Spoons

I started listening to Dana K White's Slob Comes Clean podcast in February. I googled 'how to wash the dishes' because clearly if they weren't being washed I was doing it wrong. And I was right. I had been doing them wrong by trying to wash two days worth of dishes at once.  So I started running the dishwasher every single night. The dishwasher was a new purchase. We had only had it a few months. It was making a difference but the house was still a mess. My wife and I hoped would help keep things under control in a low spoons household*

It turns out with a disorder like ADHD, having the house under control gives me more spoons. I'm easily overstimulated and I have difficulty making decisions. But I know that washing the dishes every night is something I need to do. And now I know it is something I am able to do. Some nights I even want to do it. Washing the dishes every night means I never have a large pile to deal with. I have a limited attention span and washing an hour of dishes is very difficult. Yes it can hurt physically, since I have back pain, but I mean it is difficult mentally. I get distracted. I wander off. I do something else. Depending on the task I can focus for between 5 and 15 minutes. So dishes every day is achievable even on days when I have a migraine or want to throw up or really don't feel like it.

* If you haven't heard of it, spoon theory is a metaphor used by Christine Miserandino to explain to a friend without chronic pain what it is like to live with limited energy every day. We deal with both mental and physical pain in our home on a daily basis and hoped this would help. And it did. Once I started doing it every day.