I think I have finally figured out a way to describe my anxious/scattered/depressed brain and I’d like to test it out here and let me see if any of you can relate.
My brain is a jar of multi-sized…balls with varying degrees of malleability.
(UGG. I’m 45 years old and still can’t use the word “balls” and not giggle a little bit.)
Each ball represents something I’m thinking about and everything is represented by a ball. Whether it’s me trying to decide what to cook for dinner, or how in the hell we’re going to pay for college for the kids when the time comes. When it comes time to do something, I just open the jar choose which ball I’m going to focus on. And if my brain is working efficiently - then there’s enough room where I can easily just spot the one ball I want and grab it. The big ones are easy to see. I might need to shake the jar around a bit if I need to get to a smaller one, but there’s plenty of space to reorganize things to get what I need.
The problem is, I suffer from many mental health problems. The anxiety and possibly some sort of attention deficit problems (sure would be nice if those tests weren’t so expensive) means there’s always waaaaaayyyyy too many balls that jar. There’s no room for things to really be moved around. And! They change in size independent of my decisions. And! The bigger they get? The less malleable they become so the smaller ideas/tasks/needs get squished as the bigger ones grow bigger and harder.
(OMG. HOW IS ANYONE TAKING THIS TALK OF BIG HARD BALLS SERIOUSLY?)
So, I may logically know that the volunteer freelance job I took on should take top priority right now…but the problem is the “put tabs in my non-fiction books” ball and the “is my child going to be okay in the future?” ball both grew way out of proportion and so now the only thing I see when I go in to grab one is those two. All of the others are squished to the side and to the bottom.
Logically I know that wasting time right now worrying about my kid’s adulthood is pointless. But my brain doesn’t use logic, that ball just grew one day and now I can’t stop thinking about it. I also logically know that “tab the books” project is just some random idea I had and has absolutely not priority over anything else in my life. AND YET…that ball just grew outside of my control and now it’s like I can’t focus on anything else until that task is done.
The undiagnosed ADHD part of my brain makes random balls just expand for no reason and I become obsessed with them, only seeing that one dumb ball. The anxiety disorder side of my brain makes random balls that represent things I have absolutely no immediate control over expand for no reason and that’s all I can see when I look into my brain.
SO! When it comes to time to actually trying to accomplish something, my logical brain knows: KIM! Tabbing books is not urgent or time sensitive, don’t spend time on that. Also, you can’t do anything about your kid’s future in this exact moment so quit worrying about that and focus on the laundry.
But since the ONLY balls I can see to grab are those two balls (with all of the actual important ones squished under them)…and my logical brain keeps telling me those two things are not where my attention needs to be…I just don’t do anything. I just stare off into the abyss. I scroll through TikTok. I watch Ted Lasso for the third time.
Since both parts of my atypical brain (trying not to call it “broken”) act independent of my logical brain, I can not predict what ball will suddenly grow or when. I was driving to the grocery store the other day and I suddenly remembered that we had lost our container of alan wrenches a long time ago and I completely zoned out of the conversation I was having with my kid…in the middle of the conversation. It was like the “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WHEN WE NEED ALAN WRENCHES?” ball just immediately went from the size of a pea to the size of an apple and I stopped talking to my kid and forgot where I was driving and what I was needing to buy at the grocery store.
“Mom? Are you even listening to me?” As I’m just completely zoned out driving.
“Ummm….yeah…I’m just thinking maybe I should run by Lowe’s and buy a set of alan wrenches since we lost ours.”
And then my kid who - mere seconds ago was participating in a 2-sided conversation about restaurants we’ll eat at when we get beyond the pandemic - is just looking at me like: WTF, Mom?
The final piece to this explainer is that there is always the “Despair Ball” in the jar that changes in size based on how my depression is being managed. If my depression is spiraling then that ball just grows into a giant marble and nothing else has a chance of getting around it. That ball is always there…that’s just the life of living with depression…it’s just a matter of whether or not you can get to any other ball besides that one. If I can kinda push it to the side and still function…then there’s no need for intervention. But when it becomes a giant marble and I’m just wallowing in uncontrolled despair? Unable to focus on anything? Then I know I need to talk to someone on my care team.
What do you think? Does any of this seem relatable? Do you think this could be useful in trying to explain my status to my psychiatrist? It’s sometimes hard when you have several different issues, how to explain which ones are hindering you the most. But I feel like if I could get him on board with this metaphor maybe I could explain my mental health better.
Let’s just hope he doesn’t giggle when he hears me talk about big hard balls.
Yes it makes sense. I don't think any one mental health issue within a person exists in isolation. Where there are multiple things - ADHD, depression, anxiety- they all affect and are related to each other. When I get hyper-focused on a project (lately it's been working in my yard several hours per day), there is some underlying subconscious cause to that. An avoidance of confronting more anxiety-provoking issues, for example. This even happens when I get distracted during conversation. The antidote is awareness - What happened before I got distracted? When did I lose my focus? What was I thinking about and how did I feel in that moment? It's usually some avoidance mechanism embedded deep within my psyche. I haven't done enough digging yet to completely heal myself but I have made some progress on my ADHD by doing this kind of awareness practice. I'm not convinced that ADHD could exist without some kind of psychological trauma to be sorted out. It's too complicated.
So relatable, great way to describe it. ADHD and anxiety often go together and they definitely do for me, like a tag team of elves making things messier in my brain. Ritalin has been great for me, and I hope you can try meds at some point—I’m sorry the diagnosis has been cost-prohibitive so far, that sucks. I say that I notice the absence of Ritalin, not its presence.