The Flow

Approximately a year ago, I lost my rhythm. Prior to that point, I had spent three months consistently getting things done. Floors were mopped and vacuumed weekly. Bathrooms were sparkling clean. Toys tidied nightly. All dishes were washed daily. I slept on clean sheets every week, and I exercised every other day. With the help of the app Habitica, I was living the functional adult dream. I was meeting and exceeding society’s arbitrary standards of baseline adult function.

Habitica uses an RPG format to help you stay motivated and remember to do your daily tasks. With my distractability and lack of executive function, having a reminder is critical. But having order and routine is critical too, so when my six year old daughter unexpectedly dropped a labor and planning intensive cosplay request in my lap thirty days before our planned trip to the Disneyland Halloween party, it threw me out of rhythm, and my carefully organized life fell into chaos.

My rhythm is like the tao. It flows effortlessly from one task to another serenely. There is no pressure, there is no demand. I do things as they pop up on my agenda with no emotional charge on the action. But the instant a demand is made, whether it is an appointment, an unexpected task, or even an unanticipated phone call, it’s like someone has dropped a stone into my clear pond, and the ripples disrupt the serenity of my flow and capsize my executive function in their wake. All energy is now in a heightened defensive state as my focus shifts from just being, to protecting myself against the anxiety of an unanticipated demand.

Once the rhythm has been disrupted, no amount of conscious effort to regain it is effective. Actively trying to establish a flow is about as successful as actively resisting thoughts while meditating; The more you try not to think, the more you realize you are thinking about not thinking, and the more your anxiety and frustration grows. Only passively observing the thoughts with no attachment makes meditation effective. It is the same with my flow. The act of resistance is dynamic, but the rhythm is passive. You do not create the flow, you surrender to it.

And therein lay the struggle. As someone who must control everything in her life to combat the strangling anxiety, I cannot consciously surrender to anything. Even knowing that my peace and calm was dependent on surrendering to the flow, I could not let go of my need for control. My awareness of my struggle made the knowledge that I needed to surrender a demand, forming a self-perpetuating feedback loop of demand avoidance.

I wish I could end this blog entry with some sort of clear instruction on how I overcame the demand avoidance curse and surrendered to the flow. I wish I understood how to get into my rhythm as well as I understood how I fell away from it. But suddenly yesterday, despite ill health and a consuming dread due to the descending chaos of an ever increasing fascist threat in my government, I found myself effortlessly swept away in the rhythm of my flow. A year after being derailed by a Dr. Facilier cosplay demanded a month prior to the event, I suddenly was inexplicably in the flow once more.