Thursday, May 14, 2009

Harnessing waste products

So I've struggled all my life with ADHD, and an accompanying resistance to work.
This apathy is frustrating, like a block that pops up in my mind whenever I need to buckle down and work. At times I have just sat there, paralyzed, as my desire to work battles with the block of apathy. It feels similar to my old social anxiety problems, in a way, the same sort of block that occured when I would contemplate calling someone or talking to someone I didn't know.

At the same time, lately it's been pointed out to me that I have an OCD streak. It's not that I'm mildly OCD, but that occasionally a mood will strike me and I will just start doing something until it's done. This happens most often with dishes. When the mood strikes me to clean dishes, I seem to clean them obsessively until they are done. It may be an element of dormant perfectionism, but most of the time it shows no trace in my personality. Frankly, I'm not sure where it comes from, where it goes to or what triggers it.

As I have pondered the first problem, it has occured to me that if I could learn to turn the OCD on or off at will, I could overcome the apathy wall by wielding the OCD at it like a sledgehammer.
The question is, how could I possibly do that?

I think it may be similar to how I learned to wiggle my ears, or whistle, or gleek. In those cases, it was a matter of learning what the relevant muscles felt like when I moved them. Once I isolated the feeling of them, it was possible to learn to move them consciously. Fine-tuning that movement yielded the desired effect: my ears wiggle, my mouth pours out Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and liquid can stream forth from my mouth should I so desire (disgusting yes, but relevant nonetheless).
If I can isolate the feelings that trigger the OCD, and learn to apply them to any activity I choose, I may be able to overcome one personality flaw with another . . . and thus my weaknesses become strengths.

My waste may become a hidden source of power.

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