Mental Health Monday: Calendar Commitments vs the Ennui of Working From Home

So far in 2021, like clockwork, every month around the 22nd (right about now!), I start to get antsy. Back on November 24th of last year, I made the commitment to post my digital art online on this blog, no matter how good or bad. I wanted to push myself to put more content out, and to justify spending a bunch of money on a laptop with a touch screen and no discrete graphics card for my gaming purposes. That commitment has forced its way into my head and, for better or worse, I find myself scrambling to throw gradients and funky text on my art to add texture and flavor to my Photoshop doodles this time each month, knowing that I need to post around the 24th to keep up that monthly cadence. For someone who has been terribly inconsistent with scheduling and staying motivated with content series (see the irregular posting cadence on this blog for reference lol), the monthly art thing really feels like the one thing post-streaming that has stuck for me.

In fact, most of the things that are successful in my life right now have a regular calendar-based structure. Monthly reporting meetings at work bring me the comfort the regularity of stars bring sailors lost at sea during COVID-19: looking at my data and performance four weeks of a time can help me find myself at work at a time where I feel marooned from my homebound coworkers. My team sends me daily reports to look at each morning; I have not lost the luxury of something to read over coffee. But my colleagues cannot see that they Slack me sometimes when I’m in the middle of a happy moment with my Quaranteam in our living room/impromptu office, or the drama of a cat emergency. There is still workplace camaraderie to be had in quarantine, I am just not sharing it with my actual co-workers. At any rate, my roommate and my girlfriend have found Friday Night Magic to be a highlight of the week every week this past year.

There are more direct ways the calendar reinforces and fortifies my mental health. Therapy happens bi-weekly; the things that really hit each quarter can get escalated up to my Psychiatrist so we can tweak my medication. Refills each month are a major project for ADHD medication, and this habitual chore adds another layer of self-awareness when it comes to my mental health.

Laid out like this, I guess it’s natural I want to make the next recurring feature on the website a Mental Health Monday post. There’s some selfishness, because I want to write more, and I want to post stuff here more often. But I also really want to open up about my life with ADHD and generalized anxiety disorder, because it took me a whopping 26 years to figure out that they were the roots of basically all of my life’s problems. Maybe not all, but it was a major key! If I can help anybody else fast-forward to that discovery or help someone who’s already down in the trenches with me, then this series will have done its job.