executive functioning disorder as part of the rest of my issues

Peaks and troughs, waxing and waning; my whole damn life is a rollercoaster and not in the fun way.

When I'm neutral or hyper, I get shit done. When I'm hyper I get a LOT of shit done, and sometimes to the extreme of needing done (I have a bullet journal that I started when I was hyper, it's been planned out til the middle of next year. I also started two essays when I was hyper and managed to finish one and half finish the other before the cycle ended - neither were due until the month after). When the mood screams to a halt or starts to slide over the cliff, my productivity goes down, apathy goes up and intention gets defenestrated.

This isn't the hour-to-hour or day-to-day moods, those are part of the BPD and I can ride those through to their conclusion fairly well after identifying them. No. This is the week-to-week, month-to-month mood shift that is part of the Bipolar, that is so subtle I can't see it until I'm so entrenched in it that it feels like I'm walking through treacle. And this is after a decade of knowing about the nature of these damn moods, I STILL can't fully identify them until after the fact. Fuck's sake.

Back to the EFD. This is part of the Asperger's. It waxes and wanes according to my moods and doesn't particularly care why the mood is what it is, just that it IS:

• I can be in an overall depression when the BPD comes up and goes "let's sing to ourselves for NO APPARENT REASON!" and all of a sudden I'm getting the shit done, looking fairly presentable, being fairly productive - all whilst being depressed to the point of self-harm - and then suddenly the productive mood drops. Boom. The shit is no longer getting done and I look like a homeless person caricature. 
• I can be in a hypomanic state where I'm singing all the time, excitable, nonsensical, where getting all the shit done in the blink of an eye seems just so doable but let's go do this first, eh? Too high to appreciate that the shit actually needs to get done, thanks all the same.
• When I'm euthymic, the shit to be done list is like a chores list and it gets worked through as and when. This is when I'm least affected by EFD. It's a fairly boring stage. Chores be as chores do. But hey, it's gotta get done and I'm not exactly invested in what's on the tv just now so let's get to it. Even the laundry eventually gets folded when I'm like this.

At the moment, I'm struggling. I struggle to get up through the night to attend to the goddamn nightowl spawn of satan we affectionately call "our youngest". I struggle to see the needs of others (oh? you are hungry? and you're telling me this because...?). I struggle to get anything done. You can put me in front of a sink of hot soapy water and give me the tools I need to get those few dishes that require hand-washing done... and I'll just stand there in a fog or sit down on the floor. There's three weeks of laundry to put away. Nearly 4 weeks. And I know this because NOT ONCE has it been tracked in my housework tracker, and I started that bitch on the 14th November.

I severely dislike being this way but it's not as simple as saying "suck it up buttercup, let's get going" - might work for an hour or two that day but after that I slump back down and can't be moved again. I had help a little while back from SAMH in the form of Jo, who would come around once a week and who initially got me to plan to do the work that needed doing the most. I did it. It tired me out. Wanna know what "it" was? Yeah, just putting the laundry away. Seems stupid, eh. And yet here we are. I managed to do that and a little more by the next week. Updated the plan. Eventually, at the end of 6 weeks I had a schedule to follow. Just a Monday to Friday schedule, leave the weekends free. And then it started to slide, I don't even know when. By the time I got my journal up and running, I was able to see that I wasn't doing as much as I thought I was doing. Tracker boxes going unfilled, tasks getting migrated. It's a hassle for anyone to get dressed who isn't me (because I wear the same shit over and over until it NEEDS laundering, basically - another Asperger's thing apparently), because all the clothes and towels etc are in a pile on top of a suitcase that hasn't yet been unpacked from our OCTOBER holiday. The kids still have their summer clothes in their drawers, the winter clothes safely packed away. And yet here I sit, arms like lead, typing this shit out to the 'verse where nobody will read it.


Meh.