It’s out, & there’s more close behind.
It was 15deg C in western Antarctica the other day, in June, 20 deg above the long term average.
I’m trying not to dwell on it, & live in the here & now (responsibly), because the future is too terrifying to contemplate.
The first of my late winter daffodils is about to flower… in June.
A little pot of yumness.
As a history nerd, it pains me to read how close this songbook came to being destroyed. The preservation of primary sources is so crucial to our understanding of events & eras.
What saddens me now is that with so much material committed to digital records without ever being printed at all, or only with poor quality inks, too many similar sources for our own times will not survive.
#History
#Holocaust
Contraception is a huge issue for most women. Ignorance & fears about hormonal forms of contraception abound.
I have an ADHD fuelled essay that has been formulating in my mind for weeks, now demanding yo be written, but my laptop was unplugged & flat. 😠Waiting…
Meanwhile, I’ve taken the cats outside briefly, but even they think it’s too wet.
Partner is home, golf cancelled, which has thrown me out of kilter. Years ago I would often ((not always) feel lonely on his golf days & try to arrange catch-ups with friends, or at least go for a walk to shops to interact with people. Since realising my neurodivergence, I’m a lot happier in my own company (aided by picket friends of course!), so having him home unexpectedly can be quite disconbobulating! But I do still need to exercise…
One of George’s favourite toys, which he loses under furniture, & then it turns up again. It’s the perforated ring from the lid of an eye drops bottle. I would normally cut these before putting in the rubbish, but he claimed this one first. He’ll carry its round like prey. Right now he’s waiting for it to attempt an escape.
Daffodils sprouting…
Imagine what it would do to our healthcare etc, retail, delivery etc services, if permanent residents were to leave. And that’s only the more visible workers.
Not sure I’ll be painting anytime soon.
There was no fungus to be seen, until all of a sudden, there was!
We went for a drive up into the hills & went for a walk between showers. We walked through a park bordering Emerald park lake, formerly a nursery, and planted out with lots of exotic trees. Very few Australian native trees are deciduous, and all of the autumn colour on display is exotic.
Fred is asleep & dreaming, twitching, with his tongue poking out. Maybe he’s the cat that ate the cream.
#CatsOfMastodon
#Fedicats
I’m going to chuck out several of parter’s old jumpers - moth eaten, badly pulled, shrunk etc. (Good quality jumpers last so much longer than cheap ones, if you keep the moths away.)
I hate putting clothing in landfill, or seeing bags of clearly badly worn clothes being dumped outside opportunity shops, so I’m going to give this a try. While it’s not cheap to get it collected, it can be dropped off at some partner business.
I’m currently knitting a top out of recycled denim. Lots of possibilities.
When I was a kid, I had a lovely dress a neighbour made me out of a cut down women’s dress. And as a teen, a shirt/top from a cut down shirt maker dress.
#Recycling
@actuallyautistic @autistics @actuallyadhd
I think it’s finished. I made the leaves on the right bigger, the lower one greener, the central ones brighter & darker, & picked out more of the veins.
More thoughts on ADHD medication, specifically amphetamine, after a year.
Like lots of people, I started them and BANG! Neo waking in his pod in The Matrix. Life changing. The scales fell from my eyes. I suddenly understood. It all made sense. The stuff I found so incredibly difficult for half a century and other people could just ... do it?
I wept.
"Don't chase the high", they all warn. What does that mean?
About 4-6 weeks later I had an argument with Zoe. I felt some of the old behaviours creeping back in. What? Why is that happening?
Then I started to go to bed late again, and procrastinate, and some of the other stuff. Not all though, I kept the place clean. The piles of clothes never came back. I was still getting relief from sensory issues.
And each new titration dose brought it all back.
Until titration stopped, and I was on my final dose.
And it slipped, slowly, it slipped.
Why did it slip? "Tolerance! You have become tolerant to amphetamine! Take a meds holiday!", they all chant.
I tried. I got as far as 3pm before I couldn't stand the bullshit.
Thing is, the evidence that drugs tolerance to therapeutic doses of amphetamine in ADHD even develops is ... dubious. There's a great video by Russell Barkly on this, here: youtu.be/RbZjL7czIy0?si=6xHaoY…
It's not though. I worked out what has happened, and it's fine.
Unmedicated, undiagnosed ADHD is marked by horrible disregulated emotions (more severe in the combined (me) and hyperactive forms I believe), non existent executive functioning, difficulty focusing, and yada yada.
It is, in a nutshell, "really bloody awful".
If you think you have ADHD but are undiagnosed, you possibly just read that and felt like a fraud, didn't you? "But I don't feel that awful!"
How do you KNOW? You have never known any different.
Because here's the thing. You grow up with this crap and you start to mask it, because you HAVE to.
But masking and coping strategies are profoundly psychologically expensive. They destroy us with burnout run the long run.
So we mask to the point where we can more or less make it through the day, and no more.
And it's a pretty sodding miserable existence (Yes, it really is, yes, for you, person reading this wth "some traits". Lots of stuff you accept as a normal part of being human simply is not. I know you don't believe me, even if you think you do. I wouldn't have believed me either).
And then we get diagnosed.
And medicated.
It. Goes. Away.
It all goes away.
Annnnnnnnd breathe!
You are suddenly Mr Spock. You are impervious to your emotions. You can just DO STUFF! You CAN clean the house and you DO and you ENJOY IT! What witchcraft is this?
"I'm cured! Why did nobody tell me about this?" (We did. You ignored us)
You also aren't cured. You still have ADHD.
Your emotions are still there.
You still have executive dysfunction,.
You still struggle to focus.
All of it. It didn't go away.
You just can't hear it.
Why? Because ... well, you are outside and it's stupid sodding bright, and loud. Insanely loud.
And you've been out there for hours.
Then you come into a dim room which is quiet. You can't see anything, you can't hear anything. It's all there though, just below your level of sensitivity.
A few month later when stuff starts coming back and you conclude the meds are failing? They aren't. Your eyes are adjusting to the dark.
Here's another metaphor: A shelled of water has been dumped on a landscape, continually, over thousands of years. It carves out a basin. It finds its level. Water always finds its level.
Move it to the side and it will flow back into the basin it carved. And so it is with us. We start meds and the level of effort we have always applied to make it through the day, which was borderline killing us, suddenly makes it STUPIDLY EASY.
Borderline killing us. Still is.
So you start to dismantle your big expensive coping strategies, because they were hurting you.
You dismantle them until ... well, you start to approach the level of functionality, or rather disfunctionality that you are used to. And then you stop.
Because water finds its level.
You conclude they aren't working, so you take a meds break and OH MY GOD IT'S HORRIBLE.
What the hell is going on? You turned the bloody difficulty knob up to max again. That's what the hell is going on.
After a week you start meds again, and they magically work! IT WAS TOLERANCE ALL ALONG!
No it wasn't, you muppet. You just started to match your effort to the difficulty level again.
You can get trapped in this cycle.
Or you can realise that you deserve a rest, you've had a rest, and that's nice. Now get up and do your goddam laundry, which is a thing you can do, and is still far easier than it ever was.
That is all.
The idea that anything is being designed & built to run on diesel generators, in an urban environment, when the impacts of climate change are becoming inescapable, is beyond belief.
@actuallyautistic @autistics @actuallyadhd
Work in progress…
I’ve always felt like I’ve needed “purpose”, a cause, a goal… external to my self, but no matter how hard I worked on whatever purpose I applied myself to, it wasn’t enough. And interspersed with productive periods were periods of procrastination, starting & stopping, going around in circles…
But since I started exploring the possibilities that I might be ADHD &/or autistic, & even more since my ADHD diagnosis (pretty certain I’m also autistic, but I’m fortunate enough to not need a formal label)… a purpose has been forming, which is much more satisfying, has no completion date or even a need to be completed. Instead of accomplishing something, or doing something, I’m simply being… me.
