Brain managing

Mistress went to Hamburg for two days this week, on a job thing. It felt like it should have been a piece of cake - all I had to do was drop little S off at the pre-school in the morning and get her in the afternoon, make us dinner and watch the telly, and put her to bed. She's still not sleeping through the night most of the time but it's not the nightly terror it used to be - she gets up, you lead her back to bed, she goes back to sleep. She might do it again a couple of times before morning, but there's no crying or fuzziness or trying to get up and having play time between midnight and two any more.

I should have been easy. I thought it would be. I'm overconfident that way. 

Instead, when Mistress got back I was an exhausted wreck. It's true I don't like responsibility. It wasn't the chores themselves that did me in, nor being constantly on call night and day, it was the being all alone with it. When my brain has nothing to stop it, it goes in all directions at once, and the mere act of reigning it in and trying to stay on course makes me exhausted.

Mistress is travelling a couple of more times this fall, once for a whole week, and I have a plan for next time. The first step is stream lining and eliminating as much as possible of the day to day tasks. I hate routine. It's incredibly difficult for me to do things that are boring, and anything that has to be done more than once is definitely on that list. A major clean up of a whole house, all done in one go, working all hours for two days? Count me in! Emptying and refilling the dishwasher once a day everyday several days in row? Kill me now, please.

So - paper plates and labelled dinner boxes. No household things besides the bare bones essentials. That's one thing. Another is eliminating choices. When I have a whole day stretching out before me, or in this case three days, my brain fills them up and rearranges the plans constantly. And I mean constantly. The amount of mental energy spent on figuring out the best schedules and activities is ridiculous. With no one else around saying "it's lunch time" or "you don't have time for that, you were supposed to be doing this" I behave like a butterfly, fluttering about constantly.  I'm going to ask Mistress to write me a schedule, with everything from "watch this movie Tuesday night" to "meet up with this friend at that time for lunch". I don't want alternatives and decisions. Freedom sucks.

And the third and most important part - I need something fun to focus on. Something that engages me and that easily catches my attention. I easily get involved in projects, at least for a while, and it stills my inner butterfly.

Again - I'm a dog. I need a chewing bone. This time I was the restless dog that went from window to window constantly barking at anyone outside, restlessly guarding and waiting, unable to relax until my Owner came home. And I was exactly as stressed out as such dogs usually gets, losing appetite and sleep, feeling run down and depressed, and wanting nothing but sleep when the ordeal is over.

So - a project. A fun, time consuming project that engages me without inducing performance anxiety. I'm thinking I'll sew something, construct a garment from scratch in some nice fabric, and that will keep me occupied enough so that my brain doesn't run amok on me.

Did I mention that ADHD sucks? At least sometimes.

Big small things

Sometimes there is so much to say that nothing comes out. We're great, though. We had an amazing Pride Stockholm and our four week vacation ended yesterday. Mistress is back at work, the kid is back in pre-school, and I'm... I'm not in school, because I'm all done and graduated. This is a bit of a time for orientation and reflection. I'm not really sure where I'm going to go from here, or what's going to happen on a practical level in our lives, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be great.

Today I did the weekly grocery shopping. For the first time in a year, at least. I was actually a bit nervous, but I could do it, without falling to pieces afterwards. I even put away the groceries when I got home. Amazing what I can accomplish when I'm not sick and not studying full time.

It's a bit disorienting, this new daily life I have all of a sudden. I'm not exhausted all the time any more. It leaves me a little bewildered.