Well, if life isn't just a mixed bag!
The Good
I just returned to my family home late last night after going to a conference where I was the invited keynote speaker - I gave a 45 minute talk, my longest yet by far!! The experience was quite a high as I became a mini-celebratory after, with loads of people in my field, much more senior than me, jockeying for position to tell me they really enjoyed my talk and wanted to collaborate. This bodes pretty well for the job market after I finish my PhD. Yay!
And, so far, no covid. The conference was mandatory vaxxed and masked, and relatively small at ~115 people, but I am still nervous and being very careful, masking at home. Also, loads of people were coughing and sneezing and sniffling without covering their mouths/noses on my flight yesterday, including the guy behind me who sneezed right in my face! It is astonishing the number of people in the US just sniffling and wiping their noses with their hands then touching stuff, or coughing open mouthed or sneezing without Batman-ing. It's like no one learned anything the past few years. WTF. It gives me the willies.
Crossed fingers the no covid thing persists, but who knows. My aunt and cousins just got it last week, after avoiding it for 2.5 years. They have no choice but to work in crowded spaces, so it is no wonder.
The Bad
"Like a leaf on the wind..."
So that is the good stuff - the bad is that my sister now has gone to the ER with congestive heart failure after having trouble breathing for a few weeks now and dad has some severe delirium sometimes and went to the ER because he couldn't breathe earlier in my trip (he's home now but had a really bad fungal infection and pneumonia). It is all really hard to deal with, but because I've previously made peace with the high likelihood of Bad Stuff Always Happening, esp to them, I don't really feel much. I've been expecting all of this for a long time now. Maybe not this *exact* stuff, but for my sister/dad, I've been thinking and feeling and processing their imminent demises for decades now. Mostly I'm just seeing the good and silver linings as much as I can. I'm enjoying the time I have with them and not focusing on anything negative, rolling with the punches as they come, and not expecting anything in particular.
Losing other people's credit cards & Almost burning down the rental house
My ADHD has gotten really bad as well. My dad gave me one of his credit cards to go buy food and items for the household, treat my sister when out, and buy gas for errands he sends me on, and I lost it!! Or I thought I did, I ended up finding it again...in my WALLET...a month after I had thought I had accidentally let it slip out of my phone wallet and threw it away with a wad of napkins in a 7-11 trash can. By that time, too late, cc's already cancelled.
I also almost burned down the airbnb I was staying at last week at my work conference. How does that even HAPPEN??? Well, long story. The two grocery stores I went to didn't have half-dozen egg cartons, just whole dozen, and I didn't need that many for a week, so decided to hard-boil a bunch of eggs for my salads. I put the gas stove on high and put the eggs in, then turned the gas down to the lowest setting after it had reached boiling. I had meant to set a timer at this point, but got distracted while deciding whether or not to show up to the conference ice-breaker which was starting in 30 minutes. I decided to go, got in a rush getting ready, then left. the. house. WITHOUT turning off the stove. I *completely* forgot that I was making eggs.
I got to the ice breaker, and ended up staying an extra 30 mins beyond the end of the event because I was enjoying talking to old and new colleagues after 2.5 years of missing conferences. One of the organisers - a senior person I was desperately trying to impress - starting talking about how hard it was to boil water at the elevation we were at. He mentioned the word eggs and somewhere in the back of my brain, a weird thought wriggled its way to the front. Had I turned off the stove? Wasn't *I* making eggs?
And with that, I realized I had left the gas stove on for hours and hours in my AirBnB and likely had burned the place down. I just said suddenly, interrupting the very casual convo, that I had to go to a meeting I had completely forgotten about and leapt up from the table like an absolute weirdo. I turned around and apologized when I realized what I probably looked like, then RAN to my car. When I say I was freaking out on the 10 minute drive home...I was SCREAMING in the car, tears rolling down my face, with most of me just repeating OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD with intermittent screams and shaking and wondering how I could have been so stupid, and the other tiny % of me calmly telling myself to keep to the speed limit so I didn't get in a wreck or pulled over or hit a pedestrian, and that maybe it was OK, let's just go see what the damage was then deal with it.
THANK GOD, the high elevation we were at also meant that the 'low' setting on the gas stove was not even strong enough to heat the saucepan and eggs and water in it past slightly above bathwater temp. Too hot to touch, but there was a FULL pot of water with gross eggs inside by the time I got home. All was OK.
But it very easily might not have been.
What is going on?
...I don't know. There are several other much smaller examples of me being forgetful or distracted or...whatever lately, those are just the worst ones. None of this is LIKE ME. I don't know what is happening to make my symptoms so much worse! While on vacay, I'm not taking my meds, but I never did this type of stuff even pre-diagnosis. I absolutely do not make these types of mistakes. They are unheard of for me. I try so freaking hard all the time to avoid my ADHD from affecting other people, and here I am, just doing stuff that definitely impacts other people. I am getting to the point where I don't trust myself anymore.
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In conclusion, I have a lot to talk about to my therapist when I get back to NZ!
