The Practice Can Be Enough
Or how it took me all day to write a few paragraphs and that's okay.
Thirteen weeks ago (!!!!) when I started writing I discovered it was easier for me if I approached these essays as a vehicle to educate myself and potentially educate others. Somehow that allowed me the ability to shape the words and thoughts and shake off the anxiety. If I focused less on saying things in a particularly deep or meaningful way and instead aimed to clearly explain what I had learned, I was less afraid of what I was writing. Plus I really enjoy sharing things that I’ve discovered. I truly believe learning is at the heart of social change.
This week, however, my brain wasn’t having it. I revisited parts of books I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to as I started writing out thoughts yesterday. I wrote in circles for some time, never coming to a conclusion. I often veered off into multiple different points along the way, each complex enough to warrant an entire essay of its own. No matter what I did, I couldn’t pull it all together. I kept telling myself I could delay and wait until next week, but I didn’t want to.
In the ADHD world, there’s a lot of advice about doing things when your brain is in resistance mode. A small action is better than no action. For example, you may not want to take a shower, but you could wash your face. You may not want to make dinner, but you can eat a granola bar. You may not want to clean the whole kitchen, but you could wipe down the counter. You don’t have to wrestle with your brain to do the full thing, you can do a tiny fraction of the full thing which reinforces that you can trust yourself to get something done. The size of the task is irrelevant.
I knew that scrapping this week’s writing all together wasn’t an option because it can be a slippery slope for me. I’ve already pushed back my self-imposed Wednesday deadline to Friday to allow for more flexibility, but there’s a fine line between giving myself grace and giving myself room to procrastinate. Scrapping something once, especially something that’s difficult, can mean I may not return to it. My own previous work output gets in the way as being the standard and I’m liable to get in my head about how I was able to persevere in other instances, yet I can’t get it together to persevere in this instance. Rather than doing anything at all, I convince myself it’s better to just wait until I can do something the way I’ve done it in the past. (This is like Perfectionism Lite.) Knowing when to push myself and when to cut myself some slack is incredibly difficult.
The practice, at times, has to be enough, even if you wish for more. It’s okay if the small action took you all day to do (like these few paragraphs did for me). We can’t fast food drive thru, express lane checkout, next day delivery our way out of developing our skills, whether that be creatively or personally. It takes time.
I’ll leave you with this TikTok that came up for me recently. It’s an excellent explanation of how it’s helpful for us to remember that we can’t let the hurriedness of the world dictate our process. Great things, which can include ourselves, are rarely developed quickly.
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