Permission to lead a low-demand lifestyle
Permission to lead a low-demand lifestyle
And permission to have fragile, low-resource days
This one is shorter because I’m tired-er today. Hopefully there are some concepts you find useful here, or just take it as a hug from one tired human to another. 💚
Hi everyone,
I’ve been spending a lot of time re-evaluating my goals recently—especially the vague, this is how my life should look, internalized neurotypical goals that I now realize were never going to work for me.
The reality is that I’ve always lived a low-demand lifestyle, because I can’t handle doing anything else. But feeling like I am failing at living a high-demand lifestyle is really different than fully choosing and committing to a lifestyle that works for me, and letting go of the not-really-mine-but-still-meaningful-to-me dream of becoming the person I thought I needed to be to deserve approval and a high-enough income.
There is no manual for this. I’m just feeling out what it looks like if I stop striving, and think about what I can do with the internal and external resources I actually have.
Which means letting go of various fantasies that I’ve held in my heart for a long time.
Fantasy is a form of self-regulation.
This means, unfortunately, that when you give up the fantasy, you have to deal with everything you were using the fantasy to regulate. 😩
Even a negative fantasy, like, I ought to be different, and if I just tired harder, I would be is functioning as self-regulation. Underneath it, for me, is a whole pile of undigested grief, stress, frustration, and overwhelm. And that’s going to take time to work through.
Recontextualizing some of my recent exhaustion as neurodivergent burnout does help explain it, but it will still take months or years of work to figure out and implement what I need to live well, now that I know what the problem really is. And some things that would be really helpful also cost money, so I need to build more income first, which is also hard.1
I feel like I’m at the point where the newness of the realization is wearing off, and now I’m looking at my life and realizing, Oh shit, I have a lot of work to do. It’s just different work than I thought, and I need to do it way slower than I imagined. It’s hard to not feel discouraged. (And that’s why I had the fantasy in the first place.)
It’s OK to feel like crap sometimes.
I want to be inspiring. But I don’t want to ever convey that I don’t have bad days, or that life isn’t hard for me. I don’t want to ever pretend again that I’m a different person than I am.
When I’m having a hard day/week/month/year, I find it hard to not over-eat sugar. I eat a lot more cereal and a lot less protein. Dishes pile up. I leave lights on.
I fell asleep on my couch last night, because I was too tired to get up and do the “going to bed” things. Like brushing my teeth, and moving my body from the couch to the bed.
Yesterday, I spent the morning upgrading my Mac OS, which was incredibly stressful because (a) I was terrified I might brick my computer, and (b) the task involved a series of, “48 minutes remaining….” type situations, back to back, in which I couldn’t use my laptop. And my laptop is the primary way I regulate my attention and connect with my support system. It’s my life.
Then when it was complete, my OS was slightly different in annoying ways. It’s like if someone came in and moved half your furniture 5 inches to the left. It was mildly disruptive all day long and felt pointlessly frustrating.
Yes, I’ll get used to it. No, it’s not a huge deal. But ADHD feels like an inability to automatically create homeostasis in the realm of attention and stimulation and motivation.2 So the environment being just so matters. I think that’s why we spend so fucking long tweaking everything to our liking, making it smooth, making it pretty. It’s not procrastination, it’s self-soothing in a world that is constantly being too much or too little at us.
So yes, “little things” throw me off balance. They sap my limited resources. And too many of them back to back make me want to cry and feel hopeless. And that’s OK.
It doesn’t mean I am not awesome at the things I’m awesome at. But the feeling of being inadequate in the face of life can very easily get internalized as incompetence. It’s not.
I’m at the point where I’m still learning what is really going on for me, and unlearning the negative self-image that I created out of so many moments of why can’t I handle this??!?
I’m just wanting to be honest about that, because I started this newsletter to be more honest more often, and the honest truth is that I’m feeling fragile and under-resourced today.
Some days ADHD feels like a superpower, and some days it feels like I’m a 5 year old lost in a busy shopping mall and I can’t find my parents. I just want someone to scoop me up, make the problems go away, and take me to go get ice cream.3 I want to not have to worry about adult problems.
I just want life to work, without me having to constantly work to make it work.
But I don’t have a magic wand, so I’m just focusing on self-care today.
Self-care doesn’t mean already having so many internal and external resources that you can spend a day at the spa. Who the fuck associated self-care with spas, anyway? The spa industry!? Self-care is just loving myself when it’s hard. It’s giving myself what I need when I need it.
And when I don’t have what I need, because the world is not set up to make sure my needs are met, and my wrestling match with capitalism isn’t going great....self-care is holding myself with loving compassion and knowing that it’s OK to grieve, it’s OK to feel fragile, it’s OK to feel angry, it’s OK to feel sad. It’s OK to not like how things are, even if I don’t know how to change them. It’s OK to just be myself, where I’m at.
Permission to lead a low-demand lifestyle is a subset of permission to be who you are, where you are, with all the feelings you have right now.
A low-demand lifestyle is good for all the reasons it sounds like on the tin—better for our brains, our nervous systems, and the environment. It’s also just all I can manage, and I’m working to be OK with that.
And that’s all I’ve got in me to say today. It’s OK for you to be you. It’s OK for me to be me. It’s OK to show up to life, to creativity, to work, to everything that matters to us, as imperfect, overstressed, under-resourced beings.
It has to be, because that’s the boat that a lot of us are in right now. And making ourselves wrong for that just makes it harder, and worse. And I’m in the pursuit of trying to make it easier, and better. 😌
A friend suggested “What is the 1% way to do this?” as a good prompt for figuring out how to go towards a little bit of the thing you need or want, even if you can’t do all of it for reasons of ADHD, capitalism, trauma, etc.
I’m not a doctor or neuroscientist and I’m not sure if this is technically correct, but it feels like I have to consciously and deliberately do the things that neurotypical brains tend to do automatically and unconsciously. For example, I have to deliberately think hard about priorities, because my brain thinks everything is important, all of the time. I have to consciously and deliberately work out my stimulation mix, because my brain can’t just tune in and tune out the right things at the right time. This all produces a huge amount of extra, invisible work for neurodivergent brains.
I didn’t actually have parents like that. If I got lost, I would just get yelled at for being lost. But it’s what I wished my parents had been like, and what I’m trying to provide for myself now.