These past couple weeks have been rough. Life has thrown multiple curveballs in rapid succession, and I haven’t been able to keep up. August was apparently the month of sudden change, and I was woefully underprepared, which means that my normal way of processing emotions and sensory input didn’t work.
I genuinely struggle to process my emotions, and it only gets worse when I don’t allow myself time to think and rest. That struggle, along with my struggle of processing sensory input, is a side effect of my ADHD, because my brain isn’t capable of processing information the way that it should. I don’t enjoy it, but for the most part I’ve figured out a way to deal with it in a way that is not disruptive to my life. When I don’t allow myself time to think and rest, I end up having a meltdown which sort of resets my brain and body to try again.
To better explain how my brain processes these things I’m going to attempt to give you an allegory to help you visualize what I mean when I say I have difficulties in processing my emotions and sensory input.
Imagine you’ve figured out a way to water your garden by having a hose pour water into a watering can at the perfect rate, so that the watering can doesn’t overflow, and you get a consistent amount of water coming out of the watering can at the same time. Let’s say your hose only has a really violent spray setting, so you need the watering can to help soften the blow of the water so you don’t kill your plants. As long as none of the variables change, you’re golden, however, if someone were to increase the flow of water coming out of the hose, the watering can would overflow, you’d get wet, and your garden would probably drown.
Now, I want you to imagine a bucket; I see it as a metal pail, but if you imagine something different that’s cool too. In order to water your garden with a bucket, you have to continuously go to a water spout, fill it up, walk to where you need the water to be and pour it. It’s more difficult, extremely tedious and time consuming, and it’s also really easy to overflow the bucket if you get distracted by something, or you don’t have time to keep a close eye on it.
The watering can and hose scenario is how emotional regulation and processing should theoretically work in a neurotypical brain. You only really get overwhelmed if something drastic happens in life, but overall you’re able to keep a solid grip on your emotions and process and distribute the necessary responses in an orderly manner.
I’m the poor dude with the bucket, or a neurodivergent brain . It takes a lot of effort and energy to handle my emotions and it’s a whole process. They just sit there until I can either throw them where they need to be, or I accidently let them accumulate too much and overflow, which causes a meltdown. To clarify, a meltdown is what I call my body’s physical reaction to emotions, sensory input, and general life when I don’t handle and process correctly.
The beginning stages of a meltdown are pretty small. I start getting headaches from bright or florescent lights and often find myself wearing sunglasses inside. Next, sounds get louder. If it gets bad enough, whispering can sound like someone is shouting directly in my ear. Also, sounds like my own chewing tend to irk me. Most of the time sound sensitivity is as bad as I let it get, but, every now and then everything happens too fast and I can’t process the emotions in time. After sound sensitivity, things start to feel wrong. My clothes don’t feel right or comfortable no matter what I’m wearing. Next, it sort of feels like my skin, insides, and bones are not all cohesively sized to fit my body and they are desperately struggling to simply exist as one. By the time my body starts feeling wrong, I’ve found a place to seclude myself and ride out the meltdown.
For at least the next half an hour I have to cover my eyes and ears, hide under a weighted blanket, and let myself deal. My heartrate picks up, my breathing becomes rapid and shallow, and all the emotions, events, and sensory input that I’ve been unable to process or regulate just exist all at once. It’s exhausting chaos, that often ends with me taking a nap and waking up with an empty bucket ready to try again.
I had a really bad one recently that reminded me how much of an idiot I was being. Yeah, life had thrown quite a few new, scary things my way, but I knew better than to let myself go that long without taking time to process everything. I was pushing myself because that’s what I wanted to believe I needed to do, when in all actuality I should have taken time with each new issue and processed it. More than that, I should have let myself truly rest instead of pushing forward.
So, this past week, I put an emphasis on rest. What does that look like? It’s taking time every evening to think through the things I have going on and meditate on how I feel about them, even if that means just taking ten minutes each day to work on this. It’s reminding myself that, while I am required to do a lot of things, running myself into the ground isn’t one of them.
So, this week, I come to you with a mostly empty bucket and a question. “When was the last time you truly took time to rest?”
Alphabet Soup and Jesus 