Rachel is a Jewish bisexual autistic woman (she/her) with ADHD in her twenties. She loves writing and can always be found with her nose in a book! Her plan for the future is to earn her Psy. D. in clinical psychology. This interested in psychology started as a way to help her understand people better and to figure out what it was about others I kept not getting. It is also something deeply linked with her self-advocacy. There is a gap in communication between the autistic community and providers, and she want to help bridge it and challenge others to see things from different perspectives.
View all postsFeeling Frozen in the Face of Change
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This blog post was incredibly difficult for me to write.
Not for any emotional reason. Or even because of writer’s block. There was no sitting and staring hopelessly at a blank expanse of empty screen.
It was just impossible to even start.
I’ve felt frozen for weeks now, maybe even approaching a month or more at this point. Sure, I get things done, but it’s like moving through thick sludge to get from one task to the next. Starting things feels impossible, insurmountable. I’m constantly finding myself frozen at the starting line. Things I thought I should have done by now; I haven’t even started.
This isn’t a new sensation. It’s one I’ve carried with me all my life. I’m constantly falling behind and playing catch-up with everyone’s expectations. Even my own. I never do as much with the day as I could. I almost always go to bed disappointed with myself.
I’ve described executive dysfunction to others as “depression, but you still want to do things.” People with ADHD (like me) know better than anyone that motivation alone isn’t enough to do something. You can want to do all sorts of things but find yourself stuck on the couch scrolling endlessly on your phone anyway.
Still, lately, it all feels worse than usual. I feel unable to move forward with… well, anything in my life right now. Nothing is getting done except the things I absolutely have no choice but to do. A basket of clean laundry stayed in my room so long that I was only finally forced to empty it to make room for the next load of laundry. And that new laundry basket is still sitting in my room right now.
What makes all this stalling worse is the deadline rapidly approaching me. The date of my move to Pittsburgh for grad school is less than a month away. It all seemed so distant months ago, and now it’s right around the corner.
There’s so much I still need to do before my move. It’s not just the packing, though I’ll be diving into that very soon. There’s a lot of my old stuff in the house that I’ve been putting off going through for a long time. Suddenly, I have only a few weeks to sort through it all. My room has been in a truly messy state for ages, and I want to make things easier for everyone (especially my parents, who are looking to turn it into a guest room) by leaving it cleaner than it’s been for a while. I could have been working on it little by little, but instead, I’m staring down the barrel of so much left undone and only weeks left to do it all.
The stress of all this only worsens my executive dysfunction, leading to a vicious cycle I’m unfortunately too familiar with.
I think it’s the fear of the changes coming to my life that has frozen me. These are big life changes, possibly bigger and more long-term than anything I’ve ever faced before. My move to Pittsburgh will see me far away from my family for years. And once I have my degree, there’s no guarantee I’m coming back home. Moving back home is possibly even the worst-case scenario, one where I graduate with no job lined up.
This was a choice I made. I could have chosen to get my master’s degree closer to home. There was another university nearby that also accepted me. I might not have been living with my parents, but I’d be no more than an hour away. Probably less than that. I could have done that easily.
Instead, I chose Pittsburgh. There were a lot of reasons I had for this. Good reasons, ones I’m excited about. But now that my departure date is drawing so close, my autistic fear of change is kicking in at full force. I can’t help but think of everything that’s slipping away from me, everything I’ll miss. It overwhelms me.
It’s that feeling of overwhelm, in the face of that inescapable change that will consume everything familiar to me, that is causing my executive dysfunction. It’s why everything feels so impossible right now. It’s why I can’t make myself move forward.
I fear this change, and some of our most common responses to fear are fight, flight, or freeze. I think it’s obvious which one I’ve picked.
Facing change and the stress caused by that change is a common challenge for folks on the spectrum. Even more so for someone like me, whose ADHD compels me to seek out new experiences. I’m driven to embrace change, yet I must also weather the emotional distress that change creates.
I’m trying to take things one step at a time right now, even if the smallest steps still feel daunting. I need to stay in the here and now, to try not to get swept up in the mental tidal wave of picturing everything that’s coming. Easier said than done, as evidenced by how much I found myself struggling to finish this simple blog post.
But I can’t live my life frozen. Things will need to get done, and they won’t get done all by themselves. That’s a hard truth of life, even if it’s also one of the simplest ones.
I will need to go through all my stuff here at home and clean out what I don’t need. I’ll need to pack up my clothes, my kitchen appliances, and some starter furniture for my apartment. I’ll need to clear off a bookshelf in my room so I can pack it up and take it with me. I’ll need to set up my utilities. I’ll need to make sure I have all the paperwork for starting life as a university student again, and for getting the accommodations I need as one with disabilities.
Even just laying it all out like this… it’s a lot. There’s no doubt about it. But slowly, it all starts to feel just a little bit more manageable.