So, as I make this webpage, I'm two months diagnosed with ADHD and still awaiting an appointment with a clinical psychiatrist to please god get me medicated. Conversely to what you might expect, you might think that the diagnosis made me worse, if you're bad at differentiating correlation and causation. Thus I have been writing to vent my frustrations! I'll tack any new writings on to the beginning whenever I make them.
Trigger warnings: these pieces deal with a lot of apathy and executive dysfunction that one might observe as 'worryingly similar to depression', and they're all downers on account of being vent pieces. A list of facts in particular delves into tentative suicidal ideation.
Whoopsie!
Don't be concerned re: these pieces. It is fine, I'll handle it.
The thing about possession is that the first thing you have to do afterwards is check your watch. You have classes tomorrow and you can’t afford to miss another group meeting or they’ll think you’re a flake. Where you are or how you are can wait as long as you’re not rushing to a Chemistry tutorial that you have to attend at threat of flunking. Eyes still bleary, not even a minute awake, you’ll check the date and hope it was just like sleeping for the night and that the police aren’t on the verge of busting down your apartment door to find your rotting body.
Next you’ll bandage your wounds and choke on water and eat a chocolate-flavoured granola bar even though it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do in the world and willpower is a scarce commodity. You can’t pass out again, though, not so soon after coming back. Those days are worse than the days you wake up to realize it’s been months. The days when you wake up only to find that it didn’t let you rest so your respite is fleeting because you have to spend it sleeping. So you’ll stay awake and do your stretches to prevent atrophy, eyes roving over your surroundings to wager under which mess you’ll find your phone.
You’ll plug it back in and open the blinds—sun is setting, could be worse—and make motions towards your bin basket before deciding to deal with it later, and revive your phone with your head still clouded. Your college’s queer union added to their Instagram story and your mom called you last night. You won’t call her back just yet. She’s already waited, so what’s another day? Tell her that you’re busy and college is going fine and you just spent the day finishing up that essay worth 50% of your grade. You won’t claim to have gone out with friends—she’d be too eager to believe it—so instead she’ll remind you that you need to renew your lease on the apartment and you’ll say you already did it and ten minutes later you’ll have covered your bandages with the biggest baggiest clothes you have and you’ll go down to reception to ask about it but there won’t be anyone at the desk so you’ll get scared.
You’ll shower and you’ll use that shampoo you got at the start of the year that’s still mostly full and you’ll clean your room and sweep your floors and pack your bags and head to the library at 8pm. You’ll pull out your diary and move all your obligations forward so that they’re due today instead of last Wednesday and you’ll cross out the ones that you can’t find the will to do and you’ll remember that you forgot your laptop charger at home minutes before it runs out of battery and you can’t do anything more for the day so it’s time to go home and hope you’ll wake up tomorrow.
But first you need to check your watch.
Dipshit alien gets recalled back to the mothership to total ambivalence. Dipshit alien gets recalled because his term is up and he’s done nothing with his life and his chance to do anything is over. Dipshit alien is spending the rest of his life on the mothership because he had a chance and he didn’t even blow it. He just ignored it. Dipshit alien glanced at the chance sideways for a better life and decided that shaking his head to reject it would take too much effort.
Dipshit alien’s chance had been college. Dipshit alien had gone to the city and gone to a lovely little university and had everything he could have ever wanted and he did nothing. Dipshit alien went forward and back between the college and his apartment and sat in the library doing nothing and sat in lectures doing nothing and didn’t walk the 20 minutes into bustling city streets. Dipshit alien skipped his classes and didn’t talk to anyone and checked his Instagram sparsely. Dipshit alien fucked it whenever anyone was kind enough to talk to him and dipshit alien stared at friends laughing together and dipshit alien spent his days alone.
Dipshit alien didn’t make the most of his solitude. Dipshit alien didn’t binge movies or devour books or sink hours into video games. Dipshit alien read about people binging movies and devouring books and sinking hours into video games. Dipshit alien half-heartedly booted up his gaming console with its hundreds of titles he had loaded onto it and begged himself for the willpower to open one of them. Dipshit alien had vague ideas of dancing and singing and working out and writing and going to events and and and and he stayed up until 2am doing nothing and he hated himself the next day.
Dipshit alien went to the corner store and he didn’t know what to buy because he’d never eaten anything before. Dipshit alien looked at a microwave dinner and counted the number of ingredients he had never eaten in it and then counted the ones he had (zero). There was food on the mothership but dipshit alien hadn’t eaten. He had to eat now. Dipshit alien bought the same bag of brown rice every day and he ignored the shelves of food taunting his cowardice and he nodded to where his roommates were playing cards while he microwaved it and he brought it to his bedroom to eat alone.
Dipshit alien looked at the calendar and saw that it was November and he panicked because the year was almost half over and he had done nothing. Dipshit alien counted the group gatherings he had been a part of on one hand and he hated himself for treasuring them. Dipshit alien looked away a bit too quick when he saw other aliens because everyone knew they were aliens and hated them for being too loud and hated them for not being human and if he saw them then he’d feel more like an alien.
Dipshit alien thought he should be kinder and more generous and more gregarious and more of an activist and then dipshit alien left the house and talked to nobody and went home. Dipshit alien didn’t check his phone and when he answered texts conversation stopped and nothing felt urgent. Dipshit alien witnessed his classmates panic and joke about assignments and wondered if he was missing something because he felt nothing about them. One day dipshit alien felt a regular amount of scared and then a regular amount of happy and then a regular amount of angry and it was so so noteworthy that he shrined that time in his memory as The Day Of Three Emotions.
Dipshit alien felt hungry but he didn’t want to eat his brown rice. Dipshit alien was always hungry and always looked at the cupboards and asked himself if there was anything he felt like eating and then eventually he made himself his brown rice. Dipshit alien made brown rice five times a day and the hunger persisted unti it was something in him almost a companion almost a friend mostly an annoying roommate.
Dipshit alien knew just enough to lie and he always lied and he didn’t think he was good at it but it was always working and he hated that he only knew enough to lie. He learned more and more and more but whenever he spoke he felt like he was lying so he tried to make it his own and he tried to be a liar but he couldn’t. Dipshit alien looked inwards and saw nothing. Dipshit alien always wore bold eyeliner at first because he liked it and later because he was scared to leave without it because he was the eyeliner alien and if he was plain then it was all for nothing and then he looked in the mirror and asked if he was happy and he stood there and then he did his eyeliner.
Dipshit alien was hungry as he went to meet his case worker and she asked him if there was anything she could help him with and he said no and he said he was the problem and she suggested some solutions and he told her he didn’t think he had it in him to abide by them so they both sat there in silence until she asked if he wanted to go from weekly to monthly meetings and he agreed. She asked if he had anyone to keep him accountable because he was bad at self-discipline and he had people he chatted to but he didn’t know them and he was a loner because he had been a loner on the mothership and dipshit alien didn’t know why he had been the one sent because he had hated the mothership and had felt the monotony biting him but he wasn’t doing anything at college and he didn’t deserve it.
Dipshit alien hangs all his hopes on medicine he has yet to be prescribed and he will be crushed when it does not fix him just like college didn’t fix him and it’s just going to be like this.
Dipshit alien waits to get recalled.