Boxes

The worst possible thing I can do when I'm having a bad AuDHD day is start organizing my office, and that's the main thing I'm inclined to do, probably to somehow reclaim a bit of control.

The process is the same every time. I wake up, maybe tired after having only a few hours of sleep, and the tiredness throws off my morning routine. Maybe I didn't feel like brewing coffee, or I wasn't hungry and postponed breakfast. Or I overslept a little bit and I'm rushed to start working. Whatever it is, I feel like I'm not in control.

Thoughts start bumping into each other, tasks overlap, and suddenly I'm jumping between apps, messages, thoughts, and tasks with very little control over what gets my attention.

At this point, my anxiety starts taking over. A couple of hours have passed and I've accomplished absolutely nothing. I skipped coffee, so the withdrawal starts creeping in, which intensifies the discomfort. I'm now cranky and jumpy. And impatient.

My desk is usually messy, as every working person's desk during the week, but my patience is very short at this time. I try connecting a cable to my phone and the cable is six inches too short. It can't reach, and I explode.

How can I keep working like this? How did I allow my mess to reach these levels? I need to fix this right now.

I'm separating things into boxes, bags, and deciding what's essential and what isn't. I have a big box for everything I'm discarding, and smaller boxes for cables, stickers, pens, notebooks, and all the other things I want close at hand.

And there's also the dreaded "for now" box. The one with all the items that don't fit any category and I don't want to discard. The box I tell myself I'm dealing with later, knowing I won't.

I find a bunch of cables, but I need to test them before storing or discarding them.

Mixed in with them are a couple of old NFC stickers I bought 10 years ago.

That reminds me of a project.

Wait... do I still have the repository on GitHub?

I don't.

But I found an even older project I'd abandoned because it didn't work.

I'm reviewing the code.

The fix is obvious.

Now I'm fixing it.

It's almost 1 PM now. I need to cook something for the kids. All the meat is frozen, because I was in a rush this morning and I didn't prepare for lunch. I will have to get a delivery, but I'm hesitant because every time I use UberEats I end up angry because they arrive very late and usually the order is wrong, or they miss an item. But it's an emergency, so I will have to.

I'm now waiting for the food, already angry because the "latest delivery time" has been bumped up by 10 minutes three times. My office is a mess of boxes, cables, papers, and my desk has a pile of loosely grouped items that make it impossible to use the keyboard and trackpad.

I haven't finished any of my tasks and I haven't even showered. And I don't feel like doing anything right now.

Now I have more chaos and less control than I had in the morning. My anxiety is peaking. I'm cranky, frustrated and I'm getting a growing headache from the caffeine withdrawal.

I prepare a lousy instant coffee, take an ibuprofen and some Klonopin for the anxiety. I breathe.

I take the laptop out of the office and sit on the couch to answer some messages and to try closing at least a couple of tasks.

The mess in the office is now a problem of tomorrow's Axel.

I wonder what he's going to do.