that it was time to rest. 

I just want it to all get done, and I want to rest.  

Answering how I am doing

I have been getting questions lately about how I am doing. Either people heard back at the beginning, or I have just told them, about “my panic attack which lead to a Leave Of Absence From Work” and they want to know how I am doing. Like the commonly uttered “how are you” when you see someone on the street you know, I don’t really know how to answer it.

When I am not working, or not thinking about work/working I am fine. I am able to fill my time well. I do have plenty of things that interest me. I am not bored yet.

a loose stack of items, folders, notebooks, knitting and glasses on a butcher block table in front of a street facing window.

I do sometimes miss the rituals around going to work at a coffee shop, but I just still do those, and “work” on other things. Sometimes reading my astrology for the week, or a small computer based favor for a friend, or organizing/editing photos, or some topic I wanted to research.

Image of a laptop closed with a watercolor book on top of it, in the receding background is an orange notebook, a glass of water, and a cup of coffee. These are all placed on a wooden butcher block style table in front of a street facing window.

For the past 5 or 6 (or forever) years I have practiced a lot, not thinking about things that I find distressing. (Is that a skill to list on a resume?) So when I don’t think about MY FUTURE in detail, or what going back to work would feel like, or what sending an email/slack to my coworkers saying good bye would say, I feel pretty good. Or rather, pretty normal. I still have my normal lows, moments where I question the meaning of life, and “if I can’t make myself go wash the dishes right now do I even deserve… whatever,” but again, I now have built skills to catch those thoughts more quickly and pass them through the filter of reality.

What I am mostly aware of is how little I feel like I get done. How much more I thought I would achieve or produce or accomplish if work was not in the way, eating up all of my hours and energy. That is not to say that not working has not changed my energy levels. I laugh more, can tease with the kids more. When we get back from an outing I sometimes have the energy to make the kids food and tend to Marc, so he can rest instead of it ALWAYS having to be the other way. I know I have said “yes!” to more things, spending time with people, or helping out. It is still pretty metered out, my energy, but there is more of it.

I don’t think I have finished any major project art wise or home wise, but I sure have started more. I have finished more books, not just audio, but also eye reading, but as soon as READING feels like something I could ACCOMPLISH more of and then I want to log it (!) and track it(!) and move through them faster(!), I shy away for a bit. Our house is no cleaner, but when I do cleaning and care tasks I am less exhausted/resentful of having to do them.

The kinds of tools I used to survive/push through in the past are basically inaccessible to me right now. Knitting, once my major coping during meetings had basically failed me sometime in the past 2 year. I think of it like a muscle I overworked, it needs to rest and heal after all of the overwork it endured. Daily tasks lists, or too much calendar planning is also something I cannot do, but random journaling about current interests, or a specific topic or feeling is starting to return.

I have no idea what my future will look like. Actually that is not the whole truth.

I have journal entries from months ago expressing what I want my life to look like, they read surprisingly similar to ones from 2016, and 2009, and what I remember of my daydreams the summer after my senior year of high school. I don’t have a nice quipy elevator pitch for it. There is not a job title that covers it. But honestly very few people understood what I did before at my paid '“adult/professional” job either. But the future can’t fit into the neat boxes of a “9-5” or other descriptor of how adults spend their time.

Unlike the baby adult version of myself who felt panic stricken that I didn’t know what my future would look like, what “I wanted to be when I grew up” or what boxes I needed to check, things I needed to strive for to get the next marker that I am doing good/great, I have more experience sitting in discomfort. I have more experience distracting my achievement brain away from the long term and just being a tiny bit in the current moment. That is until someone asks me how I am doing. Then I feel a wave of shame that I am doing just fine, as long as I am in the moment of “a Leave of Absence From Work” and not thinking about what comes next in any detailed way.

2016

Oh the irony of unpulished drafts, that have remained unpublished for many of the reasons the draft was written saying I would change. - This was from January of 2016. I have since left the business. I did make the branding changes. I have not been active on my site, because of… oh because of all the things.

Over the past weekend Kat (of Why Knot Fibers) and I had a business retreat. We rented a little studio buried in snow, nestled into a meadow/woods. The goal was to plan the year and decide finally what is my role in the business. Basically we had "the talk." I am no longer her yarn mistress, but official Partner.

Part of that conversation also included use of social media/branding. One of my goals for 2016 personally is to increase Authenticity. Authenticity is very important to me, but sometimes in the face of life, society, habits, and other pressures we slide away from our authentic selves into a 'safer' mask. My art has been/continues to explore that concept, and yet I have been keeping that part of myself a bit more hidden (another area I was struggling with making a commitment ;)* ).

Coming out of the retreat, in addition to the work of becoming partners and the work of ramping up the yarn lines for the spring, I am creating clarity around my art. I updated my Instagram account to reflect Roxie Lune, created a Facebook page for Roxie Lune and all of my Instagram posts will be shared there instead of on my personal page. 
 

For the past few years, most of my art exploration has been through Instagram. The instantaneous of it, the ease of having an idea to share and getting it out there, on my phone, in whatever time I had, was essential. One of my stated driving forces on this website has been to embrace all of the different directions of art and creativity that I want and am pursing, and yet my most active work was not being included or promoted through Roxie Lune. Partly this is because the line between personal/professional is especially blurred as both an artist and with social media. I have struggled over the past 10+ years at walking that line in a way that feels true, authentic, and safe. However, managing a multitude of different accounts/identities for different audiences is exhausting and creates a barrier between the creative process and the creative exchange. Instead of trying to craft different identities that allow me to carefully distribute/share with only the audiences I think will want that, I am opting to be me authentically, messily, boundary crossing, me. Because if you know me in person, that is actually how I am (how most people are?  We don't really wear only one mask). So I will let others choose what/how much if any they want to participate in that exchange. Ideally all of this means I will be posting and sharing more in the upcoming year. YAY!

* This seems to be an ongoing theme for me, hesitation on commitment. I often leave envelopes unsealed because sealing them is such a commitment. Choosing a path means not choosing a different path... oh all of the opportunities are exciting/fun I don't want to pick just one :)

Creature of Imagination

When I was a child I would envision myself a mermaid or a sea goddess with seaweed for my hair and jewelry. Or else a tree nymph or an Indian* mysteriously one with the forest. Somehow along the way I became caught up in the should's and to do lists (even of my own making). I was trying too hard to be the adult I thought I should be. Adults, I thought as a child, always seemed to be doing important busy things so I decided to become that person.

Sure I could have picked other adults to model or let that unfold more slowly, but the question that really matters is between mermaid, sea goddess, tree nymph why did I choose adult as the costume to wear and creature of imagination to be?

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* So as a child I had a naive and stereotypical view of what an Indian was from school and culture and all that crap. I want to acknowledge that this impression is not accurate or fair and limits others. So I am using this word here with that in mind, but let's acknowledge that view is really of a fantasy creature and not limiting or representing real people.

A year a week

I started to write
a little jotting down to capture a particular week.
Two sentences and a list,
Abandoned.

A week later I returned and said it all

I lived an entire year in a single week.
A few more sentiments jotted down.

The same words scattered through dozens
of journals.

Fragmented glimpses through the
graveyard of my attempts to gather my thoughts
I am stressed
Frayed, Frazzled
a bit overwhelmed
off kilter
not centered
it’s all too much
I am standing in my own way.

These are often followed by determined words
I know what I need
Space
Time
Walks
To work out
Meditation
to eat right
a glass of water.

Occasional the more profound

But these all seem harder than searching the internet
for the magic
Acronym
Pill
Supplement
Treatment
Button
Which does not exist.

So I will recommit to
Walks
Working out
Meditating
A glass of water
giving myself the space and time.

So then I have lived an entire year in a week
and cannot understand
how time has passed so fast,
how I have done nothing, and never stopped doing.

A week ago my children were born
and now they are grown.

I think, I forgot to enjoy them,
I started to but them someone needed
to eat
to read
to wash their hands
to take a bath
to go to bed
to put on clothes
to get to school

and then we were fighting again.
 

Sometime passed while I just treaded water
trying to keep our heads from slipping into the dark depths.

I am fairly sure I forgot something along the way
to workout
to eat right
to save money
invest in myself
invest in my partner
enjoy my children
to clean my house.

I just can’t recall what it is.

January

The thing about January is that it is cold. No matter how bundled up against the weather you are, you cannot help but notice the cold. Walking through the glittering white from the house to the car there is no sound save the quiet crunch and squeak of boots against the cold hard snow and the high pitched whine of the gas meter measuring out in cubic feet our attempt to beat back the cold.

It is the stillness and silence of January which makes the cold ever apparent. There is no movement of nature. The birds are gone or huddled in quiet. Even the squirrels only venture out during the warmest few house of the day to raid bird feeders and scraps. Although in January we do get storms of ice and snow which make the branches creak and groan, most days in January even the trees are quiet.

It is not always gray and bleak, on the coldest days the thin January sun emerges and turns the whole world more glittering than any diamond. That is the irony of January, when it is the coldest of the year you must don your summer shades. Perhaps it is the reminder that even in the short cold days the future is bright, and summer is coming. (1.2.14)

cut-outs

The trees were black silhouettes against the rising dawn. That seemed fitting really, all the world within her reach was flat, like children’s cut outs. While the world beyond her, the heavens, were abloom with gradients from rose to indigo.

Hunting Season

The whispered hush of the winds in the trees built up into an insistence like the rush of a waterfall or the roar of a passing semi. This was punctuated by echoing booms, it was hunting season.

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