The Spreadsheet

My brain’s a little messy. I don’t have a condition (other than C-PTSD), and I definitely don’t have anything as severe as ADHD, nor am I on any kind of spectrum. But my brain’s a little foggy. 

So sometimes, I struggle to organise my thoughts. 

Currently, I have about 15 active projects, ranging from films, to festivals, to clients, to prose, to teaching assignments. My days are nice and full. 

I’ve never really struggled with time management, but I do get overwhelmed sometimes. It’s meh… I’m human, it’s fine. I just need to take a breath, have a shower or go for a walk, and sit down and re-organise my brain, clear out the cobwebs and get to work. 

Simple, right? 

For me, yeah. 

But for someone whose brain does not function like this? Nope. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Nein. Non. 

One of my best friends is not neurotypical. His brain functions in a much different way. He’s a writer, too, and since we live together, I witness everything he does in a day. I witness what he writes, how he writes, how he juggles his job, and family, and responsibilities. And I witness how he struggles. He is a fascinatingly creative mind, has endless ideas and can produce pure magic when he writes. But it is a real, proper struggle for him to organise his brain. He could be doing so much - and yet somehow, the pathway gets muddled, the follow-through gets thrown off, and his brain gets stuck on details that don’t serve him. 

So when I tell him to “just organise your thoughts” and “just re-think how you approach the task” that’s met with a very justified comment of “Me and what bottle of adderall?!”

Fair enough. He was right. For him, just organising your thoughts is not how it works. That’s the whole point. For me, a quick walk around the city resets my brainwaves enough for me to be able to tackle any creative problem. For him, it’s a painstaking process. 

So I asked him what the most difficult thing is he faces. His reply was that he felt like he had a million different things all going on at once - all of them equally demanding, and there was just no way for him to create a hierarchy. Dishes were as important as a million dollar project. A stain on the window demanded his immediate attention as much as a meeting that was starting in 30 seconds. 

He has a day job, too. A hugely demanding one. 

He works in IT. He builds databases (please for the love of god don’t ask me what he does exactly, it’s all magic and gobbledegook for me). So he works day in and day out with excel sheets and all that sort of malarky. 

Now, I am not a technophile. I used to work for Microsoft, and I can find my way around most things, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had to give a damn about a spreadsheet. 

But I knew that this is how his brain functions, this is how he is used to organising things. So we sat down together and devised a strategy that might just work for him to just organise his thoughts. We took a look at where his priorities lay and how he could put a time-keeping mechanism into it all. 

And I like to think that it helped. Maybe. A little.

At least, it gave both of us the feeling like we had accomplished something that day, which is a win in my book. 

I am hugely privileged, I know this. The fact that I can just function most days is a huge advantage. That’s not to say that my own issues (depression, severe trauma, complex PTSD etc) don’t often hinder me - they sure do - but I am doing just fine. 

I often give the speech that “it’s not hard, it’s just hard work”. But maybe I need to re-think that a bit. Because for some, it is really really hard. And I’ve been overlooking that. I’ve not been aware of my privilege. I hope to do better.