Had an epiphany this morning. (Sidebar: I used to constantly have epiphanies, like, every day – is that because I was in my twenties??)
Epiphany goes: Me in bed, letting sunlight stream across my face, lingering in the liminal space between starting and avoiding my day, and almost like light finding its way into a crack in my brain, I realized something.
All the different projects I’ve got going on right now, all the different environments I’ll be working in after graduation, all the different types of mode I’ll need to be in to see various jobs and projects through, they will all require me to be in character. Not for the reasons I tend to associate with acting as a certain type of character though. And not for anyone else – i.e. not for acceptance, not for legitimacy. But for my own attention, for my own sake in attempting to organize what’s before me and execute each task in a way that fulfills expectations and feeds my soul, which underlies whatever character I may ever feel I need to invent…
It’s an ADHD thing I guess (again 😉 It’s about finding strategies that work for me in attaching to various projects for the purpose of engaging fully in them, and for the purpose of being able to pull my attention out (in another post I refer to this as having an Off as well as an On switch). It’s not about making myself adapt in terms of identity to whatever is in front of me, it’s about finding an aspect of myself, a dimension in which I can exist and return to later, wherein I feel connected to whatever it is I’m doing. And then, again, being able to pull out. Finding means or vessels I guess for absorption and having a way out of the rabbit hole at the same time.
Don’t worry, at this point anyway, I’ve not considered coming up with names for all of these characters (although it occurs to me this could happen…). Right now I’m just taken with this idea of connecting with a character in order to trigger my focus for a particular task. Finding landmarks in a sense, so that I can conjure up those landmarks, the feelings for instance that come with working on a certain type of project, in a way that invites me into that space. So it’s not focusing on the expectations of whomever I’m working for, which tends to make me anxious, that I can use as an anchor. It’s the aspects of myself that come up in the process of working on that thing, and allowing myself to feel at home in those emotions, at home in those thoughts…
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