The Critic Finally Relaxes
Recently, the chiding voice inside my head has been surprisingly quiet
Morning is here, and I’m trying to get the dog and the cat fed. But there’s a rack of laundry right in my road. I pair up the socks and fold underwear and get that put away. I open the tin of dog food, and as I reach for a fork I can’t help but notice the basket of silverware in the sink is overflowing. Might as well take care of that. Oh yeah, the garbage needs put out today, which sparks a thought to check to see what kind of battery my Tickr heart rate monitor takes, because I think that’s probably dead. I quickly confirm it’s a CR2032, and according to some Reddit posts a lot of them don’t last very long.
And so it goes, zig zagging through tasks. The animals get fed, the dog takes me for a walk. I enjoy being with her because her attention span is shorter than mine, and that makes me feel more normal. Everything is relative.
Getting stuff done is the easy part, overall. Up and down levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin roller coaster me. I might be singing from the mountain tops one day, and next to useless come dawn.
Despite the Often Bumpy Ride, An Inner Quiet Has Set In
What’s changed, amazingly, is my often scathing inner monologue has dropped off almost entirely. I can feel honest chagrin, frustration, or an uneasy sense of worry. Like, today a visit to the dermatologist for a routine exam revealed something odd on my back that will have to be removed and tested. That’s disconcerting, but also concrete. The old voice, like a shit seeking missile, would ferret out things, real or unreal, that could possibly become disasters. And if nothing was handy to pin my angst onto, the worry would quickly metastasize into a murky, nameless dread.
Seeing ADHD in all of its guises, and simply being aware of it when it pops up, seems to be part of the key to more peace and quiet inside my head. I can start in one direction and something will catch my eye or hijack my train of thought. I might get an impulse to compose an email, while still in my underwear, to somebody who is sleeping soundly because it’s two in the morning in their time zone. Instead of elbowing my way forward, I can calmly notice the rude jerk on my chain of attention, give it room to be there, but also have some choice in the matter.
Having more inner peace and less stress should be a good thing. But it’s left me in an odd place. In the real world, people tend to send out smoke signals of emotional distress. We share our worries and disclose our latest illnesses. We bond over the burden of being neurodiverse in a ruler-straight world. We go on about nootropics and various ways to hack the golden goose of inspiration when the days turn barren and gray.
It seems to take a lot of struggle to realize that struggling is part of the problem. It’s just too exhausting. I’m feeling more and more like just letting the whole thing go, if I could grok what “the whole thing” really entails.
What’s Next?
Nagging questions arise. I often feel a sense of uneasiness as I spend less time trying to fix myself and more time just quietly being aware. A part of me is feeling the old lonely in a crowd routine. Unseen, with no plan. No angle, nothing to sell. Everybody else seems to be engaged and chattering away.
Most of the time I have to say I’m quite fine with days off on my own, just taking things as they come. I often think of what it was like in the ’60s. Folks just gettin’ by, living ordinary lives, potlucks at the Grange Hall and small town gossip. People lived and died close to where they were born. The allure of 15 minutes of fame wasn’t nearly as strong back then, and constantly airing your dirty laundry just wasn’t a thing.
Perhaps the great project of Trying to Find the Real Me is winding down. I guess that’s fitting, given I’m on the last lap or two in life (shockingly, I’m in my last year as a 60-something).
A transition is afoot. I’ve written and talked about it a lot, and now it’s actually happening. It has to do with trusting I can let go of the nervous feeling that the other shoe is about to fall. It has to do with calling in the dogs of dread that roam an imagined future and allowing myself to get swallowed by what’s here right now.
