Fayanora: The Djao'Mor'Terra Collective

I finally got one of those "day of the week" pill organizers because I kept skipping doses for as many as several days in a row despite having Dosecast, mainly because:

1. The Dosecast app I use to track my pills doesn't consistently do its pop up notifications like it should, and there's no beeping or other sounds associated with its pop up notifications even when it is doing them.

2. The process of getting out all the bottles, getting the pills out of each bottle, piling the pills up in front of me, taking the pills, and putting everything away takes SO many spoons / energy slots that even when I was getting the notifications for the daily pills, I would get pre-emptive stress that depleted my energy and made me more prone to postponing it. Then it would be two or three days of skipping them because of my time blindness and I would get extremely annoyed with myself.

3. It doesn't help that doing all the activity every day to get that many pills ready depleted my energy enough that it made actually taking the pills harder to do. If you don't know what I mean: I have always had a problem with swallowing pills. I find most people's directions/instructions on how to do something new to be very confusing, to the point that I have to figure out how to do the thing myself pretty much all the time because of it. And when I was a kid, up into my teens, I was taking pills so infrequently - despite getting frequent migraines - that my poor ADHD memory and difficulty forming new habits meant that even when I was managing to figure out how to swallow pills, I was forgetting how to do it by the time I next had to do it. This lasted until a couple years ago, when I finally figured out and memorized how to take pills without gagging or choking. But the thing is, this takes concentration and focus to do. I have to mute anything with words in it to free up processing power for the task. And even though I know how to swallow all those pills at once, my having to go through a very difficult and stressful process of getting eight pills ready at once depletes enough system resources that if I tried swallowing all those pills at once, I would gag, choke, and possibly even puke. So to prevent that, I was having to take no more than three pills at once, and STILL had to concentrate very hard on doing it, because the smallest bit of mind wandering or split attention would make me gag on them.⁽¹⁾

Anyway, I finally bought a pill organizer, so I could skip the daily, energy-depleting, stressful process of getting the pills ready. I now only have to do that process once a week, and I can do it AFTER taking the pills. How is it going, you ask? Two days in a row, I popped open the pill box for the day, tossed all eight pills into my mouth, drank some iced tea (I can NOT dry-swallow pills), and swallowed all those fuckers all at once. I did still have to pause YouTube to be able to do it, but still, I did it!

I have never had any issues taking the Metformin on time unless it was at the same time as the others, since it's just two pills, so I didn't get one separated by day/night. Just the "once daily" version. (Hell, sometimes when I would skip most of the pills, I would still take the Metformin since it's a pretty important one.)

So that's a big relief. One less stressor in my life, two if you count my annoyance at myself from skipping taking the daily pills. Life got easier, and it only cost me like $4. (I had to get a big one because there are so many pills.)

(1) = This tendency to forget how to do things I've done before applies to pleasant things, too. It was only two or three months ago that I finally figured out how to properly roll a burrito, and it has taken all that time since to get mostly consistently good at it. I still sometimes fuck it up.

(TW for talk of vomit.)

I've talked on here many times before about "hunger nausea," one of the possible hunger signals my body gives me, usually when the need to eat is urgent or semi-urgent. Which, as you can imagine, is super annoying because it kind of kills any appetite I might have. But at least I have always taken care of it before it got to the point of actual vomiting. Until today. (At least, I don't recall it ever happening before.)

See, I had a small breakfast, then went out to the library and then the grocery store for a few things, then went home. By the time I got home, I was experiencing hunger nausea. My appetite was killed. I looked around for something to try to eat anyway, and didn't find anything I could manage to get down. The only thing I could get in my stomach was Diet Dr. Pepper. I drank the whole 20 ounce bottle and then made the mistake of sitting down to write. When I hyper-focus on anything, my body could literally be doing anything at all short of the kind of gas-like pain of IBS diarrhea, and I won't be aware of it at all.

So, naturally, when I got up to pee or something (I honestly don't remember why I got up), the hyper-focus broke, everything came rushing back, and because I had already been hunger nauseous before writing, and it had been like an hour or more, I got hit with such an intense hunger nausea that I ran to the bathroom and puked up all that soda, or at least I think I did given the color and volume of the puke.

Thankfully, I felt much better after this. I have always been worried that if I puked while hunger nauseous that the nausea would just intensify from the stomach being even emptier than usual. But nope. I felt better. Had some real, sugared lemonade and some chicken, and I'm feeling even better.

Bleh, I hate my body sometimes. But in my absent-mindedness, I ignored a clear signal from my body while being aware of it, and set myself up for a much worse situation. So I hate my brain right now too.

Latest bit of autistic/ADHD body weirdness: currently can't tell if I'm feeling hunger nausea or I'm full. Thanks in part to my sh*tty sense of time, so I don't know when I last ate.

Either way, I have no appetite again. Trying to eat a hotdog was like trying to choke down a turd. Thankfully, it's fading; so maybe that means I was full and feeling icky from eating while already full? Don't know. I hate my stupid body.

As a person with ADHD and a bad memory from it and from a childhood coping mechanism for the bullying and the general autism-brain sensory issues that involved checking out of reality deliberately because reality was too painful, my relationship with time is all wibbly wobbly because of my focus being out of whack and because my memories aren't catalogued in a linear way. I think my memories float in my brain like a billion rubber ducks dumped into the Pacific Ocean, only even that metaphor doesn't really work because of currents and stuff being trackable and predictable.

No, my memory is often random or seemingly random. A minute can pass by like an hour as it's happening and then seem like a second after the fact. I think about six months from now and it seems like five or ten years away, but things that happened six months ago might feel like they happened yesterday. I struggle to remember words I use everyday sometimes, and then other times a word I haven't used or heard for 20 years will suddenly just pop up in something I say. I could struggle to remember the tune of a song I listen to every other day at one point, and then a song I've not heard since I was ten could suddenly start playing itself on a loop for days.

My childhood is a vast ocean of roiling, starless void with memories scattered throughout it like asteroids, comets, and planetoids all floating around aimlessly; I have to fumble through the darkness for memories sometimes, and other times things just collide with me in the darkness. And I can't be certain how many of my childhood memories I even still have. No idea if they're just wandering out there in the void, or they never got parked in my permanent memory to begin with. If my childhood brain was anything like the present day me, I imagine it just didn't store any memory it thought of as unimportant, but the issue is that my coping mechanism probably made my memory worse. I have more memories from my late adolescence and adulthood, even if most of them are flying randomly through the void like the rest of it, than I do from my childhood. I have more memories of the games of pretend I used to play in order to cope with reality, than I do of the actual things that happened to me.

I have enough memories from then that I know I knew full well the difference between reality and fantasy, and that I kept choosing fantasy deliberately. I kind of still do, but now as an adult I tend to use my writing to share my reality and process it, whereas as a kid I use fantasy to avoid reality. I've turned it from an avoidance tactic to a therapy tactic.

But my point is, that time for me is weird. I don't think words will ever be adequate to express my weird relationship with time. It's like trying to explain a dream or a drug trip: you can't know, really, unless you've had the same experience. I just went to the calendar on my wall to cross out the days since I last crossed days out, a thing I frequently forget to do. I was absolutely certain that the last time I'd done this was at least a week ago. But I got to the calendar and found it had only been a couple days. I didn't cross some days out without remembering having done so, no: the image in my memory from the last time I did it matched what I was seeing on the calendar. It's just that two days passing felt like a week in retrospect. When it was happening, there'd be too many random fluctuations in my temporal perception to accurately catalogue even if I could.

My relationship with food is fucked up too because of a combo of my fucked up temporal perception and the fact my body keeps changing what signals it gives me mean what. Sometimes I feel hunger the normal way: a rumbly in my tummy, gurgling, an empty feeling. Other times there's no signal at all until I go randomly from zero to "must devour anything edible this instant!" Often that suddenness results in something I call "hunger nausea," where I get sudden nausea of a kind that means I need to eat right away. But the hunger nausea doesn't always mean I need to eat right away, and whether it does or not, it can often be very difficult to get myself to eat because of it.

Very frequently, I have to look at a clock and try to remember when I last ate, because if I don't eat even a little something very soon, I might get hunger nausea. Difficult to do when I so often look at the clock and can't remember when I woke up, when I last ate, what I last ate, if I've eaten anytime in the last 6 hours, or even how long I was doing something. Was I on the computer 10 minutes or 40 minutes? I've lost count of how many times just this last few days that I've set a timer for 20 minutes and it went off in what I thought was 5 minutes. Or set a timer for five minutes, and it took seemingly 40 minutes to go off.

It's a bloody miracle I'm ever on time for anything at all.

Hmm... I should find some excuse to have a bunch of characters go through something that artificially messes with people's time sense like that and then have a character with ADHD like mine be the one person who can cope and get them out of the situation. Then when they get out, everyone's like "How did you do that?" and the ADHD character is just like "Meh, that's everyday life for me."

I dunno about that specific scenario, but Oleander Ravenstone -- Morgana's brother -- has ADHD and his is bad enough he canonically forgot to write home or visit his family for over a decade. Granted, he's been exploring Faery, but with magic that's not as much of an excuse as you might think. He just legitimately keeps forgetting, only remembering at really inconvenient times, and often he'll hunt through his things for his communication mirror and forget what he was looking for in the middle of it.

My point is, I think I need to use a lot of the above in a scene from Oleander's POV to illustrate what having ADHD can be like, at least from my own experience.

Been having a convo with long time friend Kitty Payne about our long friendship, which is interesting because we both have bad memories, so she remembers stuff that I don't, and I remember stuff that she doesn't, and even most of the memories I do have are very vague, apart from random facts about her that somehow stick around. I'll do a quote from that convo, but first, to add further context, earlier in the convo I mentioned that I have forgotten about 90% of everything that has ever happened to me, because my memory is like a bucket that's missing half of its bottom. So here now is the quote:

"Though I will add the caveat that when I say I remember us talking on Tumblr, I mean 'I have vague memories of doing that, a bit like remembering I had a conversation in a dream, but I don't remember any of the actual conversation because it was a dream.' Damn I would give up half my blood and maybe five years of my life span to know from experience what it's like to have a brain that actually remembers most of what happens to it, rather than random debris washing ashore from the constantly receding tides of memory."

Another quote: "So between that and the fact that 90% or more of my life consists of things I don't remember doing but which I probably did do because "ADHD Memory, Haha I Mean What Is Memory?" and also "Yeah That Sounds Like Something I'd Do/Say." (A concept Amy {former roommate} never figured out. She always thought my saying "I don't remember that" was me gaslighting her, no matter how many damned times I explained that it's because I have ADHD and a memory like a bucket that's missing half of its bottom. Even when I would also add 'but that sounds like something I would say/do' to the end of 'I don't remember that,' she still never got it. Piss for brains, that one.)"

Just saw a video by ADHD YouTuber/TikTokker Onlyjayus wherein for no apparent reason she's speaking in a British accent (she's USAnian), and so I was like "LOL the ADHD urge to speak in random accents." Then added "All my life, I've imitated other accents. British, Irish, Scots, Indian, Australian... I think it must be an ADHD thing." Oh but I forgot Russian, I do a Russian accent sometimes too.

Oh the kinds of thoughts my ADHD brain brings me at times, like a cat gifting me with a bird or mouse that isn't quite dead yet. One I got just now in the bathroom: You know those horrible dragon/donkey hybrid babies in the Shrek series from Donkey and the lady dragon making babies together? Well my thought was this: How big are those going to get? Cuz like, yeah they're small NOW. But what if they get big like their mother? Even if they only get half as big as her, that's still terrifying.

That thought led to another thought: what's going to happen when they get fully grown? Are other dragons going to want to breed with them? Or will they breed with donkeys? Or will they find only rejection and eventually decide that incest is the only way to continue their abominable hybrid DNA? Best case scenario is that they eventually die having never bred with anyone or anything else. Worst case scenario is the incest angle. Dragons are already scary enough when they're apparently intelligent (even if the lady dragon couldn't or wouldn't speak), but after several generations of incest, will the fairytale world be besieged with Deliverance dragonkeys?

Posting this because these thoughts were so cursed that if I had to experience them, now you do too.

Having ADHD, and with it in my adulthood causing my reading speed to slow down and also making my reaction to large swaths of text on computer screens make me go "UGH," I use eSpeak to help me out. If you want an idea of how fast I can read with this method, check out the WAV file in the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dyxha792ervon3m/fast.wav?dl=0

ADHD is weird. Some days you struggle to remember common terms like "boarding school," other days you easily recall obscure terms like "the staff of Asclepius."