The Guard Rails

“And how does an Obliger meet an inner expectation? By creating outer accountability. Once Obligers realize that outer accountability is the crucial missing element, the solution is very straightforward and easy to supply.”

I noted a while ago that I only seem to get things done when I have a guard rail to push against. I thought it was an ADHD thing; my brain doesn’t produce enough dopamine to get me excited to do something, so I need the external pressure to get me moving, and there may be something to that, but the thing is, I tend to meet my external obligations, but flounder at my internal ones.

But then look back the other way. I have tried to make my internal obligations external ones. I have them pasted on the same list as the external ones. I give them the same weight as the external ones. Do I have to actually bring in an external party to create the obligation? Do I have to join a writing group to get myself to write?

I originally quizzed out as a Questioner, so this is kind of funny, but I based that on my difficulty in getting things done, and this negative view of myself as someone who doesn’t get things done. But that’s not true. I get a lot of things done.

I wonder if my inability to complete things for my self is based on my shattered self-esteem. Years of having to mask made me bury things that I was interested in so they wouldn’t stick out, and my mother was fond of poking holes in any little fancy I had, to the point where I don’t really trust myself to do much of anything right. And again, that’s just not true. The wrong things stand out, sure, but against a field of right things.

Devon Price wrote that unmasking is a “radical act of self-love”. Radical, in that it’s the opposite of what you’ve been doing for so long. I think I kind of got that at the time. But what I didn’t get was that what we’d buried, what we thought we’d hidden from the world, that’s actually the most important part, that’s the love right there. And man, does it take a while to get down there and free it.

I think I polled as a Questioner because I don’t like to think that I would follow orders blindly, that I’ll do something because I want to do it, not because you tell me to, but I think that might be vanity. The truth is, I do things because I want other people to like me. Like I said, I have little sense of self-worth, so I’ve been borrowing from others for a long time.

But if I build my sense of self-worth, will that change? Recognizing my ADHD and building a framework to accommodate it turned me from someone who felt like they struggled to get things done to someone who more feels like they match reality, as least as it is reflected back to me by others. The only time I’ve gotten a negative job review was when I was severely depressed. I was described as a heartbreak of student by a professor, because I could do such brilliant work only to go down in flames each semester. This was well before diagnosis, well before I started trying to “fix things”.

And then I had to drop the mindset of “fixing it”. It won’t go away. It just needs to accommodated and overcome. And part of the ADHD and part of the Autism is that it fluctuates, changing day by day, week by week, month by month. Change is the only constant. There are no absolutes.

So, once I stop beating myself up for having ADHD, I go from someone who has trouble meeting outside expectations to someone who consistently meets outside expectations. But in recognizing my lack of self-esteem, I go from someone who meets internal expectations to someone who has trouble with internal expectations. I think I need to recognize that I was still pretty masked when I took the quiz last year. Honestly, though, I don’t really feel like taking it again.

I feel like I’m working on the self-esteem issue. What happens when I come to the table meeting both internal and external obligations? Maybe the mistake is to view oneself as static, sealed within a single one of these tendencies for life. That would ignore the fact that one is always growing, and changing. You yourself are the river you never step into twice.

Maybe instead of pigeonholing myself, I should see it as more of a path, traces of the journey, going from Rebel to Questioner to Obliger to Upholder, meeting them all.

Excerpt From
The Four Tendencies
Gretchen Rubin
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-four-tendencies/id1187681096
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