I always knew, with this blog, that I wouldn’t keep up a consistent pace of posts – there would be times when there were many, and there would be breaks.
Then things happened, starting in 2019. I moved home, which obviously is a lot of effort and leaves one with less free time for a while. Then there was Covid. Then I had a mental health crisis – regarding which I have previously posted. Then I got back in the game a bit, albeit slowly. Then it all fell apart again.
For those who have supported me in the endeavour that is this blog, I want to say sorry. Indeed, for any who found my posts interesting or helpful and have missed them, to them also, I apologise. For everyone, I’m going to try and explain.
First though, I want to say that I’m really aiming to get back into this and post regularly again. Maybe not at the pace I was going before 2019, but without long gaps (partly because a long gap makes it harder to get back into it afterwards, as I’ll explain below). I still have a lot to say, a lot of things to explore – the blog didn’t dry up because ideas dried up. I even have a couple of posts ready to go and some that were in-progress when my ability to deal with the blog dried up.
The biggest reason is that my mental health recovery hasn’t been as smooth or as one-directional as I had thought (or perhaps it would be better to say hoped). It’s been bumpy, and I’ve had lower resilience to stress – and there’s certainly been enough of that in the last 20 months. I have a better understanding of how some of these problems work, in my case specifically, given my diagnosis of ADHD. One of the biggest points is that any time that I feel I have ‘failed’ at something, even in part, it is very hard for me to try to address it, fix it, get back to doing things with it. The blog has suffered from that; whenever something happens and my resilience isn’t enough to deal with it, or even things that are more urgent or important take up my time, I ‘fail’ to keep up with the blog and have a bit of a psychological block to getting back to it.
Yes, writing this post is me pushing past that block. A new year seemed a good time to do it, among other reasons. I can push past the block, but it costs me in terms of resilience, stability of mood, and emotional energy. I can do it, but I won’t – one might as validly say can’t – without some sort of help. I’ve generally had that help from my wife, but we’ve both had a lot going on. A lot of the extra stress has been on both of us. She’s still been keeping me on track, but not pushing on things that are less urgent, less critical, or things that we can live without sorting out and would be particularly hard to push me to do. I can’t fault her for that; given the situations we’ve been in, it’s been sound strategic thinking, and she’s managed to do better for me in terms of keeping me working and dealing with things that I have any right to expect given how hard things have been for her. I am profoundly grateful for her support in this, as in so many things.
I’ve also had other work, often work that is time-sensitive and pays more. I have to make a living, and while I do make a little money from this blog, it’s not a really significant contribution to our living costs. It’s not just a matter of priorities, though. ADHD affects executive function, which includes the ability to decide what to work on, and to apply one’s mind to tasks. Like a lot of people with ADHD, I suffer from overload when there’s too many tasks needing my attention. I’ve learned strategies to help manage this, but not managed to apply them as well as I could. The net result is that when I have a lot of stuff on my plate, even if there’s no reason I have to do all of it in any particular timescale, I find it harder to do any of it. This is especially true of things that take actual intellectual effort to do, and all of my earning work falls under that heading.
I know some strategies to help with both of these problems – some I’ve not implemented properly at all, and some I’ve done with success in the past and then during periods of peak stress, and peak workload, I let fall away. Naturally this plays back into the ‘failure’ psychology thing for me, so getting them going again is hard, but I’m going to.
I’ve also started some non-Quaker-related writing projects, including fiction (still on the drawing board). This has, naturally, taken both time and added to the executive dysfunction problems. It’s a common and self-defeating pattern in ADHD, we start lots of projects and finish few if any of them. It’s hard to rein it in, though, when you have so many ideas. The classic picture for ADHD is actually starting loads of projects and abandoning them (practically speaking, even if you don’t abandon them in your heart); I do slightly better than many at keeping making progress, in little nibbles, but that might not actually be ‘better’ in any realistic sense. However, those fiction projects are something that are at a stage I really enjoy, so I keep plugging away at them as I get to feel productive and enjoyment at the same time, without it feeling much like work or generating much frustration. That would come later in the projects, if I get that far.
All of this has been in the context of housing-related stress and expense (our building being brought up to code on fire safety, for which we had to meet a share of the costs), bouts of illness, other ongoing health problems getting worse. It’s been a bumpy time, and I’ve not handled it well, but I guess this is how we learn.
I hope to have a reasonable stream of interesting posts for you all to enjoy – or get annoyed at, perhaps, if you disagree – over the coming weeks and months, and possibly some exciting other Quaker writing–related news. But that will have to wait. Patreon supporters will be the first to hear about that, and will have the chance to give me some input, before I’m ready to announce it to the world.
Did you enjoy this post, or find it interesting, informative or stimulating? Do you want to keep seeing more of these posts? Please consider contributing to my Patreon or ‘buying me a coffee’ on Ko-Fi. Patrons get access to some advance information and a chance to have input to the blog, but no exclusive Quaker content. More information is available in the post announcing my use of Patreon.
