Recover we

I don’t know if it’s a real thing, avoidance addiction. I only know today I realized how my long list of undone “to-dos” offered me an unwanted surge of adrenaline. They are significant and important things. Legal things. Financial things. Adult things.

The adrenaline flooded my system, I felt like I was going to puke. In the past I have audibly whimpered at the thought of it all. Most times I’d shut down, used whatever dopamine drip could numb the anxiety long enough to forget about the list. Until the next time.

I was talking to a neighbor this morning about this issue. I was pissed for both of us at this hindrance we have allowed. I felt fierce in saying, there is no choice but to JUST DO IT!

Just do the damn things.

When I am spinning like this in avoidance, I defer to three strategies I learned early on that work for my brain.

• I set a timer. I make it a sort of game. Can I get this thing done in this span of time? Somehow it helps. Sure, sometimes I find that when the timer goes off I had gotten sidetracked on something else. Every fifteen minutes I’m gently reminded by a soothing alarm, to get back to the shit I need to do.
• Don’t put it down put it away. I have a sign in my kitchen to keep the motto fresh. You will be shocked at how much future work you save with a few intentional steps.
• Pick 5 things up. Throw 5 things away.

I haven’t been doing these things lately. The consequences are the overwhelming list. The adrenaline overdose. And the urge to freeze.

I have been toying with a solution to this problem that I know I am not alone with. I saw an ADHD expert once talk about an online support group. The participants met for an hour, once a week. The first 5 minutes were spent with each sharing what they intended to get done in the next 50 minutes. It could be anything from paying a stack of bills, deleting emails, washing dishes, whatever they have assigned themselves. It was very effective for the participants. I’m adding creating the group to the end of the looming list of to do’s.

“First things First,” as Steven Covey says. I’m going to take care of the credit union, the paperwork for my job, my debt to the TollRoad. I will wait on the phone for LegalZoom to correct their mistake in billing and to resolve the license they say is unavailable. I will take care of the school debts and traffic violation that have been haunting me. Having written them out like this made them less scary somehow.

They are not scary things. Not really. I have areas that have triggered unconscious internal reactions. Adrenaline and cortisol flood my system believing I am in danger, for reasons I haven’t been conscious of. Til now.

See, that internal reaction is just one of my unhealed parts who feels incompetent and helpless. It’s the 8, 9, 10 year old who was forced to adult too soon, to pretend she knew what she was doing, who knows she is not equipped for these sort of things but is being required to perform. I performed so well – no one knew what to do when my nervous system broke and I crumbled under the weight of my own masks.

I have had to walk myself through my life, my wreckage, my own creation and figure out what to do next. One step at a time.

The bills and the daily life maintenance as an adult continue to be something I come back to avoiding, unconsciously. Until I became more conscious of the pattern and developed understanding of why I do it.

In the ongoing quest to improve – now when I am living in the manifestation of it, I get to apply everything I know. It still comes down to doing the damn thing.

We aren’t meant to be ready for everything. We build our skills as we tackle different tasks. We weren’t equipped to handle some of the things we faced as children. It made us strong in some ways, weak in others. Now as adults, we have to take on these responsibilities as part of our healing. Even so, it’s important to acknowledge with grace, that we grew up too soon and in other ways seemingly too late.

But it’s not too late. I’m still here. We’re still here.

Like I told my neighbor – this is us taking responsibility for our pre-frontal cortex. We do what we DON’T want to do now, so we can do what we want later. I have a lot of things I want to do. Fun stuff. Important stuff. But for now, I’m going to go set a timer and get some of this stupid adulting shit done.

See ya later.