systems shutdown
when it turns out that i, too, am unmasking.
I’ve been pretty good recently. Working hard. It’s not like I had a choice; it was crunch time for Mekong Review, and then there was TJFest, and now I have some freelance editing to do and essays to read for a essay competition I’m judging.
In other words: it’s been pretty “game on” for the past few weeks. And now that that’s over, it’s like the Windows shutdown jingle has played in my head and everything’s gone dark. I’ve now transformed into a floppy slug.
To give you an idea of how hard my brain has quit on me: earlier this evening I tried to cook instant noodles but I’d forgotten to boil the water so yes the noodles just sat for three minutes in room temperature tap water.
I’m trying to get myself to do things—because, like it or not, deadlines still exist—but it feels like trying to make myself walk through sludge. All I’m good for is reading and binge-watching The First Night with the Duke (which, as it turns out, is the perfect cute, fluffy, fun k drama to watch when you’re in no mood to work).
I’ve heard about unmasking, when people come to terms with their neurodivergence and, consciously or unconsciously, stop trying so desperately hard to hide their struggles and differences from neurotypical norms. I’m in favour of this. But I hadn’t fully realised how much I was going to have to struggle with this, and how it’s so much harder to embrace the slug days when deadlines are looming. I thought I was going to learn to come to terms with my ADHD rhythms, embrace them, cut myself a bit more slack and muddle along fairly successfully with my work, albeit at a slower pace than the intense drumbeat I used to make myself march to. Funny how I’d consumed all that content about ADHD and neurodivergence, nodding along all the way, and still somehow expected that the worst of it would only ever happen to other people.
Today I dragged myself through writing Mekong Review’s newsletter and editing two (easier) articles. And then I hung up the wet laundry so it wouldn’t get damp and stinky in the machine. (Oh yes, and I washed my hair.) All this has felt like heroic effort, and now I’m back draped over the sofa. I’m writing this just to give my anxious little self a little reassurance before I succumb and become a full slug. But after I hit ‘send’, The First Night with the Duke is going back on the TV and that’ll be it for the night. There’s no other way.