Interlude: A ramble on focusing, seeing, and delivering myself over to glazing over

Struggling to work and rest through neurodivergence and chronic illness

At some point during the pandemic, my eyes stopped focusing. Maybe a more precise way to put it is, I stopped focusing my eyes in order to perceive the world in front of me. Apparently, I’ve just been gazing off into the distance and letting my eyes relax and glaze over, the world blurring around me, retreating into my thoughts and daydreams even as I kept typing on the page on my screen. I just did it a few moments ago. It happens when I’m grocery shopping. If I’m not careful it occurs while I’m driving. I just stopped actively trying to see, it seems. And when I finally did look up, because I was (am still) working from home in a pandemic, I didn’t have to look very far to see anything around me because I was in a room, and a wall is only so far away. I guess there was the window, and things outside. But again, chances are, if I was gazing out that window, I was deep in my head and somewhere else, somewhere very far away beyond the field of any vision.

I have to teach myself to focus again. The irony of this isn’t lost on me, as I battle with another kind of focus each day—brain focus. Around the beginning of 2021, I began to suffer pretty severe executive dysfunction related to ADHD/Autism (or as some I’ve seen on Twitter refer to it, “AuDHD”), and found myself suddenly unable to read a book, write anything on a page, or even complete a simple task list each day. It was—is still—very debilitating. What’s even worse is that the ideas, drive, and inspiration for what I wanted to do with my life continued with veracity. I just couldn’t begin, let alone execute, any of it. I would get started, and shut down. I tried approaching several different goals, thinking oh, perhaps this thing I thought I was interested in pursuing isn’t for me. But no. It was across all interests and pursuits. Even billable freelance work was a struggle, though less so—something about someone else’s very concrete deadline forced me. But then I’d have nothing left at the end of that for my own work. Burnout would kick in. I would not see the page in front of me. I’d pick up my phone and lose myself in the scroll. It’s still a struggle even after the burst of focused productivity this past spring and summer, and it’s been extremely challenging. Something about the gaze outward at my work, and the gaze out the window that is really a gaze inward, is connected.

Maybe this is a story about re-emerging but with new sight, and transformed. I’m not the person I was in December 2020. I became buried, lay fallow, and in the time since I’ve formed into a new shape that I’m still learning to recognize. While most people felt an immediate change during lockdown, my “Great Pause” was prolonged while all the things I managed were still operating in one way or another—my art gallery, my career as an arts educator, my life as a teacher of more esoteric subjects, and arts writing. It didn’t cease, until it did. Before January, 2021, I worked probably about 70+ hours a week with paid work plus passion projects to “get my work out there” which didn’t pay or if it did, paid minimally. I’ve always had to have “jobs” to support my creative endeavors (who doesn’t, is another story for another day, right). And then slowly, things came to an end. I had to admit it was time to pack the gallery away, all iterations of it. I had to suspend my teaching at Cornish College of the Arts because it resumed in-person classes and that became a permanent leave. The apothecary where I taught other subjects, closed. The writing was all that was left but there wasn’t a lot of that, either—such work has always been, and remains, intermittent. Who was I when I wasn’t overworked and working? Who am I if I’m not producing something recognizable to my field as a “production”? Without the structure to focus my brain for me, I was left with absolutely no tools at all to manage executive function as an ADHD/Autistic person without every minute of my time committed to some production, exhibition, writing deadline, syllabus, or some other passion project. Life imploded. Neurodivergence fully unmasked, flared wild and free.

I don’t really know if I’ve found my way through this, yet. It becomes complicated when I go down with Sjögren’s flare ups, or migraines; both of which happen at a frequency that still sometimes astonishes me even after all these years. It’s as if I try to forget my impediments; and the pandemic quite laid them out before me, unavoidably. I’m learning the kind of surrender described by Joan Didion in her essay, In Bed, in which she talks about delivering herself to her weekly migraines. I’m learning to bide my time. Like Joan, I am honing in on the pain, and the surrounding world’s miraculous details. Unlike Joan, probably to do with AuDHD, I am still fighting against it furiously; as if my battle will be won through struggle; as if by sheer willpower I will make the work come, somehow; my thoughts will miraculously clear, the words will type themselves, flowing from a hot current deep below the surface. I am not a poet, such ekphrasis doesn’t come from me. But maybe all this stopping, maybe all this gazing, maybe rebuilding the very muscles of my physical and inward vision to perceive my living world to translate it into something meaningful…maybe that is something.