Homebody & Heart

If there’s one thing I’m consistent about, it’s being inconsistent.

I have ADHD, depression, and anxiety. I have been medicated for more than half my life. None of this is a surprise to me. And yet, every time I start something new, I seem genuinely shocked when my brain does its thing.

The thing, for me, looks like this: I get excited about an idea. I do the hardest part first, which is starting. I ride a burst of dopamine through a few weeks of real productivity. Then something happens. Usually nothing dramatic. I miss a day. And then another. And by day four of not posting, I have developed a full narrative about how I was never going to be the kind of person who does this anyway.

By day fourteen, I am avoiding the blog the way you avoid a friend you haven’t texted back in a month. The longer it’s been, the harder it is to open the app.

This is not new behavior. I have been doing this since I was small. The specifics change. The shape stays the same.

I fall off. I go quiet. I spend weeks convinced I’ve ruined the thing. Then one day I come back and discover nobody noticed, the thing is still there, and I am the only person who has been keeping score.

So, hi. I’m back.

I didn’t stop writing because I didn’t have anything to say. I stopped because my brain took one look at “be consistent about a creative project” and filed it under “absolutely not.” Not out of laziness. My brain is a loyal employee who is extremely bad at the specific job it was assigned.

Here are some actual, real things that kept me from posting:

I opened a draft. Looked at it. Closed the tab. Opened Instagram instead. Told myself I was “researching social media strategy.”

I decided I needed to “batch content” before I could post again, because real bloggers do that, probably. I did not batch anything. I watched three reels about batching content and felt productive.

I got stuck on whether the tone of a post was “right” and spent two weeks rewriting the first sentence. I did not write a second sentence.

I had a good idea on a Tuesday and then could not remember what it was on Wednesday, because I did not write it down, because my ADHD thinks “I’ll remember” is a reasonable sentence.

I got depressed. Not about the blog. About other things. The blog was just one of a long list of casualties. Here is a partial inventory of things that also suffered: my bedroom, which currently looks like a thrift store after a small earthquake. My car, which used to be spotless and is now hosting pine needles in the floorboard, a mystery sticky substance in the backseat that I can only describe as “toddler,” cat hair on the passenger seat, courtesy of my mom, who is unintentionally always wearing a cat hair coat, a blanket from last winter that has achieved permanent residence, and a dried egg yolk crumb living under the parking brake lever that I have chosen not to address. My sleep schedule. My grocery situation. My motivation to wash the same three sweaters in rotation. The blog was competing with all of that. The blog lost.

I told myself I’d start again “when I had more time.” This is a lie I tell myself about many things, including exercise, organizing my closet, and dealing with the pile of coats currently living on top of my son’s unused crib next to the box of hangers I bought specifically to solve this problem.

Anyway. Here I am. Again.

Something I’m learning, slowly, through a truly embarrassing amount of therapy and one medication adjustment: consistency is not a personality trait. It is a practice. And a practice has room for falling off. That’s built in. That’s actually the entire point.

The people I admire who make things and keep making things are not people who never miss a day. They are people who come back. Sometimes sheepishly. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes pretending they weren’t gone. Doesn’t matter. What matters is coming back.

So this is me. Coming back. Again. Unashamed and also mildly embarrassed, which is my natural state.

If you’re someone who also falls off things, abandons projects, can’t remember what day it is, or has a graveyard of half-started journals in a drawer somewhere: hi. Same. There is no secret club of Consistent People. If there is, they are not inviting you because you would not be able to keep a standing weekly meeting.

Start again anyway. Nobody is keeping score except the weirdest part of your own brain, and she is not a reliable narrator.