It’s all in my head. All the thoughts I want to share are in my head and there are too many. Everything is a mess. Everywhere I look around my home, I see piles and stacks of stuff, disorganized boxes and bins, papers, lots of papers. I can’t stay organized. I guess I can’t even get organized in the first place. I keep too many things that I don’t need. Everything is a mess, physically, in the space around me in every room of my home, in the garage, in the backyard, in my cars. It’s all messy.
The mess is in my head too. I can’t organize my thoughts. I can’t focus. I get distracted quickly and easily. I have several book ideas, screenplay ideas, song ideas, all of which I know could be a productive use of my time to create, but I don’t know how to focus on one idea. I chip away at the different ideas piece by piece in a random order based on the thoughts that show up at any given moment. Nothing gets finished. It is completely ineffective, and I don’t know how to change the way I operate.
When I started typing this blog post, I intended to write about how I stayed at my 11-year-old son’s baseball practice last night and helped the coaches with batting drills. I meant to reflect on how I used “opposite action” or “opposite to emotion action” (I can’t remember exactly what it is called) from my experience with DBT. I didn’t want to go because of all the usual reasons…social anxiety, shame, feeling unworthy, wanting to stay at home and hide from the world, depression, general anxiety…all the same shit that stops me from doing everything that I could be doing to be a more effective person. However, before I started typing on this topic, I got distracted by something. I don’t even know what it was now, and that was about 90 minutes ago.
Whatever the initial distraction was, it led me down an internet rabbit hole as I searched for musicians in the Minneapolis area who I might collaborate with on a music project. I have a bunch of songs that I want to share, and I am too afraid to put them out into the world because I think I am a shitty singer and because I lack the confidence to claim that I am a musician. I think I am more of a songwriter. I want to find musicians to play my songs. That way, if a song is shared, it will be because I have finished writing it and someone else thought it was worthy of producing, and maybe that means it’s OK to share. I don’t know what I mean. Anyway,
I started searching for local musicians who lived with mental illnesses because I want to collaborate with someone who understands the world of mental health and the challenges of pursuing a life of “recovery,” whatever that means. Pretty quickly, 90 minutes passed, and I hadn’t really accomplished anything. My mind has been spinning, racing through thoughts of all the things that need to be done around home, some of the tasks I need to accomplish for my freelance podcast production work, doctor appointments happening today and next week, my son’s busy baseball schedule, my daughter’s even busier softball schedule, her piano and gymnastics lessons, new windows being installed in our house sometime soon and how I don’t know when exactly that will be and it is stressing me out, how my body hurts…like every joint (especially my back, hips, and feet), and on and on. There is constantly too much that needs to be done and I don’t know how to feel OK about it.
Although I don’t have an official diagnosis of ADHD, I feel confident that I fit the criteria to have that diagnosis (as if a ton of depression within bipolar type-1 with a ton of anxiety isn’t enough). One of my recent psychiatrists told me to ignore my curiosity about ADHD because I would not be able to take any medication for it. She said it was all stimulants that could trigger a manic episode. I schedule a test anyway…an ADHD eval or a screening…what it is called. It was a long test, and I didn’t finish it. I was put in a room by myself, answering a huge packet of questions, and I became very anxious and overwhelmed and I left without finishing. I couldn’t focus on the test that might tell me if I have trouble focusing. Interesting. So, I don’t know what to do about it.
I feel like I have wasted my morning. I woke at 4:15 a.m. It is now about 6:30 and I will be waking my kids at 6:45, then busy with them until they get on the school bus at 8:50. I am depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, and I don’t want to deal with anything today. I need some positivity in my head. I’ll find it somewhere. That may be easy at this point, as I have a recording of some positive self-talk statements that I am going to listen to right now. Bye. I wonder how many typos and grammatical errors are in this post. I want to check, but I don’t want to check.
– Brian Jost
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Read or listen to Brian Jost’s memoir: “Grounded by Bipolar Disorder; One Pilot’s Landing” (available in print, e-book/kindle, and audiobook). Click HERE to find the book on Amazon and Audible.