Something is fundamentally wrong with me. Seriously wrong. Despite my best intentions, I still seem incapable of getting shit done. Like any shit. At all. Ever.
I don’t pretend that this is a unique struggle. In fact, I would hazard that it is probably one of the most universal. As such, I must admit that I feel rather pathetic giving any validity to the suggestion that I am anything other than simply lazy.
Whenever I trap myself in this thinking, this cycle of self loathing which might be permissible if it gave me any drive, I usually tend to (somewhat feebly) comfort myself with the recollection of my intentions. “At the start of the week I had a great routine planned, I really intended to follow through with it”. I convince myself that the fact that I intended to be productive somehow reduces the moral shadow that a week in which I achieved very little casts over my character. My good intentions seem to promote me from lazy to pitiful. Not much of a promotion, I’ll grant you, but it does allow me to have some sympathy for myself that the label ‘lazy’ does not permit.
Intentions are funny things. I have begun to see them as moral loopholes to soothe my ego. As comforting as they are, I know that they have no practical utility. They are not tangible. Unless they become reality, intentions are little more than empty promises to myself that turn into conscious lies the longer I tell them with the knowledge I won’t follow through. History repeats itself. My history is one of best intentions that never come to fruition.
‘Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions.’
– The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort
To be clear, I am not suggesting we begin to take advice from Jordan Belfort. I’ve seen The Wolf of Wall Street, and after the realisation that age was not the kindest to Leonardo DiCaprio, my biggest takeaway was that Belfort is a massive bellend (to put it mildly). However, that was the most popular result that came up when I googled ‘quotes about intentions’ (in a completely non-cheesy, non-pinterest way of course). It just so happened to perfectly sum up how I’ve been berating myself recently.
Here are the actions that I didn’t take this week, laid out plain and simple like crimes during a trial. I didn’t get an essay written. As a matter of fact, I didn’t get much of my reading done either. I didn’t get up before noon. I only went to the gym once instead of the 5 times that I had intended. I didn’t drink enough water and I definitely didn’t get my screen time as low as I wanted it to be. My list of inactions is a pretty bleak one.
I feel so guilty that I cannot sit at a desk and work. It’s very simple really. Sit there, read some words, jot some notes and eventually write an essay. 5 pages tops. 2000 words. 2000 words about something I once protested to be passionately interested in. 2000 words that will be read by one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. 2000 words submitted to a university that some people spend much of their life breaking their backs to get into. 2000 words written in a safe and warm environment. These 2000 words are a privilege. A massive privilege and I imagine that I will never completely understand the full extent to which they are.
The other night it hit me whilst I was laid in bed, safe and rested, doom scrolling on TikTok. I came across a video discussing the exploitations of SHEIN workers. Sometimes they will go a whole month with only one day off and 75 hour working weeks are common. I felt sick. Here was me, begrudging that I had a couple of essays to write whilst hundreds of thousands of people were trapped in a cycle of exploitation. It wasn’t as though I had been unaware of this before that video. But as appears to be a common human defect, sickeningly we often become so engrossed in our own affairs that we fail to recognise the privilege of some of our ‘problems’. That is something I want to work on, or rather, must work on.
Despite this, I have conditioned myself to fear those 2000 words. They hang over me like the dentist did when I was eight. Always in the back of my mind, taunting me in my sleep. I have convinced myself that I can’t do it. I can’t do the work. I have let these thoughts simmer for too long that they have now become my reality. Every day I have the best intentions of writing those 2000 words but, alas, every day I fail to do so.
I must apologise. If you read my column last week then you will know that this is not exactly the article that I promised you. Aside from a commentary on rustication, I intended for a tidy series of ‘reports’, so to speak, on tackling various ADHD struggles, focusing on one area of improvement each week. A sort of documentation of self-help if you will. Clearly, this is not what you have read. If anything, though, this is the most honest thing that I could have written. This is the most reflective piece of writing about my experience of ADHD that I could have produced as it captures the reality of this disability. Despite the desire, the planning and the intention to do a plethora of wonderful things (which are very mundane things for a lot of people) ADHD renders me, at least for the time being, struggling to do them.
Yet, despite the awareness that this is the cycle that I have been stuck in for some time now, I still have the hope, the best intentions, that next week will be different.