I’ve always been the kind of person who is into a hundred different things at once: At least a couple jobs, at least a few hobbies (most of which involve going out and participating in things, like open mic nights or some sort of sport), and of course, whatever personal improvements I’m trying to make for myself that always involve lots of planning or time that needs to be set aside. As I’ve gotten older, that inclination hasn’t gone away, but my success at managing all of these conflicting interests has decreased. Work always takes precedence, because, of course, I need money to live. Being an adult necessitates a level of responsibility that being a child, hopefully (usually), does not. That is obvious and makes sense. From there, though, the waters get a lot more murky. It becomes so much harder to decide what should be most important next, or it becomes much harder to stick to whatever plan you create.

lots of failure.

I’ve failed spectacularly at that for a long time now; I’ve failed to get a lot of my ideas off the ground, and if I manage to get over the initial hump, I never seem to keep the momentum going long enough to get anything out of it. I’ve failed to lose the weight that I wanted to lose, or read all the books I wanted to read, or practice the guitar as much as I’d like; the list goes on. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly why I’m so much worse than I used to be in this regard. A little worse would be reasonable, or even expected; I’m managing so many more things, and some of them simply are more important than others, even if I’d prefer they weren’t. But unable to accomplish anything at all seems like there has to be some sort of underlying issue.

I have my suspicions about what might be the cause. For one, I am much less physically active than I once was, and that absolutely affects my mental health in a big way. That may not be true for everyone, but I am certain it is for me, given how I've felt when I was more active in the recent past. For nearly half a year, I rode my bicycle everywhere and let my car rot away in my driveway, and I hadn’t felt so good in years. I only stopped because I experienced some family trauma that basically sent my life to a screeching halt, and while I was trying to survive that experience, I got a new job that is too far away to bicycle to daily, which is killing me honestly, and I desire a remote work life again desperately. But that’s a separate conversation—something I’ll definitely be talking about here eventually.

a couple problems.

Anyway, I believe my biggest problems stem from a lack of physical activity, and undiagnosed ADHD, the latter of which I have taken care of in the last couple of months, and has helped me out with the former issue, as well as with enumerable more issues I’ve been trying to deal with. It’s honestly been a revelation. I don’t know how I was dealing with anything before this. I mean, I do know how: extremely poorly, or not at all. I’ve been able to begin getting a grip on all the things in my life I’ve been trying to fix, as well as just making the day-to-day monotony doable, which sounds like an extremely low bar if you don’t have ADHD, but trust me, it is not. It is everything, frankly. Which finally brings me to the real point I was trying to make with this post: despite how much better I generally feel, nothing has really changed.

the payoff, I think.

It is still totally up to me to do all the things I want to do, and I still get dejected when I don’t make progress the way I’d like. I still simply don’t want to do things sometimes, even if I think I should do them, or even if I do want to do them. Sometimes I just can’t drag myself to the task, for some unknown reason. The biggest difference now, is that I can get back on track. If I miss a day at the gym for whatever reason, I can go the next day when I feel better, or when I have the time. If I miss a day of writing, or working on whatever software engineering projects I am trying to work on at the moment, or whatever skill I am trying to improve on, or whatever chore I didn’t have time to get to the night before, I can just do it the next day. Again, that may sound incredibly basic and silly to someone who has never had to think about those things, because that kind of action just comes naturally. But that doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and sometimes it is impossible to overcome for such a long period of time that once you finally get out of your funk, you have enough energy to basically get back to the baseline you feel below, and never beyond it, because the cycle starts again. It is a debilitating, humiliating, exhausting, and just absolutely terrible feeling. And I still feel that way sometimes, but only for a second, and then I am able to get beyond it, and that has changed my life in a way that I struggle to conceive at this moment. I can sort of see where it is going to bring me, but even still, I believe it is going to pay dividends on things I don’t even realize I’m investing in yet. That makes me very happy to be alive.