Congratulations to me, I am now the proud possessor of an ADHD diagnosis.



Which I’d pretty much figured, after a dozen or so too many moments of “…wait a minute” while reading friends and acquaintances writing about their own experience of it. And after 50 years of living with it, I’ve got it just about as managed as it’s possible to be, but it’s nice to have my sense of myself confirmed, and also to have some help polishing a few coping mechanisms, and also to have something to take to my next doctor when I finally gird myself up to play pin-the-tail-on-the-medication with a scheduled substance, which frankly sounds like a special level of hell.

OTOH, everyone notes that that part gets way easier when you’ve got the meds, so.

…still gonna give the saffron extract a go first.

Okay, I’m a cocktail and a half into the evening, so let’s talk about place. The place you grow up, the place you most identify with (not necessarily the same place, those two) shape your comfort.

I’ve always been a forest girl. I need trees around me, trees to shelter under and soften the horizon, but also clearings to see the sky, and sometimes height to see the shape of the land spread out around me. Mountains make me claustrophobic with all that mass on the horizon, and plains make me twitchy with the lack of cover.

This is what means that skyscrapers around me read like mountains. Too tall, too much, too closing in. And fields that aren’t small and bounded with trees, or block after block of houses with nothing taller than a shrub, read to me as plains. Too open, too flat, too bare. I need trees, trees, trees. Comfort is driving under branches, seeing the sun rise and set through lace, knowing how the sky changes through the day while having a couple storeys tugged in close like a blanket around me.

So being in shadow while the sky is still blue and brushed with the last sun… that’s proper evening, to me.

And when the lights come on in the trees of Main Street, it will be the perfect evening.

(And there they are. ^_^)

I am increasingly amused by the development of the Great Illuminations War, in this city. I mean, initially they were pretty limited to about five blocks of Main St., and only slowly climbing up the cross-streets.

And then the city passed an anti-light-pollution mandate of “holiday displays can’t be up for more than 90 days” and the response of downtown appears to be along the lines of “Well, if you’re going to be that way about it…”

The illuminations this year reach east and west of Main for about five blocks on Huron, Liberty, and Washington. Liberty goes all the way up to State St. Almost the entire of downtown is now lit up, and about a third of the businesses have put up outside lights or water-fall strings on their front windows, which used to be fairly rare outside of Main itself.

It’s beautiful, and reconciles me considerably to the existence of Michigan Winter with its over-sixteen-hours-of-darkness. I’m just entertained by the extremely Midwest nature of this little contest.

Nasty hacking continues, and my diaphragm and ribs are definitely not happy about that. Things that help: drinking hot liquids, keeping two humidifiers running. Also, antihistamines and cough suppressant every four hours, last night, whee.

There is some small progress, though, in that I can occasionally breathe out of both nostrils for brief periods of time! I hate how low being sick resets your bar. Yay for living in an area with grocery delivery, wherein I can pay someone to bring me another four boxes of kleenex and some soda water.

The watchword for this winter is clearly: Wear your mask and don’t trust your relatives.

I came away from Turkey Day with a virus, and it’s ticking all the boxes for RSV. Which, I mean, better that then Covid, but it still sucks pretty hard.

Two days and the sore throat is pretty much gone, which is to say it’s moved down into the top of my lungs, so there’s a fair bit of coughing going on. Fairly dry, so again, could be worse, but no fun.

Two days has also seen it settle into my sinuses pretty hard, and my left nostril is running like a faucet, which makes sleeping difficult, which makes the general malaise worse. Basically, this one is a whole world of bleah.

You do not want this. Wear your damn mask and don’t believe your relatives when they say they’re “fine”.

I am at the Black Pearl /specifically/ to see whether the Main Street illuminations are on for the season, and the street lights have just come on, but the tree lights have /not/.

*sulks mightily*

Goddamn city ordinances about light pollution, limiting the time we have beautiful illuminations up, when we’ve just turned back the clocks and it’s sunset at bloody five o’clock, and it’s getting /cold/. This is no fair at all.

At least the Pearl itself has turned on the two trees out front, and strung their patio lights up.

So, I haven’t posted in a while, what with work insanity and depression, and the general AAAAAAAAAAAAAA of life.

(I really feel that possum meme, these days. Reeeeeally feel it.)

But this deserves documentation. So, let’s hear about Branch’s Adventures in Reaching Champaign Mutherfucking Illinois.

I thought this would go smoothly, is the thing. I reserved a seat on a plane big enough not to be going jugga-jugga-jugga the whole damn way, and (since this is the last “leadership” workshop I have to attend) used my travel points from the past year to bump up to first class. I also reserved (well in advance) cabs from actual, bonded and insured, professional cab services, at least one of which I’ve had excellent experiences with in the past.

Well, first off, that was exactly the service whose driver had sudden car trouble. But it’s fine, it’s fine, they’ll have another car to me only 15 minutes late. So I am picked up and dropped off in good order, and am hustling a little, because pre-boarding started about as my feet hit the pavement at the terminal. But it’s fine! First class, thankfully, lets you use the priority lane, and I get my bag checked and hustle for TSA Pre-check, and get through that fairly promptly.

Aaaaand I get hit with the random check. And then the whirly-invade-your-bodily-privacy machine gets snippy over the bra hardware in my racerback. Both the attendant and I paused to give the machine nearly identical looks of “fucking really?”, and then I was allowed to run for my gate. Made it with fifteen minutes until undocking! And I was immediately supplied with the water I hadn’t had the time to buy. Yay first class.

And then we launch. In heavy clouds. Moving from one sea-side city across to another sea-side city. If you fly much, you know that every single one of those is another strike against a smooth flight, so it was jugga-jugga-jugga the whole way after all.

At least I had a comfortable seat to be increasingly nauseated in.

So we get on the ground! I get my bag fairly promptly (and take a second to buy water and a Sprite, this time), and after only a very minimal comedy of errors, my driver and I connect and he loads me into quite a nice car.

And then, Chicago traffic. This element speaks for itself, I feel.

So by the time we were out of the city, my anti-nausea meds were still doing their job, but also hitting me with drowsiness, which is never fun in a moving vehicle. Eventually, I did give in and close my eyes, but the thing is, proprioception data that I do not initiate does really, really bad things to my inner ear these days. Which is to say, about halfway there, I started up and urgently informed the driver that he needed to stop, as I was about to hurl.

We almost made it. Fortunately, this hotel has laundry service.

Also fortunately, the car had that wonderful thing: heated passenger seats. So I used my handiwipes to wipe off as best as possible and loaded up again, and I turned on the seat warmer to stave off the core-temperature crash that always seems to follow tossing my cookies. Or my sun-chips, as the case may be.

(Sometimes it really helps to pay for the best, or at least to let the University pay for it on your behalf.)

And finally, we arrive at the hotel! It’s quite a nice hotel, something I can appreciate now I’m not violently ill. Best of all, they did, in fact, provide the ‘add on’ items I pre-ordered in a bit of a splurge to celebrate the end of this fucking set of workshops: a bottle of red and a plate of chocolate dipped strawberries.

So I have cranked up the heat and unpacked my things, and dinner tonight is going to be really quite good chocolate strawberries, to console me for such an absolute shit travel day.

Perhaps tomorrow, when I feel up to a cabernet, I shall call room service and request a bottle opener, since I was packing light and neglected to bring mine.

Gather round, friends, while I tell a tale of how absolutely vital it is to be ready to defend your boundaries around the typically neurotypical.

This week I was at an intensive leadership workshop, the kind that’s kissing cousins with indoctrination camps in my personal book—-straight through from 8-6 plus evening ‘outings’, breaks that are actually assigned socialization or team project time, constant demands on your cognition and sociability hand in hand. Some people like this. I am not one of them.

Unfortunately, turning down the ‘opportunity’ is a lot like turning down an actual promotion. It means you don’t get offered any more promotions, not from that boss at least.

But you know, I had vague hopes about this one! My personal ‘executive coach’ averred repeatedly that while it was important to push beyond one’s professional comfort zone, one’s personal safety zone should be sacrosanct.

So, when, in the afternoon of the second day, we got to the “neuroscience of habits” segment and circled up to play a ‘game’ that involved counting off around the circle with “buzz” instead of the actual number used for 7, multiples of 7, and numbers with 7 in them…

Well, I stepped forward and said that some of us, as in me, wouldn’t be able to do that, being discalculaic. To his credit, my own coach offered to stop the game. Unfortunately, the woman in charge of this particular event said “oh, let’s do just one more round”.

Because, of course, she had no idea what discalculia is, and was too fucking typically neurotypical to ask what I meant. So we went another round, in which I very fortuitously did not get a number that was a multiple of seven, which I would have failed instantly, and then I quietly left the room and had a massive meltdown. Because, goddamn woman, could you hit all of my k-12 damage about being set up to fail for math harder if I drew you a target?

…which, of course, I had, not that she saw it.

Thankfully, my departure was noticed, and pointed out by several of the group, along with the group norm that we had all agreed to, about how if someone was not prepared to be “open and vulnerable” everyone else was to respect that. Two people in my cohort texted to let me know that the group talked that through, and how they’d failed as allies, and to offer hugs. That part was nice.

Ms. Clueless emailed to ask to speak with me when I was ready, which took about an hour and a half, and also a double dose of my breakthrough panic meds. And she apologized, and was suitably ashamed of herself, and everyone dealt well when I came back (which is to say, was kind without referring to the meltdown at all). They’re a good group, by and large. And the next day, when I felt a bit more steady, I agreed to educate a room full of people about what discalculia is, and immediately had about four people thank me because they thought they might recognize that description in their own relatives/children, and would see about accommodations.

So, happy ending. But the middle, the meltdown, still exists, still happened, and I’m still tearing up over twenty-four hours later, just writing about it.

And the bitch of it is, we HAD AN AGREED UPON NORM that said I could call quits. If I’d been able to say one more No, I’d probably have been okay, because my coach would have backed me up, and I suspect several of the group would have also. But I hadn’t mentally prepared to defend like that, so I got stuck in that deer-in-the-headlights, lets-play-nice spot for just a breath too long.

Unfortunately, I think the moral of the story is that, unless you have a partner who knows and is prepared to defend you while you take a break, you can’t drop your guard at these things. No matter how much they try to team-build, no matter how much they engage in the milder versions of trauma bonding within the group… you have to turn that bonding reflex off and take care of you. And it’s going to be especially hard if you have a history of boundary problems, because if you don’t have a ‘rule’ for how to handle that kind of situation it’s so, so easy to slide back into ‘no rules, no boundaries’. So set your rules first, before you go, before you engage. Rule one: protect yourself, stay safe, and FUCK playing nice.

Because being the object lesson in basic fucking empathy is never fun, and it’s never your job.

Fandom: Prince of Tennis
Characters: Seigaku, Rikkai, Fudoumine, Shitenhouji, Hyoutei, Rokkaku, Shishigaku, Higa
Works: 2 + appendix
Words: 91,244

Summary: Rewrites the Nationals matches in which tension and uncertainty still abound, motivations are examined, justice is served, second-years consider the future, and everyone gets extremely heated up.

Read At: AO3 | Ink Burns

For anyone who still holds Tenipuri in their hearts… after nine years the bunnies rolled back into town and the Nationals rewrite is on.

Fire and Fleet and Candle Light

Summary:
A rewrite of the end of Regionals and the month until Nationals. Echizen gets obsessed, Rikkai is still on edge, Tachibana is brooding, Momo is insightful, Kirihara retrains, Atobe is annoyed, Fuji gets down to business, An is delighted, Yukimura is not particularly happy, Tezuka is plotting, and everyone is coming to town.

When the match with Sanada reached five games all, Ryouma knew he was in trouble. It was a new feeling. When he played his dad, he was always in trouble, so the knowledge was meaningless and he'd learned to ignore it. When he'd played Tezuka he'd barely had time to understand that he really was in trouble, and notice what it felt like, before the game was over. After all, it wasn't like a lower score meant he was losing! He'd come from behind plenty of times and won anyway.

But he could feel his pace falling, now.

Part 1 of Every Night and All
Words: 23,438