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I want to write something soon about executive dysfunction & ritual, but I'm not quite sure yet.
I'm in the post-diagnosis stage of "huh, literally every part of my personality is in fact a symptom"!
One of those things is, of course, identifying there are solid, legitimate reasons why ritual is so taxing & difficult to accomplish. It has so many discrete steps! The purpose of the steps is, of course, to gradually gradually prepare your mind and spirit for the work; but it's also the very definition of a task which exhausts me.
Tonight, I've done some basic grooming and ive moved a couple of things our of the front room, although there's still no room to work yet. And now I've sat down for a breather. That circle ain't gonna get cast.
The biggest task that wipes me out is leaving the house. There's no real difference, I think, between initiating the walk between the worlds and going down to the train station. Before you begin, there is an endless sequence of small, distinct steps - brush your hair, brush your teeth, wash your face, don clothes/robes, on and on and on.
But a lack of executive function basically means you are able to initiate fewer tasks, and once your resources are depleted, you get tired and tired and then fall over. It's not *really* about the contents of the task. It's about how many tasks you initiate
(It was a nightmare at work, trying to explain that I had no difficulty EITHER shelving the books OR signing the shelving log, but doing both would exhaust me. That's two tasks, and starting them is equally challenging. Neurodivergence nightmare is knowing that you can quite easily sign the damn log and not actually do the shelving, and actually recieve a better report than the other way around)
Realising my ritual woes are yet another ADHD hell symptom is...
...grief, again, for wasted years; especially in magic, when one typically thinks of oneself as failing, unworthy, or lacking in Will; but the same grief I have for so many lost things and opportunities, which would not have happened in a kinder world, and one where I'd been diagnosed far sooner...
...opportunity, because I do have a bunch of workarounds for daily life, stupid tricks which make uphill tasks become downhill instincts, and I can pull from them to try and fix this too...
...encouragement to try and get into coven work; if the effort to cast a circle exhausts the pleasure of ritual, then why not try things which give me license to just show up and not have to plan and orchestrate the whole thing myself...
...opportunity too to try and focus the system building I'm doing. I've now identified a major barrier to me doing work, something more profound than feeling icky about gender polarity; and also something which could be genuinely helpful, if I can wrap my head around how to make things go.
EF management is all about cunning. It's spotting when your brain is doing something weird, and then organising your life to avoid it in future. Stuff like:
I seem to "load" upstairs and downstairs in two separate chunks. I figured out that it was very hard to go upstairs to take showers. But my job at the time, you had to go up a flight, go down a corridor, then go down a flight to the showers and that was much easier. In other words, EF challenges are about "tiredness" but not in the classic sense - the stairs weren't the problem, it's about places being more accessible to my brain when they're on a single floor, and hard to access when they're not.
Bizzare!
But overwhelmingly, the best way to manage dumb shit like that is to always live on a single-floor house.
And there are so many little tricks like that, which make life more or less manageable so long as I'm free to use them.
All the same, it makes...It makes something like proper ritual as burdensome as going on holiday, something that takes up huge chunks of my week to the detriment of my strength, and I hate that. And I've been looking forward to circling tonight all week - but I'm so tired already, and the effort of putting away the fold out table and changing will be enough to finish me off. I've long since abandoned ritual baths, and come up with some namby mumbo jumbo magical excuse why my alt-prep techniques are actually better than 2000 years of water/purifying correspondences in every world religion.
I'm tired, existentially tired, not the kind you can cure with a nap - EF doesn't map exactly onto being sleepy - more like over-exertion, like being set challenging maths problems in a room of toddlers. And it's not like depression, either, where you push through it and enjoy it eventually. I can push through it, but my body doesn't care and will be tired all the same.
Tonight, there are barriers everywhere - the rooms need to be tidy to work. Or, if I go outside, I need to dress and find warm layers. Or if I go to sleep - which I cant because husband is working late. I'm too dirty for prayer, really. The house is too much of a jumble to locate my candles -ive built an altar in my mind, but can't locate the pieces. I should have started this yesterday, I think. Can I tread a compass? I can't even get my legs to move myself to stand. Should I have made ritual food? I only ate today when food was placed in front of me, lacking the additional effort for anything else.
At the same time, I appreciate the film flam, for what is ritual if not the little actions which build it step by step. It's ok to say - don't worry about this thing if you find it hard! But over the course of practice, that leads to offerings never made, spells uncast, and far too much summoned without circles or protection because...my budget is sparse. Everything is eked out, there's nothing to spare. I have to carefully plan intimacy to minimise the amount of additional showers I need take in a month.
There's nothing left. The barrel is empty.
(Oh, for the kind and gentle omnipresent gods who understand and love you all the same, and who do not need special prep or actions, and who do not get bored and wander off if you neglect them. What if witchcraft was not orthopraxic, but orthosperan: all about having the right hopes and dreaming?)
I'm in the post-diagnosis stage of "huh, literally every part of my personality is in fact a symptom"!
One of those things is, of course, identifying there are solid, legitimate reasons why ritual is so taxing & difficult to accomplish. It has so many discrete steps! The purpose of the steps is, of course, to gradually gradually prepare your mind and spirit for the work; but it's also the very definition of a task which exhausts me.
Tonight, I've done some basic grooming and ive moved a couple of things our of the front room, although there's still no room to work yet. And now I've sat down for a breather. That circle ain't gonna get cast.
The biggest task that wipes me out is leaving the house. There's no real difference, I think, between initiating the walk between the worlds and going down to the train station. Before you begin, there is an endless sequence of small, distinct steps - brush your hair, brush your teeth, wash your face, don clothes/robes, on and on and on.
But a lack of executive function basically means you are able to initiate fewer tasks, and once your resources are depleted, you get tired and tired and then fall over. It's not *really* about the contents of the task. It's about how many tasks you initiate
(It was a nightmare at work, trying to explain that I had no difficulty EITHER shelving the books OR signing the shelving log, but doing both would exhaust me. That's two tasks, and starting them is equally challenging. Neurodivergence nightmare is knowing that you can quite easily sign the damn log and not actually do the shelving, and actually recieve a better report than the other way around)
Realising my ritual woes are yet another ADHD hell symptom is...
...grief, again, for wasted years; especially in magic, when one typically thinks of oneself as failing, unworthy, or lacking in Will; but the same grief I have for so many lost things and opportunities, which would not have happened in a kinder world, and one where I'd been diagnosed far sooner...
...opportunity, because I do have a bunch of workarounds for daily life, stupid tricks which make uphill tasks become downhill instincts, and I can pull from them to try and fix this too...
...encouragement to try and get into coven work; if the effort to cast a circle exhausts the pleasure of ritual, then why not try things which give me license to just show up and not have to plan and orchestrate the whole thing myself...
...opportunity too to try and focus the system building I'm doing. I've now identified a major barrier to me doing work, something more profound than feeling icky about gender polarity; and also something which could be genuinely helpful, if I can wrap my head around how to make things go.
EF management is all about cunning. It's spotting when your brain is doing something weird, and then organising your life to avoid it in future. Stuff like:
I seem to "load" upstairs and downstairs in two separate chunks. I figured out that it was very hard to go upstairs to take showers. But my job at the time, you had to go up a flight, go down a corridor, then go down a flight to the showers and that was much easier. In other words, EF challenges are about "tiredness" but not in the classic sense - the stairs weren't the problem, it's about places being more accessible to my brain when they're on a single floor, and hard to access when they're not.
Bizzare!
But overwhelmingly, the best way to manage dumb shit like that is to always live on a single-floor house.
And there are so many little tricks like that, which make life more or less manageable so long as I'm free to use them.
All the same, it makes...It makes something like proper ritual as burdensome as going on holiday, something that takes up huge chunks of my week to the detriment of my strength, and I hate that. And I've been looking forward to circling tonight all week - but I'm so tired already, and the effort of putting away the fold out table and changing will be enough to finish me off. I've long since abandoned ritual baths, and come up with some namby mumbo jumbo magical excuse why my alt-prep techniques are actually better than 2000 years of water/purifying correspondences in every world religion.
I'm tired, existentially tired, not the kind you can cure with a nap - EF doesn't map exactly onto being sleepy - more like over-exertion, like being set challenging maths problems in a room of toddlers. And it's not like depression, either, where you push through it and enjoy it eventually. I can push through it, but my body doesn't care and will be tired all the same.
Tonight, there are barriers everywhere - the rooms need to be tidy to work. Or, if I go outside, I need to dress and find warm layers. Or if I go to sleep - which I cant because husband is working late. I'm too dirty for prayer, really. The house is too much of a jumble to locate my candles -ive built an altar in my mind, but can't locate the pieces. I should have started this yesterday, I think. Can I tread a compass? I can't even get my legs to move myself to stand. Should I have made ritual food? I only ate today when food was placed in front of me, lacking the additional effort for anything else.
At the same time, I appreciate the film flam, for what is ritual if not the little actions which build it step by step. It's ok to say - don't worry about this thing if you find it hard! But over the course of practice, that leads to offerings never made, spells uncast, and far too much summoned without circles or protection because...my budget is sparse. Everything is eked out, there's nothing to spare. I have to carefully plan intimacy to minimise the amount of additional showers I need take in a month.
There's nothing left. The barrel is empty.
(Oh, for the kind and gentle omnipresent gods who understand and love you all the same, and who do not need special prep or actions, and who do not get bored and wander off if you neglect them. What if witchcraft was not orthopraxic, but orthosperan: all about having the right hopes and dreaming?)