Two sides of a coin.

Inktober day 5

Build

The problem comes in when you start connecting things that you don’t need to connect, like “mild displeasure” with “OH GOD EVERYONE HATES ME” or “I feel a little crummy” with “I AM THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD”.

So when we’re talking about Life Skills/ADLs, you gotta use that power to make your life easier, not harder. You gotta connect things when it makes your life better and NOT do it when it makes your life harder. 

Here’s an example of the habits: 

I had a stretch of time where I was too sick to do much of anything. I could barely get out of bed to get to the bathroom. I was walking with a stick and generally just… le dead. And one of the problems I had was that I could almost never remember to take my morning meds. 

I decided that the first time I got up to use the bathroom every day, I’d take my meds. That way I was taking them no matter how crap I felt- I had to get up to pee, like it or not- and it was getting done pretty early in the morning. 

Getting up to pee meant taking my meds; they were the same thing. I didn’t have to remember to take my meds separately, or set an alarm to remind myself, or anything like that. I just did it as part of something I had to do anyway.

As time went on and I started getting better, I realized I could do the same thing with other parts of my routine. If you connect something you need to do with something you have to do, the thing you need to do gets done.

So like… say I’m already in the habit of getting up to take a shower. I’ve lived in crappy apartments my entire life, so the water takes a minute to warm up. Since my countertop dishwasher is right outside my bathroom door, I’ll take a second to empty and load the dishwasher while the water’s still heating up. It just becomes part of the routine of taking a shower. 

You don’t have to think about Doing The Extra Thing. Connecting it to something you’re already doing means that, after a certain point, it just… happens, automatically.

 The problem comes in when you start trying to do this with tasks- things that you only have to get done once, that already have a fair few steps to them. Especially if that task is has a lot of steps, has a time limit, or is otherwise Hard for you. 

Figuring out tasks with dependencies (I have to do this before I can do this!) is already hard for us ADHDers. Sometimes what happens is that you bundle two tasks together- you decide you can’t do something until you’ve done the other thing, even though these tasks are in no way connected. 

Here’s an example: 

I have three packages I need to mail. One of them is a gift for a friend in Australia, which costs a lot of money; one of them is a package for my Etsy store which is Not Finished Yet, and one is a very late Christmas package. 

I might decide, “hey, I need to mail all three of these packages together! I can’t mail any of these packages until I bundle all of them!” But it’s probably smarter to mail them separately! I don’t want to make my friend with the late Christmas package wait any more, so I can mail that first, and then mail the Australia package when I have the money and the Etsy package when it’s finished. 

But if I insist that I have to bundle these tasks… I won’t get any of them done. I’ll be too stressed out about the Etsy package not being done to mail the other two packages, and then I will run out of money for the Australia package, and the Christmas package will not get sent til Labour Day.

"It Feels Good To Be Yourself. A book about gender identity" written by Theresa Thorn and illustrated by Noah Grigni. The cover shows the four main characters, one is a transgender girl, two are nonbinary in different ways, and one is a cis boy who is the little brother to the trans girl.

I typically don't read the kids books even when they are super cute but this one I HAD to read. So I start reading. And I just--

Here's a few pages: (short image description below)

Quick image description: Above are 5 pictures I took of pages that I really liked and made me extra happy. The first two are back to back pages of the book's introduction of JJ, who is a wheelchair user and is "neither a girl or a boy" and uses they/them pronouns. This is the text from the next two back to back pages depicting the four friends playing outside and coloring on the sidewalk: "Some kids don't feel exactly like a girl or a boy -- they feel like neither. Some kids feel like their gender identity isn't always the same -- it's often changing." [Next page] "And even with all these possible ways to be, some kids don't feel like any of the words they know fit them exactly right. There are a never-ending number of ways to be yourself in the world." The last page shows Ruthie after she came out to her parents as transgender. Her whole family (mom, dad, little brother, her, and a dog on the side) are hugging. The text reads "Oops! Ruthie was a girl all along -- they just didn't know it at first." End ID.

SO OBVIOUSLY IM ALMOST SOBBING AT WORK NOW OMG

This book is absolutely beautiful and so sweet and I encourage everyone to go see if they can borrow it at their library. It's a quick 2-3 min read, maybe 15 if you start getting emotional like my queer little heart did. I'm assuming there's a regular print version more widely available, and maybe a LT version too, and if my Hawaii library has a copy of the braille version I'm guessing others already have it too.

OH AND HERE'S THE BACK COVER I DIDNT NOTICE UNTIL AFTER I PROCESSED IT AND THIS PART REALLY GOT ME OKAY (text written below)

fake dating

omniscient narrator who immediately contradicts the characters (“This is fine,” she said. It was, in no way, shape, or form, fine.)

deadpan jokes while swordfighting

the “I FUCKING LOVE MY WIFE” guy

oblivious pining that slowly escalates until A is going on page rants about how pretty B’s eyes are but still doesn’t seem to recognize they’re in love

Strong Leader Type having to physically fall down in order for the other characters to see how exhausted they are

funny villains who talk and make jokes with their heroes while they’re fighting them

the villains presented as the protagonists

*increasingly pulls out bigger and bigger weapons from more unlikely places*

“I said all of your weapons” *pulls out more*

“ALL OF THEM” *pulls out one last tiny dagger*

traumatized character using humor to cover up ptsd

characters going out for a break at a restaurant/movie/whatever and something bad happening

using the “*gasp* what’s that over there???” trick to avert the enemy’s attention and it working

a villain’s weakness being something totally random and nonsensical

a hero duo arguing over who’s the sidekick while fighting a villain

“don’t be silly, we don’t need [important thing]”  “you lost it, didn’t you?”  “yeah”

“what’s the one thing I told you not to do tonight?”  “raise the dead”   “and what did you do?”  “raised the dead”

Metroman was the “gifted child”, always pushed into an ideology that they must be perfect, iconic. When Metroman reached his peak, he felt that “ideal life” was too much and it slowly became a burden to him as he never got the opportunity to follow the life he wanted in the first place in order to pursue the life others wanted for him.

Megamind was raised in a place with wrong influences and was isolated from the very beginning being held as another prisoner just because he looked different. Him becoming “a villain” came from him believing he was one because of the way people treated him by bullying him and labelling him, never given a chance to grow properly.

Roxanne is the person everyone saw as the “damsel in distress”, yet when all seemed lost, unlike the rest of the citizens of Metrocity, she was the only person trying to find a way to change things. She never stopped looking for clues and possible solutions in order to fight back, to stand up for herself and for the rest of the city.

Hal Stewart, aka Titan/Tighten, is the person you thought you knew, the kind of person you have interacted on a daily basis, an ordinary person, the one you never imagined could become such a dangerous threat when suddenly given power and when they don’t get what they thought they deserved just because they were “nice”.

Minion is the love and support we all deserve.

She then proceeds to ask me why I couldn’t early vote.

I tell her that I guess I could have but I didn’t and the option was now closed and my next and last chance is Tuesday.

Cue her giving me a hard time for not early voting.

I politely tell her that I didn’t so I’ll be requiring time off on Tuesday.

Her response?

“I mean we’ll try to get you out.”

Umm no.

I say - “Legally the law requires that you allow me time off work to go vote.”

Her response?

“Yes, I mean legally it does.”

Yes bitch, legally! As in the law! As in it is my right!

So whatever, I leave her office with a bad taste in my mouth and run into a coworker (who’s worked there as long as I’ve been alive), and I tell her about what happened.

She goes OFF, tells me I better make sure they let me go vote Tuesday and that if they try to fight me on it to tell them to look in their files for the law that she printed off for them years ago stating my right to do so.

So she leaves and I feel a bit better but just for shits and giggles I decide to look up the law for Tennessee voting rights (I knew it was a law that they have to let you off but I didn’t know the exact parameters.)

You know what Tennessee law says?

Up to three hours PAID time to go vote, (and my dumb ass was planning on clocking out.)

Bonus:

If I’m somewhere where there are Educational Personell (Museum Docents, Q&A zookeepers, Park Rangers, Public School Teachers, Professors etc.) I have a question I like to ask them:

“What’s the weirdest question someone’s ever asked you?”

I say weird and not Dumb becuase even buckwild questions can have important answers, but whoever I ask it too usually has to think about it for a bit, then comes out with something different every time.  And I love every single answer becuase it just warms my heart out there to know people are trying to understand the world a bit better, no matter how limited thier starting point. A collection of favorites so far:

Art Museum Host: “A man once asked me “Can you help me find someone and if you can’t can you find someone who can?”  Which I always thought would be a great title for an Artwork.”

Park Ranger: “I’m so glad the Japanese couple asked me “Is bear spray like mosquito spray and it goes on the jacket, or on the bear?” instead of just trying it.”

Zookeeper: “A man once pointed at the live red-tailed hawk I had out for a demo and asked me “Aren’t those extinct?” We eventually figured out he meant “Endangered” but I hear that question every time I see a redtail now.”

Primary School Teacher: “About every other year a student asks me what part of the school I sleep in at night, because clearly I live here.  I tell them I sleep under the bleachers in the gym but it’s actually the Nurse’s office.”

Professor: “A student asked me “So how do I use this in a conversation when my aunt is wine-drunk at thanksgiving and being a jerk again?” Which honestly is a fair question about philosophy and really changed how I teach rhetoric.”

Natural History Docent: “A woman once asked me what the difference between a Million and a Billion was.  Kinda pieced together that she’d just left her church for her safety, and was learning about Earth’s Natural History for the first time. Nobody else was there because it had been snowing, so I walked her through the Hall Of Time and answered as many questions as I could.  She was bewildered, but really trying. It always struck me as a really brave thing, to try to understand all of that while fresh out of a dangerous situation. I hope it helped.”

Forensic Scientist:  “People ask me how to commit murder all the time, but if you really hate someone, stealing thier identity causes much more suffering and is a lot harder to get caught at. A guy did ask me if working at a body farm was creepy and did not like that it was ok until you learned that decayed human fingers are a deer’s favorite midwinter snack.”

Zookeeper: “People call us becuase they think they’ve found an escaped animal all the time, or they think they’re neighbor’s husky is a wolf. One guy asked me if his dog was part hyena because it had spots. But that one guy really did have a Tiger in his toolshed that one time so we try to take them seriously.”

Meteorologist: “A guy once emailed me about how hard you’d have to fan a tornado to make it start spinning in the other direction and included a picture of him holding up a box fan at an approaching tornado.  We printed it out for the work fridge.”

Park Ranger: “I was giving a talk on the Yellowstone Supervolcano and a guy asked if, after it errupted, the earth would be ‘hollowed out’.  I suppose I was just relieved that he understand that the earth isn’t flat.”

Primarcy Shcool teacher: “A student once asked me where she could sell her bones online so she could by a dog.  Which? Same.”

The scene where Matilda was dancing around her living room making things fly around to the song “Little Bitty Pretty One” was very nerve-wracking for Mara. She told Danny that she was anxious to do the scene, and he said, “You know why? Because you’re the only one dancing! We just have to have everyone else dance too! Then it won’t be scary!” 

So everyone–the crew, the rest of the cast, the people at the craft services table, everyone–danced along with the song, at Danny’s insistence. Apparently the only one who wasn’t doing the full on dance was the camera man, who just did a foot shuffle so the camera wouldn’t jiggle.