Work In Progress
It's still a work in progress, but my tea shelf is finally beginning to look as cozy as I originally envisioned:
I'm unsure whether any sort of preface about my failure to write more often is necessary. Probably not. I've encountered plenty of bloggers that write sporadically, but I always veer into self-consciousness about my own habits. My mind tells me that my posting ought to be regular and coherent, and anything else is messy and must be rebuilt from scratch. This is, of course, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in action—and my problems with motivation pure executive dysfunction.
I can't help but stop here and say for the record that it's hard for me not to see these as excuses, me using the symptoms of my diagnoses as crutches to absolve myself of my personal failings. It's not true, but that hardly matters in my brain. Attending church as a child, the passage in the Gospel of Matthew came up frequently, thrown around to admonish “worriers”: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Clearly, I told myself, I was a Worrier; I tried not to be, I prayed not to be, and yet it didn't seem to make any difference. I didn't know that anxiety disorders were a thing, that some people have fight-or-flight reflexes that just won't shut down.
It's only been in the past few years that I've realized that things I thought were character flaws were legitimate mental health challenges and taken steps to work on them as such. Admittedly, I'm still finding my way—I take identifying the moments of restlessness and dysfunction and internal freaking out as what they are, of telling myself It's okay, you're tired, everything's fine, as wins at the moment. But that still doesn't mean I don't feel frustrated with myself, or that Depression isn't constantly hovering over my shoulder.
This article came up in The Guardian a few months back and I meant to write something about it at the time (Content Warning: suicidal ideation). The author shares the story of her daughter's autism diagnosis and the mental health struggles her daughter has faced since that time. Even before the diagnosis, she clearly sensed something “wrong” with herself, and has continued to struggle since. Her mother writes, “It’s not the autism that we’re trying to change, but the cluster of secondary mental health issues that in her case seem to be a consequence of it.” That resonates: it's not just autism or OCD or anxiety or ADHD or any other neurodivergent condition in isolation. It's the complex, interconnected web of how our brains function and how they tell us things.