Re: The High-Five Corner

[quizzical]

High fives for all the sewing projects! I can’t sew worth a darn (*groan*), so you would laugh if you saw me a month ago trying to teach myself to sew with instructional videos on YouTube! It was a ludicrous and incredible struggle and it was painfully obvious that there was some perseverance/hyperfocus involved, since there was a list of about twenty tasks that were far more important than attempting to thread a needle with my clumsy hands, bad eyesight, and lack of a needle threader!

I’ve not been in the forums for a while mostly because of the holiday busyness, but I also was taking a break to give myself a perspective re-set: I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I couldn’t really figure out if and how the meds were helping me until I stopped focusing on my ADD. Once I stepped back and started seeing myself as the old me, that’s when I could see that I was functioning a lot better than the old me.

The holiday season was the perfect example of what’s changed for me; there were lots of personal high-five moments. For instance, I sent out all our holiday cards at least ten days before Christmas, and I mean ALL – there aren’t any stragglers waiting for me to figure out how much postage for air-mail, or to double-check an address. And when one card came back return to sender, I sent it out again with the correct address within two days, instead of tossing it in a ‘to-do” pile and feeling bad about it day after day.

Buying gifts was a lot easier this year, since I didn’t agonize over every decision, nor did I insist on seeing every example of the items I wanted before purchasing them. No more hoofing all over the mall just to make sure I had THE BEST suitcase possible. At times I caught myself lapsing into that sort of thing, but knowing what it was helped me to move on.

I got over my pride and bought things that were truly useful, like the gift-wrap carrying case. Last year I would have told you those things were silly and unnecessary, but I discovered that it made the gift-wrap process so much easier to already have tape, scissors, pen, and name tags all in the same bag, and to have rolls of wrapping paper that weren’t made useless by being hastily jammed in the spare trash can that served as their previous home.

Having decluttered my spare room, I had a reasonable number of empty boxes to choose from to put gifts in, instead of a wall of cardboard bricks collapsing on me whenever I attempted to pull one out.

Even where I slipped up and had crisis moments, they were a little less dire this year: I realized at the last minute that my son needed a white shirt for his holiday concert. But the “last minute” came the day before the concert, not the day of the concert, so I was able to go buy him one instead of raiding our closets and drawers for something that might suffice (“This one’s not TOO girly…”)

No, it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t bake all the cookies I wanted, or watch all the old holiday movies I wanted to see. And there were a few things entirely out of my control that put a damper on things this year.

But this is the first Christmas where I wasn’t constantly apologizing for Late this and Incomplete that, and that was simply HUGE.

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