The Daily Blog experiment – dilemma

As much as I like to crow that I have life plans and am moving towards goals, I am pretty much blown around by what my brain says is the focus of the moment.

ADHD, autism, whatever it is, when the hyperfocus calls, I answer.

Not that they’re even hyperfocii, because I do get other stuff done. I rarely disappear for hours or days down the rabbithole, and forget to eat, drink, wee, or shower. I want to say ‘I’m not that bad”, but to be honest, I suspect it has more to do with being an undiagnosed AuDHDer for many years, and just having to knock those urges on the head to get shit done.

Maybe my overruling the hyperfocii is my hyperfocus.

Anyway, while I like to call writing my calling, my reason for being alive, my career, my job, my passion, it could well be a Special Interest. I don’t want to reduce it to that. I don’t class it alongside dinosaurs, aromatherapy, and reading.

Right now, as I finish off Season of the Wolf, and start looking towards what to do with my writing coach in June, July, and August, I can feel the urge in me to sit down with tarot, with astrology, and that side of my life. Where’s my witchcraft at? My hippie wants to come out for air.

I want to say ‘Oh, not now, not when I have a vague plan for writing.’ But I know saying ‘not now’ makes no difference.

Do I say to my writing coach ‘looks like my brain is going to be elsewhere’, only to find the tarot and astrology passion lasted 2 weeks? Do I somehow try to incorporate my hippie into my writing? Beats me.

I’m so tempted to have another go at ADHD meds to see if they resolve this. But, since the experiment with them lasted 2 days and has had an ongoing depression, Ex Dys, and existential angst effect, I’m leery.

Ah, the joys of my brain. Dear brain, how can I turn all this to my advantage?

The Daily Blog experiment – mental health awareness

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month. Not sure if that’s worldwide, or Australia-specific. Anyway, UnicornGirl, who is helping me out by posting my videos to TikTok, suggested that I dig up some mental health awareness poems.

I thought I’d have 200 or more, considering depression and anxiety have been decades’-long ride-alongs, and autism and ADHD are lifelong mates. 200 out of maybe 1600 poems. 1/8 surely. But no. Of the poems I’ve databased so far, there are perhaps 20 that deal directly with mental ill-health. For many, many years, how I felt I had to take as a given. I didn’t know I was depressed. I knew, after suffering post-natal depression in 1990 and 1993, that I never went back to how I was in 1988. I felt like a grey, wet, warm blanket was over me all the time, but I didn’t know I was depressed. I didn’t know suicidal ideation was not normal. I thought every woman felt this way and that no one ever spoke about it.

So, there’s very little directly addressing my mental health. Only in recent years have I written much at all about depression, and then, what’s there to say? It’s a warm, heavy, grey, wet blanket that makes everything in the world grey.

However, I have dug some poems out of the vaults, and am about to give them a good going over before recording them for my TikTok ‘helenreadsherpoems’. I’ve printed six, and will choose 3-4 of them.

Alas, my TikTok popularity is waning. I hit my peaks with ‘Autism Awareness Month’ and ‘A Love Poem’, and my nadir with ‘The Busy Soil’ which is about, funnily enough, gardens, dirt, and the earth. I guess people, at least the people on TikTok, want angst, and love, and trauma, not a content little witch watching her garden grow.

The Daily Blog experiment – the aftertaste of depression

The depression I’ve copped from two days of Strattera for ADHD continues. Through sheer determination, and keeping busy and productive, I am keeping from going further down the gurgler.

I do have an appointment to see my doctor. I don’t want to increase my anti-depressant because it doesn’t make me feel any better. It just muffles things further and leaves me lethargic and sort of mooping along a soggy road. I’m going to ask for a referral to return to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Therapy. TMS. It did wonders for me last time, and I’ve been mostly depression-free for two years. I’d still be depression-free if those bloody pills hadn’t rained pale grey all over my brain. It’s like having an aftertaste that won’t leave.

I have no qualms about returning to TMS. It’s a known quantity, and while it does take up a considerable amount of time while I’m having it, it will be worth it. Especially if I repeat the art magic I did before I started treatment last time. I went in with determination and intent that this would work amazingly well for me. And it did. I was such an early responder that my results were called placebo. Yay for magic and witchcraft.

Anyway, my appointment is early next week, so I’m looking forward to ‘actioning’ this. To use wanker words.

The Daily Blog experiment- the LOW down

I haven’t felt quite right since my 2 day experiment with Strattera meds for ADHD sent me on an express train downwards into a depressive episode.

I feel low. Not the super low of my pre-anti depressant circa 2008, but enough so that I notice it. Certainly a holding pattern low from pre-TMS.

I’ve tried sunshine, walks, dance, outings, quiet, and time with my grandkids. Nope, still low.

I tried going to see the retro band The Herberts this afternoon. Sort of a ‘sweat my prayers’ situation. I just could not get into it. I felt heavy and lumpen – full of concrete and grey gravel.

I’m home again now, in my pj’s and trying to settle enough to get a book out and have a read.

Tomorrow will be my first chance to make some calls, book an appointment with my doctor to perhaps moot another bout of TMS.

I do wish doctors and psychiatrists would fully read up on meds before handing them out. Like, is there a big red sign saying ‘May affect mood’? If so, perhaps don’t prescribe them to people with a mood disorder.

It’s not hard, bozos.

The Daily Blog experiment – Yellowed Memory

I have spent a convoluted morning unpacking, reading, posting to Instagram and Facebook, reading, attempting to write poetry, reading, and generally feeling flat and as creative as a brown dwarf star(not at all, a burnt out thing).

Somehow, all this has lead me to what is either an appalling memory,

dissociation,

or alienation from my own writing.

Because there’s fewer short stories, I can usually trace my inspiration, my intention, and the general plot, even from scraps. But not always. Oh, it’s not the “I dreamed an amazing story, woke up, wrote some notes, went back to sleep. And when I woke up in the morning, the note said: ‘the black glove, Tim, American politics’.”

I usually have some slight memory of writing a story. Usually.

Poetry – well, we’re in much dicier territory. There’s A LOT of them. Many’s the time I’ve turned to my support worker and said: “What the actual fuck? What the hell is this about? Why? Who? When?”

Now, when I enter my ‘flow state’ I have no consciousness of time, body needs, anything around me. It’s pointless me playing music. I don’t hear it. I often don’t feel my feet falling asleep. My poor bladder has to fend for itself. I’m told this is hyperfixation. It may well be. I have the ADHD badge.

Later, I will not have any memory of what I’ve written, nor be able to recognise it later. Channeling? It’s been suggested. But if so, the dead poet using me is also keen on dinosaurs, space, fabric, tarot, science fiction, and dance.

I don’t know if I just have a shite memory, but if so, why do I remember everything about Bentleigh in the 70’s, and Carrum Downs in the 80’s and early 90’s, but not my own work?

Do I dissociate when I write? It doesn’t feel like it. I never have a sense that I am sitting in the back of my own head while something or someone else looks out of my eyes. That’s a very definite state and I know if I’m doing that.

Is it alienation? Do I not, on some level, want to own my work?

I honestly don’t know. This morning as I wrestled with The Giant Blah Feeling of ‘nothing to say’, suddenly there appeared on the page a quite decent little poem that I didn’t know was in me. It was about a small moment, or series of moments with XP. Nothing exciting, but it still needed saying. And I didn’t know that until I came back to myself and saw the page.

I like the idea that I enter an altered state between the worlds, and make magic.

The Daily Blog – return to regular service

The ‘daily’ part of this blog was disrupted by starting ADHD meds – Strattera. It turned out to be the wrong med for me. Doctors prescribing Strattera should be careful when giving it to people who suffer mood disorders, or have a genetic predisposition to them: depression and bipolar being the ones noted.

I have depression in abeyance, thanks to medication and Trans Cranial Magnetic Stimulation therpay. I suffer anxiety.

I have a niece who suffers from bipolar.

By the end of day 2 of taking Strattera in the lowered dose of 25mg, as opposed to the standard dose of 40mg, my mood was down the drainpipe. I started back on suicial ideation, not being in the world any more, feeling useless, and that my whole life had been a waste.

Morning 3, in which I did not take any more of the drug, I was crying non-stop.

So, goodbye Strattera. It’s now a couple of days since the drug has left my system, and I am feeling okay enough to remember ‘hey, blog’.

I may take a few days off next week, because I’m heading interstate to visit ThirtiesGirl and my grandchildren. It depends how busy I get. If I’m flat out, I will have no energy or downtime for gathering my thoughts.

If I have time, I may use my ipad for blogging. We shall see.

Part of two poems

I know y’all have been patient, hoping I’ll sling a full poem up here. But I’m superconscious that blogging counts as published, and even if only 3 of you read it, it’s still ‘published’.

I’m aware that I’ve done in my First Publication Rights.

When did I get so ‘professional’?

Anyway, post-eclipse, it seems I am robust enough to write some heavy stuff. Not that we saw the eclipse here. Australia was sound asleep, and in darkness. The hysteria was in the northern hemisphere. However, if you’re anything of a new age wanker like me, you felt the energy of it play out.

This morning, it seems that eclipse energy(shadow side), plus new ADHD meds have caused me to go deep and hard with my NaPoWriMo and PAD poetry challenge prompts.

So here’s a wee bit from today’s efforts.

“Take one small girl,

add a neurotypical society.

Beat – figuratively.

Let sit.

Tell her it’s normal to love the world.”

And from “An Ode To Strattera”:

“Oh, you’ve been in my body.

That’s a given.

Hook ups within hours.

Was there pleasure for either of us?

Did you like being surrounded

by my hot, pulsing flesh?

I must say

you went down

almost unnoticed.”

I feel like there’s a lot more lurking behind the inside of my skull, waiting for the right prompts to draw it out. For today, though, this is what’s been occupying my behind-mind.

The Daily Blog experiment – enthusiasms

Up until recently, my stock answer to the “what’s your special interest?” has been ‘dinosaurs’. And it’s true. I first encountered dinosaurs in about Grade 2, when we did a term in them at school. But next term, when we had free choice to pick our own study subject, I was floored. Surely it would be dinosaurs forever? No. Because the cover of my How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs featured a water-supported diplodocus, and an erupting volcano in the background, I chose volcanoes, because they were ancient, like dinosaurs. And maybe I could work dinosaurs into my poster. Imagine my shock when I could find no info on when volcanoes died out.

To this day, if a notebook has a Dino on it, it’s a definite buy. I’ll always watch JURASSIC PARK if it’s on tv.

I hedged around other enthusiasms, or hyperfixations. But now that I’m reading ODD GIRL OUT and finding things to highlight on most pages, let’s get real.

The consuming passion I had for my best friend Gina in Grades 3-6.

Taking notes on my cat’s kittens the way a naturalist might study chimpanzees.

Planet of the Apes – movies, tv show, comics. A huge crush on Roddy McDowall.

A six month delve into Sherlock Holmes academia.

Star Trek – tv show, cartoon series, fan fiction, Austrek, cosplay, fandom, movies.

Belly dance – learning, performing, costuming, jewellery, music, teaching.

Harry Potter fan fiction – 70,000 words on fan fiction.net in 6 months, in between the long hiatus between books 4 and 5.

The Life And Times of Grizzly Adams – I cried for days when they cancelled that show.

Tracing pictures from TV WEEK and colouring them in.

My first herb garden at Honeyeater Place.

Writing a poem a day for months, years on end.

Researching the late diagnosis female experience.

Tarot, and tarot deck collecting.

Sporadic returns to astrology studies for a deep inhale of new info, and then it’s dead to me for a couple of years.

Earring collecting.

Johnny Cash music.

Each and every one of these has had its time in the sun with me. Some I return to, many I don’t. All inform who I am now.

The Daily Blog experiment – oops, missed yesterday

To be honest, I’m amazed I’ve kept up as much Daily Blog as I have. In my livejournal days, unmedicated, partnered-then-not, still hardcore mothering, still working a tonne of jobs, still answerable to Centrelink and its whims, I had plenty to write about, and it was the heyday of blogging. Everyone was on livejournal, chatting about this and that. Friends were made, and we all visited each others’ blogs like paying Sunday calls.

Now, even though I have, according to the stats(which I only think to check maybe once every three months) I have 104 visitors to my blog(who are you, where are you, why are you?), perhaps two commenters, and plenty of passive readers, or bots who masquerade as readers.

I was on dreamwidth for a while, but no one really interacted there, and now I’m here. Apparently Substack and Ko-Fi are places to be nowadays. To be honest, what’s the difference between me talking to myself here, or over there? I don’t have a themed blog, as is the mode. I natter on about whatever comes to mind. Sometimes writing, sometimes tarot, sometimes going to see things in the world, occasional whining, very occasional book reviews. All autism all the time, but that’s because I’m me, in my head. I don’t necessarily talk about autism nonstop, because I don’t know what it’s like to be in a neurotypical head in comparison. I can only report on what it’s like when there are suddenly crickets chirping and I realise ‘ah, I have trotted out the inside of my head for everyone to stare at, and it is different in glaring ways’.

Anyway, this meandery post is because I missed blogging yesterday, and to be honest, there’s not much about yesterday that I wish to have recorded for posterity.

Now I’ll move on to today’s post.

The Daily Blog experiment – overexertion

I should know better. A late night Friday. 3 hours of dancing yesterday. Yoga this morning. My body said “Are you crazy?” and showed me which muscles were tired, and fed up with the whole business. WE WILL NOT BE DOING WARRIOR THREE IN ANY FIRM, BITCH!

Good thing I had a massage booked for late this afternoon.

However, that’s not the only area of overexertion. As some of you know, I always have about 8 projects on the go.

Currently:

– databasing my writing

– doing generative writing with ‘Season of the Wolf’

– getting my garden beds into order

– slowly filling up what used to be the back lawn so that it’s a bee and bug habitat

– burlesque classes

– once Wolf Season finishes, I’ll be doing a second draft of my dance memoir

– getting my NDIS funding reviewed

– launching ThirtiesPerson into independent living

– getting all my travel journals typed up

Well, I’m about to add another project. A WOMAN OF MARS is my first poetry chapbook, printed professionally by PS Publishing in 2010. It’s the chapbook people ask for the most. It was a 300 copy print run, and was marketed as a collector’s item. Secondhand copies may be floating around.

All copyright has reverted to me, and I want to reprint it, with a new cover, and make it a paperback, and ebook.

Which means figuring out a flow-chart of what needs to happen.

As if I’m not spread thin enough – all of my own doing.

Nothing like being busy, I guess.