Understand and accept the way I am

I’m having so much trouble moving on from my regrets about the past few years. For most of my life, even though I was crazy and sad, I was learning and achieving. And then I just…broke, for like 4 years of total stasis. I truly believe that I’m on the upswing, since I’ve been doing better for a while now, but I get so upset thinking about the missed opportunities and especially about how much better developed my habits, my skills, my maturity, etc. could be if I had been moving forward at all during that time. I keep trying to strengthen my weak-ass self-disciplinary muscles, and there’s just so much sadness, anger, and frustration at where I am right now and why.

I know that it does no good to think this way, and I just have to focus and plan the way out so meticulously that I can’t help but progress.

Dear Self,

You have this funny habit of subconsciously creating handicaps for yourself when you think a goal is too easy: “I’ll do it without telling anyone! With one hand behind my back! Only between the hours of 11:00 and 11:30 on Tuesdays!”

Maybe this was a fun game when you were growing up. But it needs to stop. Please replace it with the goal of over-preparing. OK, so you think (usually wrongly) that some task is easy. So ace the shit out of it rather than spicing things up by making it difficult.

~asterisk

Dear Self,

You are about to write a slightly defensive explanation of your ADD situation. You are correct that a lot of people question ADD and think it’s more of an excuse than an illness, but the main reason for your defensive paragraph is that you’ve internalized that perspective, and not that you anticipate hordes of critical comments from other 43t’ers.

But since you find it necessary, the basic facts are these: you’ve always had trouble paying attention, particularly to auditory stimuli. You covered for this fairly successfully through high school, and horrendously in college, where your retention from lectures hovered around 5%. These days, the main problem is that grad school has lots of lonely and unstimulating stretches, which is a horrible but necessary step toward the fun, varied, stimulating life of research and teaching and service that you’ve been aiming for and are now so close to.

You were off the charts on an ADD screening administered by your university’s learning-help office, but it’s never been clear how it interacts with the depression and the sleepiness. And you’ve only recently come around to accepting it as something real, to understanding that ADD is just a name for a cluster of symptoms that commonly occur together and that often respond to certain treatments, medical and otherwise. Giving that cluster of symptoms a name is descriptive and value-neutral and is a reasonable thing to do; if you feel that the word “disorder” pathologizes normal behavior, and/or medicalizes character flaws, you can call it something else. But it’s a Real Thing, and you have it.

You are not medicating for it, except indirectly. This is a reasonable choice, but it does require that you be very careful to create an environment that allows for productivity, and that you will work harder than others to do so.

This blog post by Female Science Professor about an ADD colleague is interesting and hopeful. Be a grown-up and figure out how to use your strengths and work around your weaknesses, k?

~asterisk

Dear Self,

You are quite right that getting up at 9 AM should mean getting to work two hours later than you would if you got up at 7. You are also quite right that the inevitable attack of afternoon sleepiness when you wake up at 7 AM should compensate for those lost hours. However, it seems to be a little more bimodal than that: either you get moving early like a normal person, or you never get moving. I know, I don’t understand it either.

Summary: These “flexible hours,” like everything “flexible” about graduate school, are a trap. Acting like a normal person with a normal job makes you more productive and happier.

Hugs,
~asterisk

Dear Self,

Managing a problem is different from solving it, but sometimes a problem gets managed so well that we treat it as solved and quit the managing. And then we learn it wasn’t so solved after all, and have to start over. You don’t have time for this process anymore.

Here are some problems that you are currently managing very well (yay!). Do not EVER regard them as solved and stop managing them:

• Depression. Yes, in fact, you do need the meds. If you are struggling with depression while medicated, it does not therefore follow that they are not making any difference. It does follow that you will be an utter wreck if you quit. And yes, you have done the experiment, and done it for long enough that withdrawal couldn’t have been the reason.
• Weight/sleep apnea. Those diet and exercise changes? Had best be for life.
• Falling asleep. Five things did wonders. Don’t stop doing them. (1) No bright screens after 10:30. (2) A simple sleep routine performed every day. (3) If falling asleep is hard, leaving the bedroom to read in (the dimmest safe light in) the living room. (4) Actively diverting your mind from night terrors (i.e., 11 pm in bed is not the time to ponder the inevitable death of you and yours). (5) Switching to decaf in the afternoon.
• Your skin. Amazing what birth control and the right face wash will do. They are what fixed the problem, not getting older. So don’t stop!

~~asterisk

Dear self,

Sensory overstimulation will scramble your brain. That vague, quickly rising feeling of distress you get in malls? That’s sensory overload, and if you don’t get the hell out of the situation you will start crying or at least shaking.

And self, I know you have a Victoria’s Secret credit card, and that they send you nice coupons and rewards sometimes, but if you make the trip to that garish garish place with the throbbing music and all that pink and all those people, it will ruin your day. Stick to the catalog and the website. I know $10 off or a free pair of panties is a good deal, and I know you should be ok, but your brain is wired funny and you won’t be ok. Trust me.

And you should think about canceling that card.

~asterisk

Dear Self,

When you wake up, your actions will determine with 99.9% certainty whether you will have a good day or a bad day. Your Good Day actions will look like this, in sequence:

1. Exercise
2. Shower
3. Get dressed
4. Eat breakfast and do dishes
5. Use the Internet sparingly if at all
6. Get the hell out of the house.

Bad Day actions look like, well, anything else. Now, Self, I know sometimes you are very hungry when you wake up, and you are tempted to do #4 (at least the eating part) first. This never turns out well. I don’t fully understand it either, but why mess with reality?

—asterisk

P.S. You can actually prepare for a good day the night before! It’s true! Getting the hell off the computer by 10:00 PM is very helpful. Yeah, I know you should be allowed to check your email, but let’s face it: you are terrible at prying yourself away from the computer at night. Again, yes, it should be easy, but experience says it isn’t.

To pick a far-fetched example, let’s say that I’m depressed for the rest of the day every time I read CNN.com. An intelligent person would react to this situation by thinking, “I shouldn’t read CNN, or at least, if I must read CNN, I should be prepared to be depressed for the rest of the day.” I, on the other hand, would say, “There is no good reason I should be depressed for the rest of the day every time I read CNN. That’s silly.” Then I would open up CNN.com and get depressed.

In everyday life, I do experimental science, and would mock any theoretical-type person who insisted “But that shouldn’t HAPPEN!” in the face of ironclad empirical evidence. So this tendency is doubly ridiculous. This goal is for notes to myself, because it takes conscious effort to have the “intelligent person” response to these situations.