There are a number of problems with being self-employed as a person with ADHD. Most of them could be resolved by having a partner or at least someone else in the room while you’re working to keep you working but in my case, I don’t have that person and my work computer is less than one pace from my bed so you can imagine where I spend more of my time.
For the last five or six days I have started my morning with full optimism… With reasonable optimism that today would be the day I would break through my productive discomfort and do the task that is needed for my customer.
I took the job and spent the money with the impression in my mind that I have been productive lately and worked quite regularly for a different customer project for which I felt satisfaction and pride and it was the source of optimism that I could do it again and again.
In reality I should have remembered this cycle from the previous 35 years of my life where working without a deadline on something that I only partially enjoy at specific times is a lot harder than I pretend to know it will be. It’s easy to let myself down and I’m buffered from the customer to some extent so I am letting them down but that’s future Jeff not today Jeff.
I know that if I could start and get into it I will succeed but that first initial start is frequently met with obstacles and if I see the obstacles in advance I don’t even start. So I see her on my bed looking at the computer thinking maybe I’ll just take a quick nap and then start. Maybe I’ll just have lunch and then start maybe I’ll just start tomorrow. What? It’s Wednesday? When did that happen?
I know I’ll write a blog about not being able to do the work. That seems to be part of the Regina I remember. I used to think it was a good trick of ADHD that if you tell people you’re goal and schedule it turns a task into a responsibility but as I’ve aged I realized that other people don’t care whether you keep your promises. Only the customer does. And no one reads my blog anyway.
Since I live in a certain level of guilt at all times I can’t use that to trick myself. It’s not even that I won’t enjoy the project and the challenges I will face but I’ve already decided it won’t be enjoyable because the obstacles that are right up front are the ones that have stopped me from doing it Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and so far today at 11:00 a.m.
Oh. I just remembered I have videos of feeding the chickens to edit. Priorities disguised as excuses.
