Welcome to another week of life on the road. This week, we’re currently in Tucson, where Aaron managed to scare me about scorpions before two weeks before revealing they aren’t really around in the winter.
It’s 2:30 pm on Saturday. I am meeting a friend for dinner at 5, for which I probably have to leave at 4:45. I’ve got a little more than two hours to myself.
I can’t bring myself to do anything.
I sit. Should I read? Should I watch an episode of something? I lie down on the bed, and then, since I’m lying down, I turn on some white noise and let myself nap for a bit.
I wake up. 3:45. Still have an hour. Should I get up? I scroll my phone. I send a friend a video. I scroll. What should I do with this time that I have? I scroll.
And now it’s 4:30, and I guess I should get ready to leave for this dinner.
My husband has ADHD. Many of my family members have ADHD, plus a good bit of anxiety thrown in. For a long time, we thought I was the one skating by with a neurotypical brain.
And I don’t yet know that I’m not. I haven’t gotten a diagnosis of anything, first because of procrastination and anxiety paralysis, and then because of traveling and the inability to stay in one place long enough for multiple doctors’ visits. So if I have any sort of diagnosable condition, I don’t know what it is.
But like so many people, the early months of the pandemic really threw me for a loop. Without the routine of going into the office every day, with the added stress and fear associated with COVID-19, with the political upheaval and the increased visibility of Black deaths at the hands of police, I felt lost. I felt exhausted. And I felt insane.
Pre-pandemic, I considered myself a very organized person. I used the bullet journaling system fairly regularly. I managed our household finances. I responded to emails and sorted them with labels and kept my inbox at zero. I exercised 4-6 times a week, often in the morning before work. I felt comforted by routine.
Now, I was at home all the time. Everything was terrible. I couldn’t work. I got up for the day, got my breakfast and coffee, sat at the computer...and surfed the Internet. Shopped or window shopped online. Read article after article about dog reactivity. Looked at the news obsessively. Did my assignments at the very last minute near the end of the day.
I told my therapist that I was having trouble keeping up with things that needed to be done. I explained to her how, if I needed to get up and do laundry, I knew I was going to pass by that coffee cup on my desk, and I’d need to take it downstairs to the kitchen, and at the top of the stairs was a box I needed to break down and recycle so I’d need to take that too so I didn’t make multiple trips, and then while down there I’d need to grab all the hand towels to bring back up to do laundry, and I’d pass by the new toothpaste and deodorant on the counter that I also needed to bring back upstairs. And then I’d go to actually do these things, but Aaron would call out to me after I picked up the coffee cup, and suddenly I was talking to him, and I was headed downstairs, and then I was headed back upstairs, and I’d forgotten all the things I’d meant to do in between.
And I told her about how much time I felt like I was losing. Not losing time in the sense of blacking out and not remembering. But just, letting time go by. And it’s not that I wasn’t aware of the time going by; on the contrary, I was usually acutely aware of exactly how many minutes had gone by that I still hadn’t done the thing I needed or wanted to do.
Sometimes, I would sit there, trying to decide if I wanted to work out now, at 11 AM, before I got too hungry and was ready for lunch. Or did I want to wait until after I’d eaten and had plenty of time to digest, and work out mid-afternoon? But it would be better to get it over with because then I’ll get showered and dressed sooner. But I needed to make sure no one at work was messaging me, and that I had plenty of time before my next meeting.
And now, I was hungry for lunch, which meant I needed to eat. I’d spent the entire workout window of time trying to decide if I was going to work out.
I told my therapist about all these things, and that I had a high rate of ADHD in my family, and that I knew so many women my age who were just now getting diagnosed and it was really helping them to understand how and why their brains functioned the way they did. And she said, “Yeah, it sounds like it’s possible you do have it, and it would be good to get you assessed.”
She told me to watch the How to ADHD YouTube channel in the meantime, to see if anything resonated. And she emailed me a list of ADHD specialists I could reach out to.
Well, it wasn’t so much a list, as it was a full directory of mental health professionals of all types that I’d have to figure out how to sort and find the ADHD specific ones for myself. And then find the ones who took my insurance. And then start reaching out to see who was accepting new clients.
So I started with the YouTube channel.
I watched countless videos of Jessica McCabe describing what it was like to have ADHD. Some videos were easy-to-understand explainers about what ADHD is and isn’t (like, the fact that it’s so, so, so much more than young white boys who can’t sit still in school). Others were tips and tricks on dealing with a particular trait or behavior. Some videos I couldn’t relate to, but I could see my husband’s behavior in them. Others felt like they were speaking to me.
The very first video I watched was all about setting up an ADHD friendly home. In it, she talks about having everything at “point of performance”— “having everything you need to perform a task within arm’s reach of that task.” Her example for this is her coffee station: it’s next to the sink, so water’s right there, and the coffee cups are in the closest cabinet to the left. The drawer below the pot has all the filters, sweeteners, coffee scoop, etc.
And this is what spoke to me, because for a long time, since I’ve lived on my own as an adult really, I’ve set up my life this way. Every apartment has had a coffee station. Every bathroom has had a specified place for every object.
When I moved into my very first apartment, I bought a mail holder to put on the wall by the front door—I could drop mail into the holder, hang my keys on one of the hooks, and know exactly where both things were. Ultimately, the mail part of this thing didn’t work out for me, because once the mail disappeared into it, I wouldn’t see it and would never remember that it was there. But the key hooks were clutch for years, literally until we moved out of our townhouse and hit the road.
I always thought I did this because it simply made organizational sense. But I started to wonder if maybe I’d established these patterns as a result of something like ADHD. Maybe I’d established these patterns, without really knowing why, because I knew I needed them in order to keep up with things.
Was I an organized person, a sign that I didn’t have ADHD? Or was I organized and meticulous about some things as a learned way to cope with ADHD?
Here's what happened with trying to get an assessment: I opened the email from my therapist, saw how much work I'd have to do to get through the list, and thought "Oh man. Not now." I marked the email as "Unread" so it would stay at the top of my inbox and I could come back to it when I was ready.
It was Unread in my inbox for about six months.
Finally, the shame of it sitting there got to me. I emailed my therapist, admitted that the list was too overwhelming, and asked her if she could send me a short list of people instead. She obliged, and within a day or two, I had a manageable list of five names. I reached out to three, and took the next available time slot for an assessment—two months out.
By the time the appointment came around, we had moved out of our townhouse and were in Ocean Shores.
I joined the call, and the woman informed me that, while she could do the initial assessment that day, because I'd soon be out-of-state, she wouldn't be able to continue to work with me—any follow-up appointments, medication appointments, etc. She was only licensed in Washington. She gave me the choice of doing the assessment or just cancelling the appointment right then, no charge, no harm, no foul.
I started crying. Months of trying to motivate myself to work through that overwhelming list, and then two months' more waiting for the actual appointment, and now the most I could have was one session.
Since I was already crying, feeling ashamed and embarrassed, I opted to cancel the appointment right then. Maybe I should've gone ahead and done the assessment. But I was exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, and I just wanted to get off the call.
Back to square one.
I still don’t know if I have ADHD; some symptoms sound exactly like things I’ve dealt with and others I don’t relate to at all. It’s very likely that I have some form of diagnosable anxiety, but I don’t know anything specific about that either. And I don’t know when we’ll settle down enough to get that kind of assessment, let alone a potential medication regimen started. (It’s hard enough keeping up with Aaron’s medication on the road, between state-by-state law differences and ADHD medication shortages.)
So for now, I tend to lose time. I spend so much time in my head that I don’t get done what I’d planned. I agonize over what to do for so long that I could’ve done the thing three times in a row.
I’ll be honest, it’s been somewhat better since we re-homed Darcy. She was very clearly an added stress in this regard (she was also adorable and fun and really hilarious, don’t worry, I’m not forgetting that).
But I still feel like I’m struggling to function a lot of days. I wander around aimlessly for portions of the day, wondering what I should do. Aaron asks if I want to play a game with him, or watch something, and I say “No, I don’t have enough time to dedicate to that, I need to do this, this, and that.” And then I spend so much time deciding which of those things to do that I could’ve just hung out with my husband anyway.
I don’t write about this because I’m beating myself up for it. I actually think, if anything, I’ve reached a fairly healthy place when it comes to self-talk and being kind to myself. I’m not mad at myself for not working out, or not spending a certain amount of time writing, or not making it to the post office today (damn, I did mean to do that though). I recognize that our current lifestyle is throwing us into a lot of change and making it hard to establish routines in the same way. I’m not down on myself about this.
But I’m curious about it. I’m curious and I’m observing. I still watch How to ADHD videos from time to time. I talk with my other recently diagnosed friends about what they are working on and solving for themselves (seriously, so many women in their 30s are figuring this out right now, it’s wild). I take note, when I feel stuck in an indecisive loop or an afternoon of lost time, of how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking about.
And I’m also planning to go through the Anti-Planner: How To Get Sh*t Done When You Don’t Feel Like It. It’s a book by Dani Donovan, a writer with ADHD who has created a lot of a relatable comics and content about living with a neurodivergent brain. Aaron bought it after hearing her speak (she gives great talks on living and working with ADHD).
I figure it can’t hurt. Even if I don’t have diagnosable ADHD, I could still use some help getting shit done.
What else is going on?
Dealing with mail while on the road is going to be the death of me. I will probably be writing a longer piece about this in the future.
I finished reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and oh damn, it was emotionally devasating. In the best way. I loved this book. Hire me to write the limited series adaptation—oh dammit, Netflix is making it a movie instead.
Working with notecards for screenwriting in the Airbnb is still a work in progress. Last week, Aaron and I both needed to use the big table, so I had to pick up all the cards. I tried putting them on the wall using Washi tape (to avoid any wall damage) but it’s either not strong enough or just doesn’t mix well with this house’s textured wall; the cards kept falling down. So I’m using the digital plot board in Arc Studio Pro until I can figure out how to get a physical one up and running again.
I saw a screenwriting friend this week and had a delicious dinner with her. I’m hoping to connect with people as much as I can while we travel, so this was a treat.
If you haven’t heard, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a new set of guidelines on working with children in bigger bodies and they are problematic to say the least. Virginia Sole-Smith wrote about in The New York Times, a piece that is really helpful if you’re new to the anti-fat bias conversation, and she’s diving deeper into it on her own Substack. Both pieces are great.