Emily Park via Unsplash
An end-of-the-year series about ditching what isn't working anymore, especially generalized approaches to "self-improvement."
It’s a mirage: I am not a type A person, if to be type A means that order and structure comes naturally. All of this—the lists, the organization—is less a natural impulse and more a complex netting of coping mechanisms stopping me from crashing to the floor. I have ADHD, and keeping tight control means that it’s a little harder for me to wander off, to get distracted, to fuck up.
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I tried it: I, very coolly, left it until a day or two before. I thought, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
The worst happened: I forgot key medication and some toiletries, I packed so few clothes that by day two I was wearing my boyfriend’s ill-fitting shorts in front of strangers and new friends. I was late to the airport, and I’m lucky I remembered my passport. Sure, I had fun, but at the cost of my comfort.
While the excess of planning is an important guardrail for my chaotic-feeling inner life, it has also come to make me incapable of spontaneity, to the point that I have grown to fear surprises. The things I enjoy—shows, vacations, parties—happen infrequently and with much planning. That worked for me, until this year.
Doing Fun Things, you might have gleaned, is hard for me. At the start of this year, pre-pandemic, I was struggling to take control of some serious health problems. I felt exhausted and burned out and incapable of doing any of the things I’d planned: visit Japan, do my work, see my friends. I felt drained and desperate for a break, and then, just as I’d wished on the monkey’s paw for months’ worth of time to hide indoors, COVID happened.
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At that point, without a routine dictated by external sources, I needed even more structure to avoid the dreaded Fucking Up. I made my to-do lists and Post-its even more detailed, and right now, I am on week 31 of a weekly task list, ever-changing to include my goals, dreams and achievements.
But the rigidity has finally had the opposite effect: I am sick of it. For the first time in my life, I feel like I could feasibly just… not do any of it. I want to throw caution to the wind; say yes to bad parties, yes to awkward events, yes to feeling overwhelmed and in agony and bored out of my mind. I remember now why I bother doing those things at all: Amongst the burnout and sensory overload, there are so many good moments that I couldn’t possibly have planned for.
An event or vacation is something you can plan in the abstract: what you do, what you eat, where you go. But within that there is so much room for variety, and it’s the comfortable kind I almost enjoy. When I have agreed, fearfully, to go on press trips where the itinerary is out of my control, I have felt initially wary and frightened. While every day was newly terrifying in the moment, when I look back on those days, I see only experiences that made confronting the terror worth it. I forgot somewhere along the way that misbehaving and forgetting is where truly good things can occur. I falsely equated spontaneity with insecurity, my greatest fear, knowing that if I disrupted any of my carefully laid plans, I might get distracted and forget something important. But by not leaving any room for anything exciting to happen, I lost something else, too. This year I saved up and gave myself a gift I’ve had my eye on for a while: a formal ADHD and ASD assessment. Armed with that assessment, I’m now better able to prepare, to understand my limits, to explain what I need to others. Maybe now I’m able to loosen up just a little, too.
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