Part 3: Resistance
This is the third installment in a series of blogs about my down-sizing and moving. Down-sizing and moving is hard for anyone to do but particularly hard for those of us affected by ADHD. What I am confronting now is my struggle to contact people for necessary services. For example, I live in a condo so there is a maintenance staff available to do repairs. In order to get the condo in shape to sell some things need to be fixed.
My first step was to clear away stuff and furniture blocking access to what needs to be fixed. It is quite a list. My struggle comes from contacting the condo staff to arrange the repairs. It is complicated. I don’t know a lot of things that I am kind of scared to ask. Like what repairs fall under the condo being responsible and what repairs I will need to pay for. Also scheduling is a bit of a bear because I see some of my clients in person at my condo and can’t have maintenance coming through while I am with a client. For some reason I feel guilty that I need the repairs that I did something wrong.
All this comes down to my not making the call or going to the condo office to talk to them. Those of us affected by ADHD often struggle with making calls and requests. A lot of us tend to feel intrusive when making a call. We don’t know what is going to happen during the call that makes us nervous too. What if we are asked something we don’t have an answer for?
I know I am procrastinating about getting the maintenance work started. I think I am embarrassed at all the stuff and mess I have in my two bedrooms where much of the work needs to be done. Intellectually I know whoever comes to do the work not only don’t care but have probably seen worse in their career. I am also embarrassed that I have lived with some of these problems for a while without getting them fixed. Probably making some of the problems worse and that embarrasses me also.
Knowing I have to get things started I have come up with a plan that I think will work for me. It is not the most efficient plan but I am more comfortable with it and will more likely follow through with it. That is the most important part – that I will follow through. Instead of going to the condo office with my long list of all the repairs I need done, I will go down and ask for maintenance to fix one problem that is in both my bedrooms. I could do the whole long list but I can feel my resistance to giving the whole list to them. We have to pay attention when we feel resistance. It often deters us from taking action. When we feel this resistance the best way I know around it is to either break it down in to smaller chunks that we can ease our way into which is what I am going to do. Or get some help from someone else to break through the barrier your resistance is causing.
Back to the trenches for me.
Until next week…