Existential discomfort and ADHD
Picture a face. Could be a made-up face, could be the face of someone you know, could be an amalgamation of the two.
When I try to picture a face (or anything else, for that matter), everything about it never stops moving. The head is a layering of all different kinds of head shapes and sometimes random other shapes, always subtly morphing and adjusting and occasionally flashing out into irrelevant silhouettes before coming back to a general human head.
Focusing on any one feature or area is like zooming into a melting painting. Everything in my mind’s eye is always in a state of becoming, both in terms of movement and composition. Whatever I’m trying to visualize, most of everything within or around it is only partially there, fading and warping in and out of a hazy existence. A mouth is simultaneously multiple kinds of mouths in multiple expressions without necessarily feeling impossible or contradictory, any of which might bring about distracting phrases or moods or scenes in my head. The mouth will also occasionally be some unrecognizable shape, as if in response to a suddenly relocated vector point, and will sometimes simply cease to be a mouth at all, or disappear entirely.
In my mind, anything is hard to look at for too long. The longer or harder I try to look, the more elusive it is. Like the scientific eye peering closer and closer at atomic particles, everything is always breaking the rules and splitting into smaller and smaller stuff. More and more relational context, less and less hard truths. This experience can be quite frustrating, even depressing. It’s hard to visualize, oh, anything. It’s hard to make plans for expression, meals, outfits, to synthesize information, prioritize tasks, and to project my intentions into the future. Sometimes I feel like I have a learning or processing disorder, and by definition perhaps I do. It’s hard to get diagnosed with stuff as an adult, especially without health insurance in the US.
But diagnosis can also be another shackle. I don’t think my mental experience is “wrong,” and in fact it’s probably quite common. Just as I may be swimming in the vast body of God (for lack of a better term), eternally morphing and becoming and being composed by/of all happenings simultaneously, my mind is also part of this.
It also feels existential because my efforts to hold something cause it to decompose through my brain-fingers. It sometimes feels like life is flowing by me and I can’t point my life force well enough to engage with it. Visualization is part of creativity, motivation, and preparation. It’s how we align ourselves with a future. Simply writing this post has essentially taken me months.
But maybe there’s a middle ground. Maybe we don’t all engage with life exactly the same way, and maybe engaging with it where we’re at makes it easier to broaden our styles of engagement over time. While using modern concepts (or language at all) to identify my experience has helped me in many ways, it may also be holding me to preconceived ideas of normal, right, useful, healthy, et cetera, and thus tricking me into a self-limiting understanding of self.
Easing into that understanding has required staying with this discomfort -- the discomfort of struggling to focus and to express, the discomfort of looking into this experience long enough to see what all it touches, without getting too distracted by what it feels like and what all that may bring up in my mind and heart. It’s possible to stay with it and learn from it and process it, though it may take many tries and many years.
And God knows, I’m still uncomfortable. Processing discomfort doesn’t necessarily mean “fixing.” “Fixing” assumes a problem. Processing just requires giving the energy somewhere to go, spreading out across a wider nervous system until the backlog of energy has eased and the flood has receded, and we can see the patterns left on the shorelines. The effects are writ there and we’re living them. There’s plenty of work there, alone.
May we stand in our discomforts long enough to process whatever’s waiting inside them.
