Will the mountain last as long as I can wait?

She needs an assassin.

They’re the best in the business.

Falling in love wasn’t part of the deal.

LOVE KILLS TWICE, my F/NB romantic suspense is out January 18th and for pre-order now! 

Purchase: Available Here

Content Warnings: Available Here

Original Fiction Twitter: @riengray

what ppl hear:

Adhd person: I’m naturally good at remembering information and am lucky enough to be good at standardized tests but because of this I’ve never had to try in school and now that the work is exponentially harder I’m struggling

Adhd person: I have this one hyperfixation and I know everything there is to know about it. (Ie, I can read Korean, I taught it to myself!)

UH WHAT

This might have been the bit that hit me hardest, actually:

it would be easy to misinterpret the following scenario as a standoff between two partners: Imagine that your partner asks you to pay the electric bill, and you say to yourself, “OK, I have time to do that today.” But when you sit down to do it, you keep getting distracted. The ADHD brain needs higher stimulation in order to complete this rote task with minimal payoff. Your ADHD brain says, “That task is way too boring, and I refuse to focus on it. Find something that interests me more, which offers me a bigger dopamine reward, and I’ll work with you.” It doesn’t matter that you know you should pay the bill as promised; if your brain won’t engage, it’s an ugly standoff. Perhaps, after a day of procrastination — when your partner will be home in 20 minutes and the bill is still unpaid — there may be enough of an adrenaline rush from a sense of crisis that your brain will engage and you pay the bill.

The ADHD brain and its owner are at odds with one another. It’s difficult to compel a disengaged brain to engage by force of will. In fact, much of the treatment for ADHD involves learning to psych out the brain, so that it will attend to necessary, low-stimulation tasks.

Appreciating the tug-of-war within that pits intellect against neurobiology increases compassion and acceptance for one’s hidden struggle.

I feel SEEN. OTZ

Navajo/Hopi Covid Relief Fund

Critical Resistance, working to dismantle the prison industrial complex and abolish the police

The Queer Detainee Empowerment Project

National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, working to end violence against indigenous women and children and provide resources for the MMIW campaign

Sunrise Movement, a youth-led political campaign pushing the Green New Deal and climate legislation

Industrial Workers of the World. Unions.

Companies are spending millions of dollars to keep themselves from having to cover benefits for their employees instead of spending that money on, for instance, employee benefits.

And they’re doing this at a time when the job these workers do has become the most dangerous for drivers and in the highest demand for deliverers.

Their attempt is so transparently heinous that they had to dispute a neutral description of the proposal.

And their add campaigns are exactly the bullshit Amazon tries to pull, where they have people of color talk about how important their job is or how much “freedom” they need in their work life. If you’ve ever lived in a community with an Amazon warehouse/distribution center, you’d know they regularly chew up and spit out workers in poor and often minority communities desperate for work.

VOTE NO ON PROP 22 in CA

It’s the gig economy corporations fighting hard to have the right to exploit workers and deny them the basic benefits of employment. 

Like, you know, the right to be paid for all the time you spend on the job, not the time you spend doing specific tasks. Like the right to overtime payments. The right to have your employer pay for necessary equipment. (In this case, being paid for gas, car maintenance, insurance, and so on.) 

OR - if this really were “independent contractors just using an app to find clients” - the right to negotiate directly with those clients. The right to set their own rates. The right to discuss the terms of the work - like, agreeing to a delay on one side or the other. The right to build  up a regular clientele. The right to refuse clients without penalty. The right to know the details of a job before agreeing to it. (Did you know that Uber and Lyft drivers don’t know the destination before they accept a job?) 

Have you considered: if it’s an important object, making its home Aesthetique™?

I’m living that ADHD life, and yeah, visual exhaustion is absolutely a thing. I can’t tell you how much time I spend every week looking for stuff that’s right in front of me or even in my hand (and I legit can’t tell you, once it’s north of an hour time ceases to exist for me), except!

I’ve figured out that I’m more likely to be able to find something if the place it’s supposed to live is something I like looking at. I have a little key hanger by my door with birds on it. It’s visually interesting, it pleases me to look at it, and I can see in a moment if my keys aren’t there before it becomes mission critical to have my keys.

(image of a brown metal key-hanger with three hooks in the shape of small stylized birds, and keys on each hook)

It’s tiny shit like this that can dramatically improve your life. I also do a lot of crafts, and because I am a self-aware trainwreck and a super visual person, I know that I need to have my materials where I can see them all the time. I also figure, if they’re gonna be constantly visible, I maybe oughtta make ‘em  Aesthetique™, because I don’t want someone to stage a hoarding intervention.

(image of cube shelves with fabric stored in small bolts and scrolls, sorted in color wheel order)

This has the added bonus of curtailing my occasionally out-of-control shopping problem, because it feels like shopping through the stash I already have whenever I start something new.

Did it take a while to organize my fabric like that? HELL YES IT DID, but when I started I had maybe half as much material to organize, and I asked for help doing it. (Never be afraid to ask for help, my friends!) And seriously, since I like looking at my stash, since it makes me happy, since I’m proud of the work I did to make it look like that, I’m way more likely to keep it that way.

I actually took my closet doors a coupla days ago, so I can accomplish something similar with my wardrobe. I’ve got clothes I like and never wear because I forget they’re there, so I’m gonna make my closet Aesthetique™ and actually frickin’ use it.

clytemnestra: interacts with the chorus