Crazy as Usual

One of the biggest struggles with autoimmune disease for me has been dealing with my stress patterns.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was this adorable little red headed child with ADHD.  Well, when you grow up with ADHD problems, you tend to take one of only a couple paths.  Some of us simply tuned out.  All the negative feedback all the time, and all the people telling us we could do it if we just tried harder, were just too much.  So we gave up on a system that was fundamentally unfair, refusing to see how hard we were working.

Or, we figured out how to steal all the power in the room, and became the class clown and problem.  Maybe a lot of the attention was negative, but at least we were reclaiming our autonomy from all the negative feedback telling us that if we would just submit a little harder every day, we'd be successful.  That seems like motivation to a lot of adults.  But somewhere along the way, we learn that no matter how hard we work, they keep moving that line.  So some of us figured out that the best option was to take power back for ourselves, amuse our friends, and do whatever it took to feel victorious, having admitted to ourselves that no victory was possible within the bounds of adult demands.

Or we learned to become human pressure cookers.  We knew nothing of adrenal fatigue, and kids were rarely prescribed any psychoactive substances at that point for anxiety or depression.  And so some of us, being just gifted enough in other ways, really did try to rise to the occasion, no matter the cost we were incurring on ourselves.

The reality is that most of us with ADHD probably did some of all three at times.  But for me, my average day was pressure cooker fear mode, no matter the cost.  I would panic at all the expectations, and drive myself half insane trying to make the details come together.  There were other factors in my life that made this worse.  That list could go on a long time, but I will just mention that "sweet old lady" who was my third grade teacher.  She was to retire after that year, and her idea of teaching at that point in her path of personal exhaustion, was to make everything a competition while she did as little as possible.  For those of us with stage fright and panic attacks and a struggle to function verbally, rather than visually, this was a very special hell.  Standing in front of the class losing contest after contest in multiplication could not have been more demotivating, if you'd paid a scientist to develop a maximum demotivation tool.

So I struggled sometimes, often failed in scenarios like that one, but still kept trying.  I went through eye therapy when I was about 11, and the doctor said to my mother that she'd never seen a kid with so many issues work so hard for success.  That was to be sort of the overview of most of my childhood.  There is little that I can't do, but the cost is sometimes astronomical, and in no way correlated with other people's perception of how easy or hard that task "should" be.

So I can't really say that it came as a surprise, many years later, when I began seriously reading about autoimmune disease and found that a primary component for a lot of people is unresolved history of anxiety and emotional problems.

But when you've spent your whole life pushing yourself toward too many projects, too many things on that ever-expanding to do list, without retreat, it's hard to figure out how to get off that train.  The ADHD makes it worse, I think, because I never knew anything else but trying too hard for too little to show for it in an average day.

How do I manage the mess, now that I do know it's killing me?

I still can't say that I am good at it.

But I have learned a few things over the years to manage the stress better, and reduce its impact on my immune system.

I manage to make lists.  But these days I have the never ending list where I keep whatever I just need out of my head so I stop obsessing, and then I have my "5 things today" list.  This helps to encourage me to learn to break tasks down more thoroughly into sets I can do in a day, allows me to ignore the overwhelming list of 300 things, while focusing on the very small number that I have chosen for today.

I have also taken up coloring books again.  I was slow to sign on to this recent craze.  But it seems to help me get out of my head, so experiments there are positive.

I focus on eating well, and recently have been trying to improve my extraordinarily broken sleep patterns, with some success.

I garden, which despite the exertion, is somewhat meditation for me, really.  It's exhausting, yes, but peaceful, and makes me feel less powerless on frustrating days.

I did a lot of years of therapy, working on myself, and always know that's an option if I need a tune up, again.

I cuddle.  It's funny.  We don't tend to talk about it a lot as a culture, but I think sometimes our obsession with ways to de-stress are partly related to a break down in physical contact.  Someone willing to just pet my back for a long time is an amazingly soothing thing.

I make myself teas and linger with them.

There are other things, but those are a beginning.  I do know I need those things, and to limit my overwhelm levels.

And yet, somehow, it hides, waiting to pounce at the least provocation.

I recently found myself a new doctor who takes me seriously and isn't basically incompetent about all the things wrong with me, like most of the doctors I have worked with.  On the surface, that's a relief.  But it also brings its level of chaos.  Thanks to GI and adrenal testing, I have spent the last few weeks on and off supplements that I tend to use to help keep the wheels on the bus about various things.  That has caused some of the pain problems to come roaring back.

The cause is worth it, to finally diagnose some of this mess more accurately, but it's rather like having the magician botch the tablecloth yank, and ending up with your plans for the week in a pile of so many pretty delicate china shards on the floor.

And then on top of the pain wagon of holy-hell-why-me?, I also learned that doctors have been ignoring me about my knee for years now, and it turns out that once again, I was right.  There is something wrong.  You would think that by the 35th rodeo, a girl would know what to expect and assume most docs are not competent with your problems, but apparently I am just entirely too optimistic.  So new doc and an MRI later, it becomes clear that I have a badly torn meniscus in my left knee, that I have been walking around on for years.

So on top of life in the molasses swamp of pain, I am trying to schedule surgery, work around a trip out of town, and manage to make enough food, that I have sane things to eat while I can't stand around in the kitchen for hours like normal, making food.

And that would be more than enough, but wait, there's more!  For one low payment of more time than I possibly have, I also must finish the mural I started in the bedroom.

When the ex left, they left a mess behind them, and we've been slow dealing with it, replacing flooring and whatever else needed to happen.  We finally have the flooring done in the master bedroom, the baseboards in, and all that, but a paint guy drove me out of my mind, by not quite matching the color, and mismatching the sheen of the paint we took in to him.  We were trying to clean up the 200 holes left in the walls, but instead we drove me bananas.  So if I wanted to not end up rocking in a corner drooling on myself in frustration, I had to do something about the paint.

Probably that sounds crazy.  But have I mentioned I am an artist?  (See, I included art to prove it.  ---->)  Paint mismatch literally makes me fixate for hours, no matter the lighting conditions on the slight subtle differences, which is hardly conducive to sleep or sanity.  So I decided, back before finding a new doctor and all this chaos, that I would start a mural, allowing me to make it seem like changes in color and texture were on purpose, and reducing my overwhelming perfectionism about the paint situation.  When I started that project, I had no plans for all the chaos that would pile on shortly.

With knee surgery on the horizon, I need to stop doing it at a leisurely pace, and get that sucker finished so we can move the bed in, so that I won't have a need to do stairs every day while I recover.

And then, because I am what is known in the medical world, as a giant pain in the butt, we've had to squeeze in extra doctor visits to figure out meds I can actually take without reactions, compounding pharmacies, and all that sort of jazz, too.

Sometimes, no matter what we try to get the ducks in a row, and manage the stress, the ducks have their own opinion, and goose you for your effort, cackling as they run every which way.

And this is how you find yourself frantically painting spots and swirls on your walls, in between cooking frenzy, while ignoring your blog you just started, for days, because somehow knowing how to manage stress, and actually applying it to your life any given week, don't seem to exist in compatible universes.

But with any luck, I will have pictures soon, of the crazy things I am doing to my walls.  I decided as an act of taking back my own enjoyment of life that it was time to stop waiting to be grown up enough to paint any thing I pleased on my walls.  So I have gone half wild.  We shall see how it all comes out.  Always hard to say in advance.  But it is a wacky, manic kind of fun, if also exhausting.

But I think I might owe my adrenals an apology letter after this project.  At least I will be able to lay around a few weeks being amused at my work, though.  So there is that to look forward to.

Now if only I could develop the psychic ability to better predict the future, next time...