Thanks, I appreciate it.

And each of those small tasks is a boulder that needs to go up and over the mountain. And there’s no satisfaction for handling boulder #1, because boulder #2 has been looming the whole time. And so on. And when all of the boulders have finally been moved, the next mountain is right there. It’s different than the first mountain, and all of the boulders are different. Each boulder and mountain takes more and more energy. There’s no end. No reward for finishing. Just boulders all the way down. Or up, in this case.

I’m tired, man.

Just wanted to say thank you for this reply. Trying to un-knot and maybe get something accomplished today so I need the in-depth reply spoons elsewhere. But it’s appreciated.

I would say definitely try to minimize the doom scrolling tho, cut out some of the news if you can. I find life easier to deal with if I’m not always worried about how bad the world is outside.

When I was young I was a news junkie. Like, watching the local network news for an hour, then the world news. Every weeknight. This turned to news radio as an adult, especially since it was the only way to get traffic info at the time (yes, I am old). I cut this out save sports for many years, before there even was doomscrolling lol. Never had any social media to speak of for the longest time. Even when I joined Reddit about 10 years ago, I was just there for the niche hobby subs and avoided /all and /top like the plague.

Speaking of… when Covid hit it became fairly imperative to keep up with events. And it came right on the heels of getting screwed on a house purchase, and precipitated the work situation going from bad to worse. Felt like every time I tried to take a step forward I got a baseball bat to the kidneys, while the outside world made me question if the boneheaded decisions made in horror movies were really all that unrealistic.

The ironic part is that I had serious trouble finding decent mental health treatment while paying out the ass for insurance, since all it seemed to cover was pill mills and unqualified social workers (which I then had to further cough up dough for). So when I had a breakdown this past winter I was pretty much hopeless. But somehow, the Evil Socialist Freeloader Plan (aka Medicaid) let me hit the freaking lottery for both group and individual therapy (unhelpful PHP detour notwithstanding). I feel like I’m making actual progress.

The catch: in a month or two I’m either going to be homeless, or spending all of the spoons doing something I’ll hate in exchange for maybe enough little slips of paper that prove I’m allowed to exist (or, ya know, sleep). Either way, the clock is ticking, and the doc is slow-walking my meds. Meanwhile I’m selling off personal items to pay bills, and come November there may not be a functioning SSA to process my disability claim that that I still haven’t fully filled out because of executive dysfunction and the work questions being triggering.

Tick tock, tick tock.

paralysis intensifies

I wish this had been me. Instead I stayed at one cushy but low paying job for a decade, then a progressively more and more toxic and stressful one for another decade before I limped away. AuDHD/anxiety/depression is a bitch of a bear trap.

Adderall gave me panic attacks during routine problems at work. I pretty much went through all of the stimulants ~20 years ago before I said “no mas” to the pharma-go-round. I’d been rawdogging reality for 25 years, how bad could it get?

Narrator: Yes.

I looked that one up a bit ago. The source is Jiddu Krishnamurti, but it doesn’t look like the common quote is accurate:

It sure is more concise, though.

It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

…yeah.

They’re also trying to teach that in math classes (it gets called “new” math) but the boomers are freaking out because “why can’t they just do normal additions like we used to, this is so complicated”.

So, as a childless Xennial, I have to ask… is today’s “new math” the same “new math” that people complained about in the 60s?

https://youtu.be/W6OaYPVueW4

If so, that’s an awfully long time for something to be shunned as “new.”

we never need to just do a long division.

Truth. I recently got a neuropsych evaluation and part of it was an unexpected (to me) IQ test. And staring me in the face, for the first time in ~30 years, was a few pages of arithmetic problems. Took me a minute to recall how to do decimal multiplication but it did come back to me. Long division? Nope. Had no freaking clue. Given that it was timed I just left blank anything I couldn’t work out in my head. Maybe if I had time for trial and error I could have eventually figured it out. But one thing is for sure… the odds of me ever needing that skill again are fairly low.

I think it would be more of a mobius strip than a circle.

Even tasks I enjoy are hard for me.

Loud and clear.

Working on it. My current psych seems pretty set on “getting the depression under control” before tackling the ADHD. My dude… it’s all knotted up, Gordian style.

getting enough adrenaline from stress to end the cycle (super harmful in the long run)

That’s me! I’m pretty sure my baseline cortisol levels could kill a small animal. Also pretty sure sustaining that level has done permanent damage to my body.

Yep, I had to look it up too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_Demand_Avoidance

I went though just about every stimulant on the market about 20 years ago. Most did nothing, but a couple had me going through panic attacks for routine work issues. After two years on the pharma-go-round I’d had enough. I got this far in life rawdogging reality. How bad can it get?

Narrator: Yes.

There’s actually a third circle, “Things That Earn Money,” about 60,000 pixels to the right.

I coasted through elementary school and ran up against undiagnosed autism, ADHD, and GAD (it was the 80s and I wasn’t disruptive) once homework started getting real. Had no problem learning the material, aced the tests, struggled with homework and writing assignments. “Not working up to his potential” became “lazy.” I took myself out of the gifted classes in middle school and bailed on “college prep” classes in my sophomore year. By the time I graduated I had failed English three times and wanted nothing to do with college and its endless papers I’d never write. Went to tech school for IT/electronics and did field service work for a bit before getting burned out and laid off. Landed in corporate IT and got real intimate with depression. 25 years later I’m still trying to recover from a lifetime of fighting uphill on hard mode against AuDHD, anxiety, depression, trauma, and the resulting burnout, keenly aware of my shortcomings the entire time while simultaneously fostering a deep seated contempt for the orphan crushing machines that define modern life.

My life would have been a whole lot easier if I had only been sociopathic.