Fidget
I’ve mentioned in a post before about my discovery of a more workable system of thinking about rest. Sleep is neither all rest, nor is exclusively for it. And it can’t be made up after it’s 24 hour rhythm has been distorted. Sleep lost is lost, and weekend sleep that does not make you feel better is just empty attempts to rest, and sleeping in is just the good feeling of getting at least your required amount of sleep.
When I discovered this article, about the seven types of rest, I became an older person. Sent it to practically all close family WhatsApp contacts. Linked here. It was too good to read and let go. While it is stuff we already instinctively know and seek out, this categorical representation is more easy to accomplish. It’s a quotable quote when you tell your family it in fact won’t be fun for you to spend a day at an exhausting party with pretentious aunts and scandalous uncles.
And that you might not be too selfish and youthful to want to spend that much time with real friends, or with something you enjoy.
What hit my migraine-prone brain most was the sensory rest. Not one to scroll, I am not an elite human subspecies. I simply can’t go through the sensory overload. It causes brain fatigue that I do not need dedicated reflection to realise. It causes nausea before the migraine. And my feed was too much of other people. (I only got Instagram because I wanted to showcase photography; I couldn’t take Snapchat and didn’t even make it to TikTok- I was spelling it TickTock, and when I got second thoughts (pun intended and to follow), I searched it up. TikTok gets its name from tick-tock, a term for ‘countdowns and minute-by-minute action’ which is horrifyingly overcoming) Then, without a prompt from the world, I just removed most of the outlandish batchmates from my instagram at least, sometimes out of contempt and sometimes out of jealousy, and mostly out of pure visceral irritation.
Things, I tell you, need to stop moving this fast. The videos of flashing pictures, even if the photo is wholesome, cannot be done. I want a visual that I don’t need to panic about losing if I don’t absorb it fast enough or hold onto with my thumb. I want it to transition slowly to the next. I want a video at x1 speed for crying out loud. Actually, I’d prefer x0.5.
Surrounded by a group of overpowered, overachieving friends who were constantly ‘on the go’, it was impossible to breathe. Where has the art of conversation gone? Do people know how to respond to a story in a meaningful way, instead of cutting to the next scene, +10 seconds? Do they have a bunch of pulleys moving so fast they can make associations between seemingly unrelated things so fast, I cannot realise how they could be directly connected?
And if I’m not able to keep up with their outpaced thoughts, then am I also lacking in the skill of listening to two people at the same time? This is where I draw the line. I can’t have one person hang in a conversation. I must acknowledge the feelings of both, if not replying to both. I must maintain that fleeting eye contact to show them I heard them. How do I do that? And sometimes they keep at it regardless. Two conversations go at the same time. In a group of five or six people. It’s not acceptable.
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After I shared this with a professional, of course, I got diagnosed with ADHD. Neuro-divergent? No no no no. I’m normal. Everyone else has a short attention span, they just make it work. It’s funny how my inability to concentrate on their short attention span conversation makes me ADHD and not them. Thinking about those rowdy group conversations makes my head hurt. I need a normal pace of things and why does that mean an ADHD trait? It’s a normal trait.
Societal formulations of diagnoses aside, when my thoughts go one to the other, I consider it a faster working brain. And when I don’t link them all up, I am encouraged to take methylphenidate. So I do and it gives me a mental calm. It’s like there is a backoffice in my mind, the window frosted. Before, there was mayhem, workers walking briskly flipping through files furiously. Now, they are walking calmly, open files in hand. I’ll take it; it’s a good excuse to distance myself from the sensory overload.
Much like the hospital. An overload is an understatement. There is just about everything overly stimulated about it. WhatsApp to the computer to the mobile call to the extension to the chatter in the room to the chatter outside it. Your dizzying on-board sheet with too much information in one page. I think I’ll stop my description here because just thinking about it is too much and this is my day off.
A day off, indeed, so valuable. It works in no way for reflection, I concede. It is just a system reboot, and before you know it, you are back in the thick of it. The mental fatigue giving way to mental neutrality and a clearing in the overgrown jungle of your mind that you’ve just made to have a small picnic in takes above 24 hours of a normal circadian rhythm, including food and bathroom breaks. Then your subconscious can begin to consider reflection.
I feel like a kid who got overwhelmed by the fidget spinner and that was so very strange that I was later associated with fidgeting myself. Me? I’m a calm person. My thoughts just don’t want to deal with a bright object because they are a flurry in themselves. I’m not fidgeting, you are.
Whatever the pace of the world, I realised I was working harder than most people to keep to it. Fast or slow, I don’t know anymore and I don’t think it matters because it’s too indescribable and relative. It seems more a pace of brain than a pace of mind. It was taxing on my resources, but of course I couldn’t know better because I’ve only been these sulci and gyri of brain matter. I only accepted- not that my symptoms were like ADHD, because I don’t even know that that means- that my stories were like ADHD.
Yes, that’s exactly me, I’d say when I was told about someone’s experience in a micro-scenario and they also happened to have ADHD. I can easily lose my identity in association with a story than a symptom set that is so heavily masked I cannot even appreciate it, let alone conventionally manifest it. My own spin on how I exhibit my brain workings, my brain workings being ADHD, is a story and I would rather embrace that and own it. It was striking how similar these were to me. Too situational and too intimate to be like finding someone who loves seagreen as much as you. It was behavioural and neuropsychiatric proof that I needed.
Was I like this all my life and I didn’t know it. That I can confirm. This is the same brain-speak and same thought process I’ve always had and always go back to after a short lapse when I might think differently. There was no great change after which I started thinking differently or forgot what I used to think like. I don;t attribute more to this that I should. Or maybe not as much, because of course it affects everything like most things do. It’s not ‘my brain’, it’s literally me. But also not all of it because you are more than your brain. You are your brain in your head on your body in your environment under the sun and on this planet. Around the people that surround you and within them. Nothing too defining, but a working definition. Not a big deal but a deal.
The more energetic part of my brain is giving way to an even slower-preferring one. Age affecting my ADHD. Well, age affecting me. But I affect it too, and after starting exercise for completely unrelated reasons, I now have so much of what I call negative energy (frustration) that I must run off. I get agitated if I don’t, something everyone might relate to. If it can be proven I depend on it much more, does that make me hyperactive-disorder? I think anyone trying to make scientific something so abstract is not playing a game with chess-pieces on a board of confounders, they are playing a game of confounders. Confounder. Yes, I like to be called that. Not insignificant or inseparable but intertwined, and not really nullified outside of arrogant statistics, confounder.
