Going aluminum: why is starting the hardest part?

finishing is the second thru twelfth hardest parts

How do you begin things? Do you need to meticulously plan out every step of your journey or do you just dive headlong into the lightless vacuum of space, hurtling your body into the nothing as unseen dark gravities pull you apart, atomizing your everything, leaving no trace of anything, erasing you from existence like the photo of the McFly children in Back to the Future?

The ADHD algorithm sent me a video of someone who said that he begins things by narrating out loud what he’s about to do. I am putting my phone away, you might say, and then do. I am standing up and walking to the kitchen, you might continue. I am opening the cabinet, you intone, aloud. I am taking out this bag of chocolate chips that Aly said is just for baking, you utter into the uncaring sky. I am pouring the chocolate chips down my gullet like a baby bird choking down the nourishing vomit of its mother, you announce to the universe. I am hiding the empty bag in the garbage under other garbage and will deny ever knowing what a chocolate chip is, you whisper, through tears, so as not to be heard.

What I am saying is that, despite helpful gifs of (what’s that guy’s name? Jonas Judas? Oh yeah!) Shia LaBeouf telling you to just do it…

…despite WANTING to do things, like especially to write and read more poetry, starting is the hardest part. Once the things are started, then you just have to somehow finish them. But let’s not worry about that for the time being.

And by you I mean me.

Maybe things would be easier if Shia was in my house yelling at me, but that would present a different set of challenges.

I feel like dumb old shame is the main culprit here. Shame and then the treating of shame with my little stupid dopamine outlets, watching ads for rewards on free phone games, being told to download Royal Match by an endless line of unrecognizable celebrities, just so I can get some extra jewels to spend in the upgrade store.

I’m not the first person to talk about the difficulty of starting, the need for all the weather conditions to be perfect in order to just do the thing.

I asked my 7-year-old (who also has ADHD) what she does when she needs to get started on something she’s been avoiding. She said sometimes drawing a picture first helps. I have yet to try this but I could definitely see that working: doing something meditative and emotionally neutral as a way to ease into the idea of something a little more challenging.

One strategy that has worked in the past for me is body doubling, the scientifically unproven phenomenon that the mere presence of someone else helps to focus you on more productive pursuits. But perhaps BECAUSE of my executive functioning challenges, it is hard to organize a regular opportunity to for meeting a body double buddy.

That has been part of the magic of the Zoom poetry workshops I’ve been facilitating (and participating in) since April 2020, just having other people writing along with me at a scheduled time. I have half-joked that I want to start a second Zoom workshop that is just people gathering online to read silently for two hours.

So I don’t know - what do you do to shit so you don’t have to get off the pot?

One last thing: I have heard that some of us are unable to start things because we are “perfectionists” and don’t want to begin something unless it’s going to be finished and “perfect.” I feel like the term perfectionist usually refers to someone more type A than me, but I read something w/r/t perfectionism in the book Pathways to Success: Taking Conservation to Scale in Complex Systems. Essentially, waiting around until one can deliver the “gold standard” of excellence - in this case, in ecosystem recovery - means that you may never start a worthy project. They recommend shifting this thinking to an “aluminum standard” and just doing your best with the resources you got. This mentality is easily transferable to, say, disciplined writing and reading (or chores, or answering dumb work emails, or finishing a newsletter post).

Living up to an aluminum standard is great - especially when the stakes are way lower than addressing the global biodiversity crisis. You can make yourself FEEL fancier by simply saying “aluminum” in a British accent.

Okay, here I go…