Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I'm hungry and don't have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don't have energy to shower without eating first.

It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I've spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It's fine!!

It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it's ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.

Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There's the closed loop I described, and there's also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that's too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I've been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it'd be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven't made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it's going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.

Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don't know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can't even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don't panic.

And when I've got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.

That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven't at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can't think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I've managed to figure out starts with one I can't make myself tackle, so I'm stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can't tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there's going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.

and the next day tabitha is like Did cheryl actually turn into a cow last night or did i dream that and jughead is like Yeah or is that a movie we watched and then they get a call from betty who's like Guys i think cheryl is a cow now and she's on a rampage. and they rush to find cheryl who is eating all the grass in town and they're like We have to stop her or riverdale will lose its precious rivergrass. so they call archie and jughead makes him dress up as a toreador and wave a red cape at her which enrages cow!cheryl because she owns the color red and she merely loans it to archie's hair out of the goodness of her heart but now he is flaunting it so she charges at him and he uses a pitchfork to knock the cowbell off of her and she turns back into a human. and she tearfully awakens and hugs archie and says Thank you archiekins you saved me from my bovine fate just like my jj would have done. and veronica says I don't understand why did christine bior send you a cowbell that makes you turn into a cow. and betty says Actually it turns out the package wasn't from christine bior it was from cowstine bior. and everyone's like Cowstine bior?! and just then nana rose enters the room and says Oh is that the cowstine bior cowbell i ordered? I was wondering where that got to and cheryl says Nana rose you ordered this? For why? and nana rose says For the maple syrup cow of course and archie says The maple syrup cow? and nana rose says Yes child did you really think our special blossom maple syrup came just from trees? We infuse the sap with the maple milk from the maple syrup cow. I ordered that cowbell just for her and cheryl says But the package said it was for cheryl blossom and nana rose says That's because the maple syrup cow's name is cheryl blossom. and toni says Why is the cow named cheryl blossom and cheryl says Dearest tt don't ask silly questions.....for what other name could the cow that enhances our maple syrup so be blessed with? and everyone is like True enough. and then there's a knock at the door and it's the mailman and the mailman says Delivery for cheryl blossom and it's the same packaging as before and cheryl looks inside and says How delightsome! My very own christine bior nose ring! and everyone says Cheryl NO and lunges to stop her from putting it on.

Anyway, I felt the need to gather them all

who even is this dude? someone needs some anger management classes.

love how he keeps reminding us that “I HAVE THREE GIRLFRIENDS”, “THEY ALL KISS ME”, and “THEY SMOKE WEED HURRP DURR”.

and let’s not forget the “Blaiz” and her “wicked tat”, or that he doesn’t “wanna see you standing outside [his] home at 3 am holding your weird dripping brown bags ever again”, and that this is “the FINAL FUCKING WARNING”.

“the goo pile that is now your body”

i’m dying over here, jesus