Trying to be consistent is honestly a pain in the ass

    I don't just mean with writing; I mean with anything. Routine is not a skill I have acquired. Routine was not a vocabulary entry in my childhood home's dictionary. 
 
Trying to cultivate consistency for the first time when you are a full on adult who realizes they most likely have undiagnosed ADHD on top of a severe head injury that made an already flighty brain even wispier is really hard.  Doing simple tasks is like herding a bunch of balloons. I get my hand on the last one and then another from the bunch floats away and my hands slip to focus on the one running away from me and lose grip of the other three that were semi important and so my hands greasily grab at strings uselessly, never quite holding one long enough.

Take for example this blogpost of which I have entirely forgotten my original point. Let's hope I get it back folks but odds are it is with the angels now. 

Anything that requires steps is a nightmare. There are lot of things neurotypicals think as simple that actually have steps: making a meal, planning grocery shopping for the week that won't result in either rotten food or a haphazard array of foods five days later that don't go together,  making a doctor's appointment et al.

I say all that to say this: consistency is fucking hard for me. I'm a very present friend when you can pin me down long enough but I can also disappear for days/weeks/months and not realize the time away has been so long. I'm grateful to those incredibly patient friends as well as my 4 current partners who are very low maintenance.

For a change I will swerve from self deprecating to patting myself on the back, not something I'm accustomed to yet.  I submitted my application for Hedgebrook. No one reads this but I will humor myself and explain for the imagined audience that Hedgebrook is an all women's writing residency in Washington state. Gloriously woodsy cottages and meals made for you among other writers with cottages nearby. It is a fairytale land that is extremely hard to get into. 

the application was hard for me. it required me to think about it a lot. Twoish weeks ago I met up with a cutie I started dating so I could actually be held accountable for starting the damn thing. I was so frozen even as I stared at the application preview in front of me until they suggested I make bulletpoints about each question. 
So I did. Normally under circumstances such as these, I would have completed that step then totally forgot about it and missed the deadline. or ignored the constant calendar reminders on my phone, putting it off and then  whoops. 

Instead I would work on these things two more times before even opening the slideroom official app. Of course I made it harder than it was, overthinker that I am, I wrote a near essay length answer for each question on my drafted word document and then getting into the actual application realized it was only 1200 characters each one. 

Painstakingly I frankensteined pieces together to fit better yet say something tangible. I bothered 2 of my partners to help me pick through my final poem sample. they both obliged, giving me compliments I hardly deserved but thoroughly needed. 

By the end my head was pounding with caffeine dehydration and overwhelm but it was completed. I  don't have enough hubris to tell you I will be accepted.  Finishing this multi step process was  more about meeting a deadline while not flurrying through in one fell swoop, exhausted and half assed.  

I'm fucking proud. I've been struggling a lot lately but here was one accomplishment. I ignored the negative balance in my checking account and used my remaining credit line to order celebratory taco bell. Will I ever be free of the fast-paced adrenaline from the "EVERYTHINGS ON FIRE"  to "meh nothing matters so I'm going to keep disintegrating" spectrum of getting shit done? I don't know. But I feel free to fuck up and keep going.