I Worry a Lot

I worry that the foster puppy isn’t eating enough. I worry that the feedback I got in the rough draft of my term project wasn’t specific enough to be actionable and I’m going to end up turning in something less than what my professor wanted. I worry that my two youngest kids are incessantly mean to each other and no amount of moral coaching seems to be fixing it.

The pandemic has been a fun source of concern, but now that we’re halfway through our vaccine regimen I have new worries. What happens when my kids go back to school? All of them are going to different schools than they did before lockdown, three different schools in fact. How are we getting them to all of their respective schools (none of them drive yet and two of the schools are outside our district)? How is that going to impact scheduling for my classes now that they are all going to be in person again?

My partner says there’s no sense in worrying about it before we’ve got more information. Of course, I know that’s true. It doesn’t stop me.

In case this is your first time on my blog: I have ADHD. I have been diagnosed. I haven’t been diagnosed with anxiety, but other members of my immediate family have. Plus, apparently, about 25% of people with ADHD also have anxiety. In some ways, it comes with the territory. We’re always forgetting things and we can’t keep focused, so we stress about doing a better job at being or seeming “normal” in a world that’s not designed for us. So, ADHD can cause anxiety. Still, sometimes people just have both. Or sometimes ADHD-like symptoms are caused by underlying anxiety. So…

• ADHD → anxiety
• ADHD + anxiety
• anxiety → ADHD

Anyway, I accept that it is likely I have both, and that the reason Adderall throws me into a tailspin is probably that I need to address my anxiety before I can approach my ADHD. The trouble is I’d probably have to figure out how to make my life less stressful. While I am an absolute champion at finding ways to complicate things*, I do not know how to uncomplicate them.

*We have four kids and two dogs. We foster puppies for a local rescue. I’m in grad school full-time and working part-time. My partner is working full-time and in school part-time. I’ve been homeschooling all of the kids since the first lockdown started. I’m doing a lot of my homework during the kids’ lunch breaks and after they go to bed. I’m reading textbooks as my bedtime reading. When I was told I could choose a format for my term project on the interaction of two biogeochemical nutrient cycles… I chose to write a children’s book. I could have just made a PowerPoint. Through all of this, I also blog. In spite of everything, I still applied for an internship at the local science museum, considered taking an intensive summer class on beekeeping, and am thinking about writing an actual book (not as an assignment or for children).

I tried meditating, but I kept forgetting or failing to make time for it and then I quit trying. I exercise three days a week. I bullet journal, keep calendars and to-do lists, and set reminders for things so I won’t have to try to keep everything in my head all the time. All of this has helped a lot with what used to be my biggest sources of stress. With all that’s been going on lately, though, I have a new source: I’m constantly busy with something, over-booked, and unable to keep up with what I ought to be doing. It seems like when I figure out how to stop dropping plates, I find new ones to spin. This feels like a personality trait and I really don’t know how to reverse something that big. It seems like it’s going to take more than journalling.