CW: discussing work, anxiety, ADHD
My therapist would say not to apologize for sharing my feelings, but my poisoned brain tells me this is the height of gaucheposting: being too real in a social media landscape girded by irony and a superficial post-irony that too often feels like more performance.
I deal with a bespoke slurry of inattentive ADHD and anxiety that most often manifests around my job and relationship to work. As a journalist, there's a lot of pride and purpose derived from the work, but that has led me derive a substantial amount of self-worth from publishing work that gets read. If I am not Publishing Things Online, then I am not successful, not worth anything, actively torpedoing my career.
Writer and critic Gita Jackson has often said that journalists, by necessity, must be at least a tiny bit narcissistic - we believe in a personal prerogative to write about other people's lives, creations and communities and desperately want everyone to read it. That's certainly true with me, but I've somehow twisted that into a crushing obligation to be perfect, be the first, be the most knowledgeable.
All of this (and more, but come on y'all aren't billing by the hour) smacks headlong into daily executive dysfunction and inattentive episodes wrought by my brain's fun little inability to correctly receive and process serotonin. For almost a year, I've been working with a frankly incredible therapist to develop some habits and patterns to help keep me out of familiar ruts, but it's a daily struggle to be productive.
There are days where six hours rush past me in a blink while I stare at a blank word doc. Others feel like writing with Rock Lee-esque training weights on my fingers, annoying but manageable. A year ago, the worst days of dysfunction and inattention would send me spiraling into petrifying terror about losing my job over something I couldn't control but was certainly my fault. Now, it mostly haunts my evenings.
Now that I'm several hundred words into this post, I'm unsure what point it serves. Accountability? That'll probably be the title, and it does help to write or say what's going on instead of leaving the thoughts to ricochet around my own head and warp into self-damning curses. Maybe it's just to firmly stake my cohost space as one of sincerity, less of Twitter's faux-professional performance with all the edges that might imperil job opportunities sanded down.
I'm doing broadly okay these days. More good than bad. A long time since my last extremely bad spiral. Still, I know I've burned bridges and disappointed both readers and creators by dropping the ball re: my day job, and letting go of those feelings is an ongoing project. Gonna just hit "post now" before I reread this and think better of it lol
