I have a dream

Closets.
I dream of closets. And cabinets, armoires, cupboards. Storage, in other words. A home for all my crud. How oh how did I not notice THE COMPLETE LACK OF CLOSETS in this pre-Victorian wreck? Where was my brain? (Bad question; don't ask. I obviously misplaced that long ago.) WHERE DID THEY PUT THEIR PETTICOATS FOR CHRIST'S SAKE???
Some previous resident turned the perfectly good butler's pantry into a TV room. Narrow closetlike TV room, but a TV room nonetheless. Leaving us, however, without a pantry and very minimal cupboards. No longterm storage. So we store our pantry items down the basement. Along with everything else.
Everything else, that is, that's not strewn about on every possible flat surface upstairs.

Need all 10 fingers

and toes to count the rapidly increasing tally of left-behind articles: Life Partner's mother emailed today to tell me she found a slipper sock that hadn't been missed yet.

Things left behind over Chrismess

Dec. 25, 2010:


Items left at Life Partner's mom's house:
Three gloves, none of which match the others
Gift picture

Items left at my parents' house:
Shoes
Wet socks
Dishes

Items left at dog-sitting friend JB's house:
Pile of clothes she just gave me that day
Box of tomatoes
Container of dog treats
Wicker basket
Stainless steel bowl

AND DID I MENTION

I still don't have my Christmas cards out, much less even started.

ADHD + Christmas = ChristmADHDs = Chrismess

I am still recovering from Chris-mess. I was up Thursday night (Dec. 23) until 4 a.m. wrapping presents and then wrapped all day Dec. 24 (80 presents in all) plus made 10 loaves of homemade bread and tabouli for my friend who dogsat. (What the heck do you expect when you try to be Marthat??) Kitchen was disaster zone -- flour, dishes, wrapping paper, dough, cinnamon everywhere.


Loaded up my car to the gills and drove 40 miles to meet Life Partner at his workplace. (Yes, they make him work Christmas Eve.) Unloaded my car into his car.
Then traveled 70 miles down to Chris-mess Celebration No. 2 of 3. (I decided to skip No. 1 of 3 (my mom's side of family) because it meant driving alone in my temperamental beater and with my broken vertebrae. Plus I was so disorganized that there was no way I could have been ready to leave the house for two days with the car packed up and appliances off by 6 p.m., even though I had all day to prepare.


We arrived at No. 2 (his mother's) at 12:45 a.m. for his family's Christmas Eve gift ritual, which went on until 3:30 a.m. Saturday. 

Then the next day we loaded up the car again (this makes three times) and traveled another 30 minutes away  for more Chris-mess (this time at my parents' house, with paternal rels). We didn't get our car packed up with new clutter and tsotchkes (a fourth time) until 11 p.m. for the 90-minute journey back up to home.

Three days later, on Tuesday, Dec. 28, every bone and tendon and muscle in my body hurts. I'm exhausted, dragging myself around; it's the biggest deal just to check email and answer the phone. My friend J. called and said she was coming over to bring something I left at her house, and I nearly started crying. I was like,  "Leave me alone! I'm tired and a blob of nothingness!"

Then Monday I had to meet a deadline -- which I did, around 3 a.m. Tuesday. 

Now today I just started another deadline story due Jan. 2. So am exhausted but frantic, which is worse than being frantic but exhausted because when you are exhausted but frantic, you are too exhausted to think clearly about what you frantically need to get done. 

Merry Chris-mess

It's been FOREVER since I last checked in. I even concluded that this blog was just Thing No. 52,568 that I'd gotten excited over and hyped up about, only to completely lose interest in a matter of weeks. If that long.

Well, Chrismess is over, and I'm happy as a bedbug in a youth hostel. I found it to be so incredibly traumatic and   unsettling for my ADHD self that I just had to start writing again. Only I'm still too traumatized by the strain, pace, pressure, work and frantic travel of Christmas (not to mention the MESS I/it created all over my entire downstairs) to write in too much detail quite yet. Over the next couple days, I'll go into it more.

Are other ADHD-ers this beat-up and battered by the hippy-happy-cr@ppy holly-jolly holidays as I am? I'm just DEAD. My entire body feels like it was crumpled up, thrown out a car window onto Interstate 94 and repeatedly run over by cattle trucks and Humvees, like a discarded McDonald's cup. Every muscle in my body hurts -- from the stress? lack of sleep? pressure to perform/be happy/make conversation/BE SOMEONE to friends, family, cousins, newcomers to the fam-damily?

DO NOT MISTAKE ME: I don't hate Christmas because of my relatives. They are all perfectly fine people. It's the tension in my head and in every fiber of my body that gets all wound-up about it. The thing is, though, it's not just Christmas; it's any family gathering of any kind. Reunions, birthdays, showers, anniversaries.

The only way I can describe it is that (the feeling I get) seems a lot like my mom's descriptions of her claustrophobia. Only with people. When I'm cooped up around people, I just freak out, panic, can barely eat.  I'm like a terrier, panting and panicking during a thunderstorm. So is this agoraphobia? Or just ADHD magnified by all of the different conversations, gestures, facial expressions, emotions, silent cues I feel I must pick up on? I secretly wish someone else with ADHD would stumble upon this blog and talk to me.  Am I the only one out here?