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Brian won't let me tell you about Brian!
Brian won't let me tell you about Brian!
In the interest of accountability, I have to share with you that Brian seeks to prevent me from talking about all the ways he affects my life. Sorry-not-sorry to Brian, we haven't signed an NDA.
The idea for me to start this project is a few years old. There are a couple of ways that Brian has affected the creation.
At first, Brian represented a brain fog so intense that I couldn't follow a sentence from beginning to end and once brought home a block of lard (animal fat) instead of shortening to my vegetarian household. I could not manage, at that time, to reliably do anything.
Now, Brian mostly manifests himself in time-blindness and demand avoidance (ADHD).
If I'm honest, we're off on a bit of a rocky foot here*, and the content I'm currently making is not content I feel super proud of. It's fine. It's main feature is that it is something. I, like many, have spent altogether too much time trying to find the perfect way to do something. I research, I compare, I self-doubt.... sounding familiar to anyone? ... and ultimately quit before starting. This is a cycle that I have entered into repeatedly during my life. I'm not alone - there are already plenty of relevant cliché phrases. One of my personal favourites is - Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Another is - Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough.
It's my personal opinion that this concept cannot be overshared. I know. I know. There are those who would take those phrases as excuse to under perform. I suspect that these are the same people who try out calorie counting and say that it doesn't work because every calorie came from a cheeto. But when the problem is Brian... so often just getting started can go a really long way. Your first YouTube video is going to be bad. Your first pencil portait will probably make children cry. Your first cleaning sweep through a very messy room will take literally forever and you will be exhausted and there will be so much left to do because you couldn't see all of the things that there were to do when there were so many things to do when you started and why does does evnt accumulate on baseboards. **breeeathe** Ahem. Yes.
Get started. It's ok to do it well. But it's also ok to do it badly. Just. Get. Started.
*And for the love of all that is good, please appreciate my mixed metaphor! I have a plan for a whole post about mixed metaphors, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it!
What about Brian?
What about Brian?
Here's the thing about having Brian in your life. All day, every day, we spend the majority of our time surrounded by people who have either never heard of Brian or people who are also trying to desperately pretend that Brian doesn't exist. And, even if he did exist, he is certainly not present in their very-super-normal-nothing-to-see- here lives.
It sucks.
It's othering.
And for a lot of us, present company included, it can be deeply shameful.
But, here's the rub. Shame is a beast that can create a self-perpetuating cycle by insisting on staying hidden. Shame thrives in those darkest places within us, where even the most self-confident person can quietly question their worth as a human being. In these dark and secluded places, many of us have a persistent voice that spews cruelty and insists on the most uncharitable interpretations of our every behaviour, feature, and thought. Cruelty on a level that we would never think about, much less say out loud, to even a perfect stranger.
We deserve better, and frankly, so does Brian. Whether Brian is causing time-blindness, demand-avoidance, or even preventing you from remembering how to use your very own microwave, the shame of living a neurospicy life comes, at least in part, from hiding our spicy in the dark. From the incessant exhaustion of self-monitoring, masking, and trying to fly below the radar. Full disclosure and no toxic positivity here, many if not most of us, have a good reason we developed these unhealthy coping mechanisms. Too many good reasons to include in this particular post.
BUT!
You are not alone. It sucks. It's needless hard. And, you and me? We can do hard things. Especially when we work together.
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