You Know. But Knowing Isn’t Always Enough.
Depression, anxiety, neurodivergence…
These things suck the life out of everything.
There’s nothing worse than being told:
“You’ll feel better once you’ve done it.”
Indeed you will.
But it’s GETTING THERE that’s the challenge.
See, my get up and go got up and left without me.
So thanks for pointing out the obvious, Einstein.
Now tell me how the hell I get to the point of getting there without a fight.
Because that’s the part people don’t seem to understand.
What They See
They see the shower.
They don’t see the argument it took to get me into it.
They see the clean kitchen.
They don’t see the hours of staring at the mess, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that need doing, while my brain conducts an emergency meeting about absolutely none of them.
They see the completed task.
They don’t see the negotiations, the guilt, the anxiety, the exhaustion, or the ten false starts before I finally manage to begin.
“But You’re on the Right Medication Now…”
And then there’s medication.
“Aaah, finally, you’re on the right meds. You must be feeling better.”
No, Linda.
I don’t suddenly become a fully functioning adult because the prescription is correct.
Medication can help. It can make things more manageable. It can take the edge off the chaos.
But it doesn’t magically turn ADHD into a tidy little personality trait with a colour-coded filing system.
It doesn’t mean depression disappears.
It doesn’t mean anxiety packs a small suitcase and moves to another continent.
And it certainly doesn’t mean every task suddenly becomes easy.
Sometimes, the meds don’t work and you end up feeling like a Dr Seuss character in your own life; feeling wired, glitching, or feeling like an absurd cartoon puppet running on the wrong fuel.
The Vicious Little Circle
When ADHD contributes to depression and anxiety, you can end up trapped in a particularly vicious cycle.
The task has to be done.
You know it has to be done.
You may even know that you’ll feel better once it’s done.
But the motivation, energy, focus or executive function required to start simply isn’t there.
So you don’t do it.
Then you beat yourself up for not doing it.
Then you feel worse.
Then the task becomes even harder to face.
And now you’re not only dealing with the original problem.
You’re also dealing with shame.
Because apparently struggling to do something is not enough.
We must also hold a disciplinary hearing about it.
“Why haven’t you done this yet?”
Because I don’t know.
Because I am trying.
Because the fact that I haven’t managed it doesn’t mean I haven’t spent the entire day fighting with myself over it.
Because knowing what needs to happen and being able to make it happen are not always the same thing.
The Gap
That gap matters.
The gap between “I know” and “I can” is where a lot of people get stuck.
And from the outside, it can look like laziness.
It can look like carelessness.
It can look like a lack of effort.
But sometimes the effort is happening where nobody can see it.
Sometimes getting out of bed is the achievement.
Sometimes brushing your teeth is the achievement.
Sometimes replying to one message, washing one cup, taking a shower or eating something counts as progress.
Not because those things are enormous to everyone.
Because, on that particular day, they were enormous to you.
And that doesn’t mean you should give up on doing things.
It means perhaps we need to stop pretending that the only meaningful part is the finished result.
Sometimes the real work is getting yourself to the starting line.
And when your brain has spent the day hiding the starting line behind a wall of exhaustion, anxiety and self-criticism…
Well.
Getting there is the bloody marathon.
Then There’s Work
And then there’s work.
It has to be done in order to eat.
Though opening a packet of crisps sounds far more enticing…
So, in your brain, you know that without work, you have no way of surviving.
You know the bills need paying.
You know food costs money.
You know the world has very little patience for anyone who says:
“Sorry, my executive function has gone missing, so could we postpone capitalism until Thursday?”
Unfortunately, the world does not work that way.
The task itself becomes a daily fight.
You have to get up.
You have to get dressed.
You have to get yourself to work.
You have to perform.
You have to concentrate.
You have to appear reasonably functional while your brain is quietly throwing furniture down the stairs.
The Emergency Setting
And sometimes, because the fight is enormous, you push yourself beyond your limits.
You force yourself to keep going long after you should have stopped.
You produce more than you thought you were capable of producing.
You get through the day.
Maybe you even have an exceptionally good day.
People notice.
They praise you.
They tell you how well you’ve done.
And somewhere along the way, that exceptional effort becomes the new standard.
The bar moves.
Not because you deliberately raised it.
Because you proved, once, that you could reach it while running on fumes, panic and sheer bloody determination.
So now you have to reach it every time.
The problem is that you didn’t discover a sustainable level of performance.
You discovered your emergency setting.
And emergency settings are not designed to be used as a lifestyle.
“You’ve Done It Before.”
But when people have seen you manage something once, they often assume you can simply do it again.
“You’ve done it before.”
Yes.
I have.
I have also survived things I should never have had to survive.
That doesn’t mean they were healthy.
It doesn’t mean they were easy.
And it certainly doesn’t mean I can repeat that level of effort indefinitely without eventually collapsing.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t doing the task.
It’s accepting that doing it badly, slowly, imperfectly or at a lower standard may be the only way to keep doing it at all.
The Cost of Constantly Trying
Because if every task requires you to give one hundred and fifty percent, eventually even brushing your teeth starts looking like an Olympic event.
And there are only so many medals you can win before you need to lie down in a dark room and question every decision that brought you here.
The goal cannot be to perform at your absolute limit every single day.
The goal has to be finding a way to function without destroying yourself in the process.
Because surviving the task is not the same as being okay.
And getting through the day is not proof that the day didn’t cost you everything.
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