Category: Posts

I’m rooting for you.

It’s probably the nicest pool I have ever seen in my life.

It’s the half-sized pool, 25 meters long, but so wide it’s almost square. Three walls of the room are floor to ceiling windows, and there are skylights overhead, piercing the knotty pine ceiling, flooding the room with natural light. When you speak, the sounds bounce around a bit, sounding unnatural and flat.

There is another pool in the room – a square heated pool they call the therapeutic pool, but they assure me that if no one is using it for a group, I’m welcome to use it, too. When I walked through this morning, it was in use by two women who appear to be around 80, talking in low tones while using foam dumbbells to exercise.

My focus this year, the year after my Dad’s death, has been on my health. My dad was only 21 years older than I am, and while his death from a virus says nothing about my own life expectancy, it does make one begin to count. I’ve been eating better, and logging my food. I exercise nearly every day. I prioritize getting enough sleep.

And this week, I joined a gym with a pool, because my joints are trash after years of abusing them.

This morning, I put on my trunks (which fit me perfectly 50 pounds ago, but are now relying more than they should on the drawstring to defend my modesty) and slid into a warm pool, and commenced to do laps – quiet, slow, trudging laps – the equivalent of walking as opposed to the running the speedo-clad twenty-something guy in the next lane is doing.

I can only really backstroke with any degree of proficiency, so I am watching the ceiling, following along under a wooden beam that spans the length of the room, keeping all the moving parts going the way I was taught all those years ago on Parris Island: Hands up along the sides to the armpits, then out, then down, hands cupped. My shoulder grates a bit, unused to this particular motion.

And in the aisle next to me is a Black woman somewhere in her late 70’s, with the foam dumbbells, raising them and lowering them in the water, all the while moving down the length of the shallow end of the lane sideways, back and forth. A woman I assume to be her granddaughter cheered her on, saying, “Good job, Granny!  I’m so proud of you!”

I knew I was not moving quickly, but I have to admit I did notice when Granny passed me. Several times.

And I did think, briefly, that it is a crying shame that my swimming ability is so slow that an 80-year-old woman can walk sideways faster than I can swim. But as I swam, back and forth, slowly, like an impressionistic portrait of the athlete I used to be, I couldn’t help but think how awesome it is that she is doing the work, and how great it is that her granddaughter is spending time with her, and how much I wish I could spend that sort of time with the people who loved me into being.

And then I spent some time in what my Buddhist friends call an act of Loving-kindness, where I just took Granny and her family and focused on them and wished them every good thing.

I’ve never been good at competition. I almost died as a kid, and often in the years after it was an accomplishment that I showed up. I learned long ago that whatever motivation I have to have to get through my day is going to have to come from my own motives, and not what you think of me.

And can we be honest with each other a minute and admit to ourselves and to each other just how hard the last two years have been? There has been so much put on us that we had to just survive, so any thought of winning or not seems so secondary right now. If we just show up, that feels like winning to me right now.

Wherever you are in this whole thing, I’m rooting for you. I want us all to win.

So good job, Granny. I’m proud of you, too. And while you might get there before me, I’m glad you’re ahead of me, to show me the way.

The day I did not die

Content Warning: Descriptive narrative of a suicide attempt. Discussion about suicide and mental illness and depression.

I was 16 years old, and my parents were not home. I don’t know how to describe it – it was just a wave that came over me, and when it did, I was ready.

I was a smarter than average kid who looked differently than his classmates – I was scrawny, pimply, socially awkward and most of all, afraid. I was always afraid. These days you would say I was bullied. In those days, I would have said I was in hell. But that wasn’t the reason it came over me. But had I been successful, it would have been the reason ascribed to my actions.

I had read countless accounts of suicide – no mean feat in that pre-internet age. I had read all the dictionary entries, all the encyclopedia accounts. Then I researched famous suicides – Socrates, Hemingway, anyone at all who had made their way into the Britannica. I had a morbid fascination with death, and with suicide.

So when the dark wave came, I was ready.

I had received a shotgun for Christmas when I was 14. There were strict rules around its use, but it was unlocked. I sat on my bed and loaded it with buckshot. I took off my shoes, because I had figured out I could pull the trigger with my toe – a “trick” I had learned in a book I read about famous deaths. I put the barrel in my mouth – right now I can taste the bitter, acrid taste of the oil and the metal on my tongue – and placed my toe on the trigger.

And I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably 30 seconds or so.

And then I took the barrel out of my mouth, unloaded the gun and put it away. I don’t know why. The darkness receded, just like it came. I was horrified to find myself there. And it would be more than 10 years before I would tell anyone that it had happened.

I was on no list of people who would have been watched. I had a neurologist, but no therapist. No guidance counselor ever approached me. No teacher was concerned about me. I should NOT have had a shotgun, but in my world, people my age often did, and so nobody could have known. I was active in youth group, had been baptized, and would have strongly identified as Christian.

It wasn’t the last time I thought about self-harm, however. Once since then since then, I was as close as that day, and have been contemplative multiple times, although not for several years now. The darkness just comes on sometimes, and it seems an incredibly rational solution to end the pain. It is always late at night (more accurately early morning). I hate waking up at 3 or 4am – not because I am afraid I won’t go back to sleep, but because I am afraid of where my brain will take me if I stay awake.

Don’t mishear me – I have a good support structure in place. I have tools and strategies should things get scary, and I learned to recognize triggers, and avoid them. I have people who know my history, who love me, who I feel safe calling should I need them. There are people Renee knows to call if I scare her with my moods. Mentally, I am in pretty good shape these days. Or as good as one can expect given everything that has happened the last two years.

When all is said and done, most suicide is a symptom of mental illness.  And mental illness is just illness, like pneumonia is illness, or cancer is illness.

I’m not saying nobody ever rationally decides to end their own life. The enslaved Africans who threw themselves into the waters of the Atlantic rather than be enslaved made a rational choice. Those who fell from the burning building rather than burn – I get that. People facing months and months of excruciating pain before their inevitable deaths – totally understandable. But we are not talking about those people right now.

People who appear happy can be mentally ill, and people who are bullied can be mentally ill, and people who have families that love them can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

Likewise, people who love Jesus can be mentally ill. People who go to church can be mentally ill. People who are clergy can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

And when people die of illness, it’s horrible, but we don’t blame them for it. We wish it could have been prevented, and we seek to prevent other people from dying from it.

So, this is why we don’t have shotguns in my house – ever. And why every chance I get, I tell people that they need to take care of themselves, and be honest with the people who love them, and don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Because the world is a much better place with you in it.

If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. The National Suicide Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. And if you don’t want to call them, please call someone. 

The world is listening.

When I read old novels from the turn of the last century, it’s a kick to see that they didn’t really have protocols in place on how to answer the phone yet.

Some of them answered with the name of the family that lived there: “Smith Residence”.

Some answered with their phone number: “4286”.

Some said, “What?”

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, favored “Ahoy” as his preferred answer.

When I was little, almost 50 years ago, our small town phone book had instructions in the front of the book for how to use the telephone, and it recommended you answer the phone with “Hello”. Which, I recently learned, was the protocol recommended by Thomas Alva Edison.

Anyway. My point is, it takes time to learn how to best use a new technology. And so when I get frustrated with the ways some people use Social Media, I try to remind myself that the medium didn’t really go mainstream until after the smartphone went mainstream – about 12 years ago. It’s a very young medium, and many people still don’t have intuitive ways on how to act there. I mean, my mom signs her text messages, for crying out loud.

Historically, most of us only had one on one relationships. I would talk to Bill, and then I would talk to Mary. I may, at a party or something, talk to both Bill and Mary. But mostly we talked one on one. We didn’t have many other options.

Some people had public relationships. Pastors come to mind, as well as teachers and of course celebrities – people who were watched, who had a platform and the capability of being heard by many people at once, and who were known by many more people than they knew.

But now many of us have these public relationships. And we are like the nouveau riche child stars who don’t know how to handle the sudden attention and so we act out and end up with the equivalent of a heroin addiction and a neck tattoo.

Because of the algorithms, despite the fact that I have more than 2400 Facebook friends and more than 1400 additional people follow me there, I really only interact with about 150 of them regularly. And so it’s easy to think that when I post something there, I only imagine I am only talking to those 150 people. But I’m not.

Instead, I have found it useful to imagine I am having a conversation on a live radio show, and I am broadcasting for all the world to hear. If you were having a conversation on a live radio talk show, you would comport yourself differently.

In any event, we are all still figuring this out, this mixture of public and private, and we all have different boundaries and lines. But it’s important to think about these things because right now, there is no “standard”, and the medium thus requires a level of intentionality that most of us are unused to.

Here is a concrete example that may be helpful:

It is not uncommon when someone dies for their friends or family to post it on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to let people who you are not in regular contact with know what has happened.

Sometimes it is simple, like, “My aunt Mary died last night, the funeral is Friday.” And other times someone writes a formal obituary, such as you might have put in the paper in the past.

But the key is, and a good general rule on social media is, people get to decide how much they share. So when somebody posts that someone has died, please don’t ask how they died. If it’s important to the conversation, they will tell you. And if it isn’t, then that isn’t information they want to share.

When Dad died last year at the height of the pandemic and I saw lots of people acting like this virus was not serious, it was important to me that you know he died from COVID. That he was a First Responder and caught this virus while caring for people who were dying from this virus was important to me. So I made sure you knew, in everything I wrote, that he died from COVID.

But I, the author, get to decide.

If we were on a live radio show, and I told you my 17-year-old daughter died*, would you say, “How did it happen?”. I hope not. But some people have no problem asking that question on Facebook, while not seeing it’s just rude and inappropriate. Do you really want me to say, on a live radio program, “She killed herself, Karen”?

No, Karen imagines it is just us, one on one, chatting away in the living room, eating tea cakes and coffee. But it isn’t. We are on the air. And the whole world is listening.

*For the record, I do not have a 17 year old daughter.

Kindness

When I was 5 years old, my best friend in the world was a boy named Paul who went to kindergarten with me, and who lived a mile and a quarter up the road from our house.

Paul was adopted, and his parents had been around 50 when they adopted him as an infant, so Paul always had the “old” parents. By contrast, my parents were 21 when I was born, so his parents were nearly 30 years older than mine.

His father was a tall man, who worked in a warehouse and had thick ropey muscles in his arms, and a silhouette of a naked lady putting on her panties on one forearm, and an anchor on the other – vestiges of his time in the Navy.  At the time, it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember asking him if the naked lady was Paul’s mom, and he just giggled.

He also had an old Ford Falcon that he had turned into a pickup truck with the help of a cutting torch and some plywood. If there was anything cooler than having a naked lady tattooed on your arm, it was making your own pickup truck. I thought Paul had the coolest parents in the world.

Anyway, it was Paul’s birthday, and I was invited. It was a beautiful spring day, and there were lots of kids there. Paul’s parents didn’t have a lot of money and they lived in a small single-wide trailer with one bathroom. And so, predictably, when there were suddenly 10 little boys in the house, a line formed outside the bathroom. And I suddenly had stomach cramps.

I was hurting bad. My stomach was churning and there was this long line to the bathroom and suddenly my intestines exploded and then there was warm diarrhea running down my legs inside my Sears ToughSkin jeans. I was mortified. But, as often happens when you get everything out of you, I felt so much better, other than having a pants load of poop, that is.

I went and found Paul’s mom, but I couldn’t tell her I had crapped my pants. So I told her I wasn’t feeling good, and asked if somebody could please take me home. Paul’s dad was pressed into service. I climbed into the cab of his homemade pickup truck, with a cloud of putrid funk following me. He gets in, looks at me, and rolls down the window. We head to my house.

At the stop sign, he said, “So, you are not feeling good?”

I replied that I was not.

He said, “You know, it smells like you messed your britches.”

I sat silent, mortified.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

When we pulled up in the driveway, Dad was outside, working on the car. Mom came out when she saw us, and I ran to her and hugged her legs. Paul’s dad explained that I said I wasn’t feeling well, and he and Dad talked about whatever was wrong with our car while Mom took me inside, her nose telling her exactly what the problem was.

She asked what had happened, and I told her, and she told me it was OK, and asked how I felt. I told her I felt wonderful, now. She asked if I wanted to go back to the party. I assured her I did. She cleaned me up, we put on new clothes, and I ran outside and told Paul’s dad I felt much better now and asked if I could go back to Paul’s with him when he went.

On the way back, he looked at me, and said, “So you feel better?”

I assured him I did.

“I’m glad.”

And the rest of the way in silence, and everyone welcomed me back when we pulled up at Paul’s house, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

There were so many ways that could have went differently. He could have made a big deal out of how much I stunk. He could have laid out plastic for me to sit on, or demanded I answer him when he asked if I had soiled myself. I was already embarrassed beyond belief – he could have made it so much worse.

But he didn’t. Instead, he tried to empathize with me, and normalize what I was feeling.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

I think about that story sometimes, about just how… kind he was in that moment to a mortified kid with poop in his socks.

Kindness counts.

Hope is a choice.

I met a new friend today. At least, I think we will be friends.

It was one of those conversations where you just agree to meet up for coffee and before you know it, three hours have passed and you have talked about 5 or 6 different things, and the conversation flows easily from one thing to the next. Those are rare for me, but I love it when they happen.

And one of the things we talked about was how change happens. I have these conversations a lot these days. We look around us and feel like things are bleak and divided, and we wonder if there is any way out. If those who work to oppress others, those who would take rights from others, those who work for their own self-interest even when it hurts others, and we wonder how we get them to change.

My new friend was somewhat cynical. “I think I have given up on their changing,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe they can, but it doesn’t feel like a real possibility”.

I told her I didn’t have enough self-esteem to believe that people can’t change.

She was puzzled. So I explained that I once believed very different things than I do now about… almost everything. I used to be an Evangelical who wanted to save your soul from Hell, and now I’m not. I used to believe God did not love Gay people, and now I don’t believe that. I used to chase money, and now I chase relationships. I used to want to distance myself from the South, and now it’s a core part of my identity.

“But here’s the thing: In every one of those instances, I didn’t change because I accidentally had a change of heart, but because of a relationship I had that caused me to reconsider my position.  I changed because who I knew changed, and I changed because my ideology had to follow my relationships. My heart changed, and then waited for my head to catch up.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel said that when it came to God, there were no proofs, but only witnesses. In other words, some things can’t be proven but only experienced. I believe people can change because I have changed. A lot.  I can’t prove that people can change, but I am a witness to the fact that they do.

And I don’t believe I’m special. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m pretty mundane, actually. And if I can change, as un-special as I am, then pretty much anyone can, given time and the right relationships. Or else I have to assume I’m so special that I think I can change, but they can’t. And I don’t have enough ego for that.

“That is… hopeful. Maybe more hope than I have right now,” she said.

“Oh yeah. It’s hopeful as hell. Because I want things to change. And I believe that the only way things will change is because people change. And if I thought people couldn’t change, then what choice would I have but despair? So I find myself having to choose between hope and despair.

“And I choose hope.”

My neighborhood

On the 15th day, I’m thankful for my neighborhood.

I love my neighborhood.

In fact, we really bought our neighborhood, and they threw the house in.

Each day I go for a walk through our neighborhood. The walk started as a distraction for the foster son we had living with us at the time, and has since become a sort of spiritual practice for me. I love walking the same path each day, knowing it will take between 40 and 43 minutes, depending on a traffic light or two.

But other times I am distracted by neighbors in their yards, and the pace suffers as the relationships increase. I will always take the time to have a conversation, to listen to a story, to hear their concerns or hopes. I spent most of my life thinking I had to avoid interruptions in order to do my work, until it occurred to me that my real work – the work of being human – was actually found in the interruptions themselves.

I pass by heavily wooded lots, hear the children playing at the elementary school, after rains hear the rushing water in the creek and the occasional speeder on the interstate. I see lots of neighbors walking, and a few running. I do notice that all the walkers are smiling and the runners are scowling, and this confirms for me that I am no longer a runner.

Jackson is a storied place – I live but perhaps ten minutes from the homes of both Medgar Evers and Eudora Welty (albeit in different directions). The only openly affirming United Methodist Church is a 3-minute walk from our home, and I pass by the houses where both a former Governor and the author Willie Morris used to live every day on my journey along what Morris called Purple Crane Creek.

We live within walking distance of 2 grocery stores, 3 gas stations, an independent bookstore, and a bakery. We are a 5-minute drive away from a larger grocery store, 10 minutes away from a Home Depot and a Target. The Elementary school is a block away from our house, and the Magnet Elementary school is also a 5-minute drive.

My neighborhood is diverse – of the 5 lots that touch mine, they are all people of color. My street has retired preachers, college professors, social workers, retired military people, salespeople, a psychiatrist, and whatever I am. I am one block away from mansions, and one block away from 900 square foot cottages.

Our neighborhood has block parties, a Fourth of July parade, a holiday party and loves Halloween and kids.

I remember when we were looking at houses, Renee strongly advocated for houses in this neighborhood, even though the houses here were slightly more expensive.

“That place (where we now live) feels like a neighborhood. The other places we looked at feel like just some people who live next to each other.”

And that sums it up nicely. We love this neighborhood because it feels like a neighborhood, not just a place where some people happen to live next to each other.

My health

On the 14th day, I’m grateful for my health.

That sounds cliché, but it’s true. I have been incredibly fortunate.

My wife has been hospitalized overnight more than a dozen times in the last 12 years, the longest for 10 days when she received a heart transplant. I am intimately familiar with the American healthcare system, but fortunately, only as a spectator and not a participant.

I’ve had one broken bone my entire life. Since 18 months of age and I survived all that drama (See day 10 for more on that), I have not been admitted to a hospital. I pretty much haven’t had anything wrong with me more serious than a sinus infection in decades.

I got into prediabetes and prehypertension ranges when I was at my heaviest, but those problems went away when I lost weight.

I get migraines when the weather gets damp and heavy. MSG gives me severe headaches. (Yes, I know it’s the MSG, and yes I know about that study you want to link to that says it’s all in my head, but I assure you I do.) The hinge joint in my hips gets really stiff when I sit for too long, and when I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, my feet are super stiff.

But really? I feel great.

What about your depression?

I live with clinical depression, and will until I die. It’s just part of who I am, like being right handed is part of who I am, or having pale blue eyes. I’ve struggled with depression my whole life. I have dealt with suicidal ideation my whole life. The perfect storm of suicidal ideation and depression almost killed me twice – the most recent was in 2018, which led to my decision to go back on mental health meds for a time.

The thing is, if I didn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t know it. I can pass most of the time as neurotypical. That is part of the hell of the form of the disease I have – you would never know. Which is why it’s important that I talk about it.

In a lot of circles – including many spiritual circles – mental health is disregarded or looked down upon at best, and blamed on spiritual issues or “sin” at worst.

Here is the thing: If you have depression, you are just sick, and sometimes sick people need medication to get better. Sometimes medication just gets us back to where we can take care of ourselves (like antibiotics) and sometimes it is required the rest of our lives in order for us to stay alive (like insulin).

I try really hard to be open and transparent about my mental health stuff, even though I am fully aware that things I have alluded to in this post (such as past suicidal ideation) could be used (illegally, but still) against me in future hiring decisions.

But every time I write something like this, people reach out to me and tell me they aren’t OK either, and they had no one to tell.

There is no shame in getting help if you need it. There is no shame in saying you are not OK. There is no shame in being depressed. And the more we are honest about the ways we struggle, the less shame there is, period.

As an aside: I’m not including my ADHD as an “illness”, because I don’t see it as an illness. (again, see Day 10).

Managing energy

I have spent the last 15 years working in the so-called “helping professions”. People like nurses, doctors, pastors, social workers, teachers… that’s us – the helping professionals. And for helping professionals, the main resource we use in our work is our energy.

And to make things more complicated – I’m an introvert. That doesn’t mean that I’m shy, or I don’t like people. It just means I derive energy from solitude, and I expend energy when I engage people. In other words, people are expensive.

In helping circles, a lot of time is spent talking about self-care, and it has even slipped over into mainstream conversation. But all too often, self-care is equated with doing something enjoyable: A spa day. An afternoon at the movies. Soaking in a hot tub.

Those can all be fun, but the real task of self-care is energy preservation and repletion. If energy is your single most important resource, a primary job of self-care has to be protecting and replenishing that resource.

I know a surgeon, and the list of things he just won’t do is long because he simply cannot afford to hurt his hands. They are the means by which he earns his living, and that is too important to risk on something like mountain climbing.

Or another friend who is a bartender, and she makes her living on her feet. The money she spends on shoes and inserts and care for her feet gives me chills, and she too has a long list of things she won’t do, because it could hurt her feet and impact her ability to do her work.

I propose we should take energy management exactly that seriously.

That sounds simplistic and privileged, and it is. But something can be both simplistic and true: You have to manage your energy to be in this fight long-term. This sort of work – helping work – is an endurance sport – a marathon, not a sprint, and we will not get the better world of which we dream by working 14 hour days on the regular.

And privilege is both a noun and a verb, and while energy management is a privilege in the noun sense, it is also something we must privilege in the verb sense – we must privilege it, make it a priority, in the same way we make eating a priority.

A big part of how we do that involves listening to your body, and then building your life around what you learn. The most important knowledge is always self-knowledge.

Here is a personal example:

Because I know myself, I know my most creative time of the day is early morning, that my least productive time is after 3:00 PM, that I really need 7 hours of sleep to be my best, and that more than 8 hours of sleep will not help me and actually hurts me. Carbs are not my friend, and sugar makes me tired. Exercise of any sort helps me focus. Mingling among crowds is exhausting, but being on stage is life-giving.

None of that is supposition or opinion: Those are facts, gathered over a lifetime. And because I have committed my life to build a better world, I have to manage my energy, so I have, to the fullest extent possible, sought to build a life that prioritizes those facts and takes them into account.

So only easy meetings get scheduled for after 3:00 PM whenever possible. I wake up as early as I can, which means trying to get to bed as early as I can (A friend once told me that going to bed early is how adults sleep in, and I can’t agree more). If I eat sweets at all, it is only after I am done with work for the day. I am more likely to accept your invitation to be a speaker than I am to attend your party as a guest. And I take daily walks that range from 20 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the amount of time I have available.

And I’m not perfect at this, in any sort of way. But I have found that doing something excellently 80% of the time always gives me better results than doing something half-assed 100% of the time. The things we pay attention to are the things that get better.

I’m not saying that any of these things are things you should be doing, but they are things that work for me, and allow me to be fairly good at my work, despite being an ADHD riddled, introverted, depressed Chaos Muppet.

I am saying, though, that you should pay attention to your body and learn how your body responds to things, and then build a life that focuses on preserving and maintaining your energy.

What have you found helps you with managing your energy?

Introversion and energy management

I am an introvert. This shocks a lot of people who know me.

“You seem so outgoing!”

“You are so engaged when talking to people!”

“You do so well on the stage!”

Introversion isn’t a synonym for being shy, or socially awkward, or withdrawn. There are introvert stand-up comedians, introvert actors, and introvert party planners. No, introversion just means you get your energy from solitude, and you spend energy on public interaction. As opposed to extroverts, who derive energy from interaction and spend energy in solitude.

So, as an introvert, I can have a very public facing job. It just costs me more energy to do it than it would if I were an extrovert.

Think of it like this:

Like a lot of people who work in the so-called helping professions, I don’t make a lot of money. I mean, I make enough to support my family and to pay my bills, but we have to be careful with our spending. Extravagances are rare, and splurges are just that – a splurge.

So, for example, if I want to go out and eat steak at a steakhouse, I can afford to do it – occasionally. Like, maybe once a month, if I plan for it. But I couldn’t do it every day. I would quickly be bankrupt and overdrawn, unable to take care of my obligations.

And if that happened, the problem isn’t that steak is expensive, although it is pricey. And the problem wouldn’t be my income, although things are tight. The problem is that I didn’t properly manage my resources. Because steak is expensive, and I do have a finite amount of money.

And for introverts like me, people are expensive, and I have a finite amount of energy, and that energy is a resource I must manage.

For example: Tonight I am going to the birthday party of a friend’s son. He is turning 12, and there will be a cookout and a bonfire and lots of kids and basketball and toasted marshmallows. And it will be expensive for me, energy-wise. But the kid means a lot to me, and the friend means a lot to me, and so I’ve decided it will be worth it. The same way you might save up to treat a yourself to a nice bottle of wine for a special occasion.

But just like me deciding to eat steak at a fancy restaurant, I can’t just do it whenever I want to. I have to save up for it. I have to plan for it. I have to look ahead and budget my energy around it. I knew I had this on the calendar, so I didn’t plan any in-person meetings this afternoon, and I don’t have any planned until lunchtime tomorrow.  I’m going to spend an hour or so before we go alone, reading, and when we get home, I will be exhausted, and will go to bed. But while I am at the party, I will see people, have fun, and the people I will interact with will think I am likeable and outgoing.

Because I am outgoing. And I will have fun at this party. It’s just expensive for me.

A further thing:

I recognize that the ability to arrange my schedule is a huge privilege, one that most people don’t enjoy. It has taken me until I am almost 50 years old to have this much control over my calendar, but it is something I have been fighting for my whole life. Once you know how you best work, then trying to make your life match up to that is a huge quality of life improvement, and very much worth fighting for.

When you can’t do the thing.

The city I live in now is notorious for its poor street maintenance, and sure enough, our first year here, we lost a tire on the hatchback when I hit a huge pothole. At the tire shop, I asked them to change the oil while it was up on the rack.

The mechanic told me that when I had hit the pothole, I had also dented the oil pan in such a way he couldn’t get the bolt out to drain the oil.

“You’re gonna have to get that oil pan replaced,” he told me.

Money was, at that particular moment, tight, and the tire was already an unexpected expense, and we were in the process of moving into our new home, and it wasn’t leaking, so I said thanks, and drove it home with no oil change, intending to replace the oil pan myself later when I had time.

For the next few months, I drive as normal. The oil in the car was synthetic, which can go much longer between changes than conventional oil, and it was hot outside, and honestly, my ADHD object impermanence kicked in and since I couldn’t see it, I more or less forgot about it.

Then we got foster kids, and started driving the SUV almost everywhere, and I started working from home more, and instead of driving the hatchback every day, it was only a couple of times a week, a few miles at a time.

Somewhere in there, I went to the parts store to buy a new oil pan for the car, but they didn’t carry it – I would have to order one from the dealer or off the internet, they told me. I thanked them and then promptly forgot about it again for a few more months.

Then in a fit of ambition, I ordered the part and the gasket off the internet, and bought the oil and oil filter – everything I would need to fix it once and for all. I put it all in the cargo compartment of the car and forgot about it again.

And then a global pandemic happened. Neither car moved for two weeks. Then I went for six months without driving in the dark. I began working almost exclusively at home. In that first year, we put less than 5,000 miles on our SUV. I put less than 1,000 on the hatchback. For the last six months, it never left the carport. I would crank it every month or so and let it run for a while, but that’s it. It got covered in dust and ick.

It just sat there, and since it was more than two and a half years since the last oil change, I didn’t want to drive it anywhere serious, and I couldn’t change the oil (which is something I can do practically in my sleep) without changing the pan, and so it became a “thing.” My car I loved, just sitting there, covered in ick, because the emotional investment in doing the thing was too heavy.

For us ADHD types, sometimes extremely simple things become overwhelming. The thing itself isn’t hard, but the energy and investment to do it is, so it becomes a “thing”. A thing that just taunts us with our inability to do it. Changing the oil pan had become a thing.

To be clear: I had the tools. I had the parts. It wouldn’t be a difficult thing to do – there are maybe 10 bolts, all easy to get to. It would probably take 2 hours to do if I wasn’t hurrying, including clean up. And during the time all this is happening, I had enough free time to built a huge deck for our house and a 10×16 workshop in my backyard. But I couldn’t do this.

But lately, I am working on a new project that will dramatically increase my time in the car, and so it would be good if both our cars were back to fully functional. Because I scheduled this week lightly, yesterday I had a free morning and decided to do the thing: I would replace the oil pan and change the oil on the car.

I got everything ready. I drove the car up the ramps. I crawled under the car.

There was nothing wrong with the oil pan. I mean, nothing. So I changed the oil like normal and was done in 20 minutes.

I don’t know if the original guy who told me it was dented was lying to get out of doing the oil change, or confused my car with another when he was telling me about it, or what. But I have been carrying around the emotional weight of this task I couldn’t make myself do for more than 2 years when it didn’t even exist.

This is a perfect example of what life with Adult ADHD is like. The object impermanence, the sense of overwhelm at a complex, multi-step operation that just looms larger the longer you put it off, the sense of shame you feel for not being able to do the thing, even though you know you can do the thing, the inevitable doing of the thing and then the sense of shame because it took you so long to do the thing when it was so simple to do.

I will, of course, learn nothing from this. Because “this” isn’t about my laziness, but about my brain, and how it functions. It really doesn’t matter how much I want to do something. It doesn’t matter how much I need to do something. There are things that just overwhelm my brain, and no amount of self-talk changes that.

And when that does happen, sometimes you can hack your way out of it – such as paying someone to do it for you, if you have the resources. And other times, all you can do is be as gentle with yourself as possible afterwards.