Swamp Bog of Sadness, aka (this is when my computer crashed)
A medical diagnosis and some clarity
I’ve been having a lot of feelings lately. Yesterday I walked out the cotton hammock under the Filbert tree. Filbert trees are hazelnut trees, which is something I hadn’t known until the woman whose cat I was caring for told me. I went out to the hammock and gingerly crawled butt-first into it, then lay back and stared up into the green, green leaves which were almost neon against the blue, blue sky. You know those days when the sky is so blue, like it’s translucent and infinite and makes you feel as small as the starry sky does? Blue like that. So blue it’s not a color, but a kind of being.
I didn’t bring my phone with me outside, on purpose. The past couple weeks, while house-sitting alone on Bainbridge Island, I’ve been attached to my phone. This often happens when I’m on deadline, which I am. I turn my book in Monday.
Alone under the tree I stared at the leaves and blue and my eyes lost or gained focus, I’m sot sure which one. I inhaled the dry grass and the musk-scent of the sheep in their pasture. Sheep with brown noses and brown legs. I touched the puzzle pieces of bark on the ancient tree, whose trunk was three time the width of me, or more. Some of the branches, which grew outwards and then upwards, were as big as trees themselves, and had grown their own sets of branches. Inside the craggy puzzle pieces moss and lichen had settled, their greens each singular, textures rough with the dry of summer. I stroked them and closed my eyes.
I didn’t want to feel my feelings. I get like this sometimes, where I turn away from myself and what’s in front of me. I think the word is overwhelmed. I’ve been overwhelmed since I was little, trying to shuffle all my homework pages together, trying to keep my room clean although it always seemed somehow to collapse in on itself in slow-motion, trying to appear put together when I often felt like I was sloppy, unkempt. Every Sunday, my mother woke with the vacuum as she cleaned the house and yelled at me to clean my room.
Sometimes I’d spend the entire day in my room, sorting through papers and stuffed animals and stamps and markers and crayons and books and trying to figure out where to put everything. Nothing seemed to have a place. I’d get distracted with each object, the memories associated with it or the words printed on it. Sometimes my mom would come in and yell at me, sometimes she would lay her hands on me, pressing me with an urgency that baffles me now.
This kind of distraction has always been a part of my life— this kind of entropy. Days after cleaning my apartment there will be a pile of dishes, a pile of clothes, then two piles, then many piles. I won’t open my mail although I know I should. I’ll keep forgetting to take my car in for an oil change. The envelope urging me to renew my tabs will sit unopened on a desk, until it’s buried. Letters from friends go unanswered. Time, it seems, expands and expands and expands and yet I don’t have enough of it.
My life has always had these shadows of avoidance, overwhelm, franticness. When I was in college (in my thirties) a roommate remarked on the time I spent doing homework. “I don’t remember having to spend so much time on homework when I was in college,” he’d said, and I responded that I just wasn’t as smart as him. Truthfully I spent my afternoons and evenings holed up in my room, procrastinating with TV, then I’d wake up at 5:30am and go to the coffee shop to do the homework I could have done the night before.
I’ve learned that these are symptoms. It wasn’t until yesterday that I understood that all of these habits were indicative of a neurological issue called ADHD. I didn’t know that they were textbook. I’d never thought of them as a whole. I’d always thought of them as me. As my own personal deficiencies, my laziness, my disarray. Why did I always cancel on friends when I procrastinated so long that I had no other time to do my work? Why do regular tasks take entire days? Why does going to the post office exhaust me? Why am I compelled to interrupt those I speak with, as if what I have to say is more important than their own thoughts? Why do I finish people’s sentences for them or squeeze my hands so hard my nails dig into my skin when I have to sit for longer than 45 minutes?
Time expands and expands and expands until it crushes me under its weight and I am powerless. Useless.
I remember when I was much younger, maybe sixth grade, I went in for testing. They thought I had ADD. But I passed the test, so whenever the subject came up I always thought, no.
But they were wrong.
I am glad to have a deeper understanding of myself but also, fuck. Is this why my book has felt impossible to contain, always spilling out in tangents and tertiary trails? Is this why things always feel so hard? Not just trauma? Not just my upbringing? Is this why I felt I had to sacrifice friendships and relationships simply to be a high-functioning adult? Is this why I need full days to recover from certain activities?
Is this why my mother used to tell me I was lazy for starting and never finishing projects? Or why teachers always lamented my math skills? Or how I got an A in college astronomy but remember absolutely none of what I learned?
These are questions I’ll be asking myself for a while. If you’ve struggled with ADD/ADHD or had an adult diagnosis, I would love to hear about your experience.
It isn’t all bad, or doesn’t need to be bad at all. If ADHD is what allows me that overview— if ADHD is what grants me the wonder I have, my curiosity for everything. I am grateful for that, if that is what it is.
Yesterday my computer crashed right as I was getting started on wrapping up this draft of my book. If I am being honest this draft of my book isn’t much different than the last draft, but whatever draft it was it is now on its way to the Apple repair shop, and possibly gone forever. Today I will spend an entire day retyping my manuscript, and revising. It will be a marathon day. It is absolutely vital. It feels impossible but I need to get a book turned in so my editor can (finally, finally) give me feedback.
I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the book with my full-time job, but I will soon. I am leaving my nanny job the first week of September, the week after I turn 41. I am leaving my nanny job to write me. To devote parts of myself to other parts of myself. I’m excited to see how things organize themselves. Probably in piles. That’s okay. What this means is that I’ll be able to be more on point with this newsletter. I’ll also be devoting a lot more energy into my other newsletter, FIRES, which is about the history of fire in the United States.
The transition is scary, a little. I’ve been working through a lot of fear and slipping into a shape less fearful and more accepting, more grateful. I hope I can travel a little bit. Visit friends. I hope friends will visit me. I hope that, with this diagnosis and some treatment I can be a better and more reliable friend, to myself and others.
I am honestly too stressed about my book to make a list of things I am enjoying this week. I have been enjoying flowers! There are probably some flowers where you are. Tell me about them in the comments, or maybe even put a picture of some of your fave flowers in the comments!