Always a fucking demand. I feel like all day every day all I experience is getting my attention yanked this way or that by everyone and everything. People, pets, friends, loved ones, tools, systems, tasks, the bin, my home, everything just yanks me randomly. “Pay attention to me, do this now, not that, do that now, not this, come here, go there, be present, be practical, be emotional, be fun, be serious, now, now, now, now!” It never fucking stops.

Why do I experience so many things as demands? It honestly feels like that. This must be an ADHD thing, feeling like I’m holding onto whatever’s going on in my mind at the moment and suddenly - YANK! Some external force pulls me away and I watch my attention fall away with whatever my mental state was and now I’m confused, like a sleepwalker that just woke up in the middle of the garden. But the demands don’t stop, they expect me to be immediately ready to engage, and I’m just blinking there, groggy, and I try to force myself to grab onto the new thing, to be present, to focus, to do, say, listen, operate, think.

But that’s not how it works, is it. I can’t just grab on, on demand. That’s kind of the point of ADHD. Grabbing on is automatic, I can’t directly control it. Like that scammy grabbing machine game, where you have some control over the arm, but when and where it grabs isn’t up to you. So I jostle the joystick, try to move myslef into a good position so that if and when the grabbing happens, I’ll be aiming where I need to be. But it’s not a sure thing and I am annoyed and angry and ashamed, because the Demands need me to nail it and nail it now and I just can’t. I try and I try and I cry with frustration but the arm won’t be dictated to, not even by me.

Well, anyways.