FEATURE | HEALTH
Written by Cameron McCurdy (she/her) | @leighapparently | Social Media Coordinator
“I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax”
- Scottish-American proverb, circa 1977.
Every night once I finally get home from a long hard day of working from home, I find myself in my room. Maybe I’ll watch a movie, start a TV show, or read a book. But I find myself unable to. Those things feel like a waste of my time. My AuDHD brain tells me that every moment not spent making the most of being finally alone to work on one of my creative endeavours is a moment that I’ve wasted. Instead of letting my brain relax, I’ll start planning a comic, drawing or writing into the early hours of the morning. Or I’ll open up FL Studio and not stop making a new song until my room smells like hyperfocus fear sweats and I’ve just noticed that my bladder has been full to bursting for the past half hour.
During a rant to my therapist about how annoying it is that I find it hard to leave a social situation and go to bed, the topic of relaxing came up. My brain requires recharge time after everything I do. So naturally, my brain walks to my computer chair, sits me down and starts working on my art. I open up Photoshop, FadeIn, or FL Studio, and I stare at it. Either I stay up way too late making something, or I inevitably open YouTube without any conscious decision-making. I spend hours watching video essays about things I like, things I don’t like, and things I’ve never heard of. At some point, I inevitably fall into the doom scroll of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or TikToks. At no point am I having fun, or relaxing. I don’t stop and realise that during this time, I could have watched a movie, read three chapters of a book, or just lay in bed and be asleep already.
My therapist attributed my problems with relaxing to several factors.
My ADHD gives me complete and utter choice paralysis, sending me into a procrastinatory state of watching the most easily consumable media,
My anxiety tells me that if I don’t make the most of this free time, I WILL NEVER HAVE FREE TIME EVER AGAIN. IT’S NOW OR NEVER, DON’T FUCK IT UP.
My Autism enforces a habit that I have been making stronger and stronger for over ten years.
My fatigue leaves me exhausted, but not in a sleepy kind of way. A manic caffeine-fuelled exhaustion that leaves me wired but without any energy.
My therapist began assigning me homework at the end of each therapy session. That homework almost always consisted entirely of. “This week, please relax.”
“This week, I hope you get some rest, and have some time to yourself to just relax.”
“For the love of God, Cameron, you need to make learning how to relax your number one priority for the week.”
I returned to him after weeks of this, begging him for some insight into how to turn my brain off for a moment of self-care. His solution? I should get high and play video games. The weed tricks my ADHD into focusing on whatever task I’m already doing. It turns my constant anxious monologue into something I can claim isn’t true because it’s coming from a brain that’s on drugs. It tricks my autism into breaking patterns because I’m in a heightened state.
Videogames are a huge comfort for me. While I love other mediums more, there’s nothing quite like hyperfocusing to full immersion in a world I can interact with. Every few months, my focus activates and a particular game becomes a source of relaxation. Getting lost in the completely fictional worlds of Hollow Knight’s Hallownest, Celeste’s Mountain, Baldur’s Gates’ Faerûn, or something even more far-fetched like Assassin’s Creed II’s Renaissance Florence.
Despite this, I can never bring myself to play them. My boomer parents’ ethos that I should go play outside reverberates in my head whenever I open Steam. And the other parts of me tell myself that I should be doing something productive.
“What about when you’re high?” Asks my therapist. When I’m high, I spiral into a howling pit of self-directed anxiety over everything I’ve ever said and done, unless I have a task I’m doing.
“Okay but, what if you have a task to do when you’re high?” He asked. If I have a task to do, there is nothing else in the world that exists other than the task I’m doing.
“Okay.” He scrawled something down on the notepad just out of view of his computer’s camera. “Your homework this week is to boot up your computer, open a videogame, press start, and get as high as you can.”
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