There is a lot of noise in my brain right now. Honestly, my brain is soup at this point. So I will write this in the form of a numbered list:

  1. I am doing too many things at once. Again. I do not want to admit it but I am falling into the old habit of doing so much that I effectively just do nothing.
  2. My brain keeps jumping from interest to interest. Call it ADHD, call it BPD. The undeniable truth is that I do not stick to anything.
  3. I run away when things get hard. I do not have the discipline of sticking it out through the worst. It makes me anxious. Panic attack level anxious. At the centre of it is the deep fear that I will find out that I suck. I do not understand why I am so existentially terrified of being mediocre. But it is a driving fear that prevents me from doing anything that I mildly enjoy well. I’d rather say to myself - i didn’t even try that try and fail and find out that I sucked at it.
  4. Another existential fear, another side of point 3 and one that drives point 2 is that it is too late for me. People my age have already started their PhDs. People who bullied me, who rejected me. I will come to this later, but the fear that I am too late is pushing me to do everything at once. And that is making my anxiety worse.
  5. People who wronged me doing well is like fuel for my anxiety because it validates the notion in my brain that I was the problem. I deserved to be wronged. I am a loser. I do not have the bandwidth to unpack this with nuance right now, but that is the gist.
  6. I never developed the discipline of hard work. I have never worked hard in my life. If I have, it was only by coincidence because what I was doing happened to be fun. I do not want to be this person.
  7. Anxiety is here to stay. I got my routine in place last year because I was successfully avoiding all that brings me anxiety. Now that I have to do the things that make me anxious, my routine is falling apart. I am back to dysfunctionality, insomnia, inability to do basic things like self care.
  8. That brings the additional anxiety of whether I am making up my mental health in the first place. When mental health breakdowns are rare, I can distance myself from thinking about it. When they are frequent, I constantly have to grapple with the fact that the world was meant to be exclusionary. I have to constantly justify my need to rest. My disability. I have to justify that I deserve to exist, in whichever imperfect shape or form. That my value to society doesn’t diminish by my dysfunctionality.
  9. I have to learn to be okay with slowness – the slowness of learning discipline. The slowness of learning itself. Doing things one at a time.

That is all I have to say for now. The next couple of months will be difficult but I have no choice but to go through them. I am glad that I am wiser this time around.

I do not have to do it all at once. It is okay if I fail. My dysfunctionality/disability doesn’t make me a burden. It is okay if I am slow. It is okay if I take my time. It is okay. It is okay. It is okay.