There is a thing that my brain does where it notes a thing that needs to be tracked and then tracks it. Locations of objects in the house are frequent items in the tracked queue, but it could be a phone call that needs to be made next month, or a prescription refill. Often I’m not even aware that I’m tracking. It is just that the relevant item pops into the front of my brain when the internal timer goes ping. There are times when this tendency is annoying, like when my brain decides to track and fret over things that are decidedly not my problem. Or when it tracks something that I’m trying to ignore, such as how long I’ve been waiting for a submission reply. This constant subconscious tracking definitely adds some tension and stress to my daily life because I’m constantly hounded with a sense that I need to hurry and get things done because more tasks are coming. Automatic tracking is both a blessing and a trial.
Right now it is not happening. I’m not tracking things in the back of my head. I have the few tasks in front of me, a normal quantity of things to do in a day. But when I reach into the back of my brain where I usually have a dozen little trackers ticking away, there is just nothing. It’s like a swirling fog. I’m too tired for the trackers to work. All my physiological energy is being used up by my daily tasks and by healing. It is so astonishingly quiet in my head without all that ticking. Yet I know that all the tasks have not gone away. It is just that now they’ll surprise me by suddenly being urgent. It also means that I’m letting people down. They expect me to remember meetings, to answer emails, to get things done. I can see lots of things I should be doing, particularly with picking up all the dropped threads of school work for my sons. I wear out before I can do them all.
It is like I’ve lost a super power. I know it will come back when I’m well again. I can see that things will return to normal, but I’m not there yet and it is frustrating.