During a session with my therapist over dealing with ADHD, she asked me an interesting question: “Do you give yourself the freedom to be bored?”

Certainly a very interesting question isn’t it ? In a world with 5g, cellphones, Instagram, Twitter (I will never call in X), Youtube, Spotify, TikTok is it even possible for someone to NOT be entertained all the time ?

Yet, the thoughts and the turmoils do not go away. My deepest doubts, the voice within me, they all start roaring as soon as it is time to go to sleep.

In every moment of silence the emotions rush in. Guilt over tasks left unfinished, unstarted or postponed. Uncomfortable realizations, the insecurity of living in a fast changing world. My sleep is disturbed, my moments of silence are stabbed with the aformentioned guilt and the shame of not fixing my beloved bicycle for over 9 months.

What does it have to do with ADHD ? Turns out, being comfortable with being bored isn’t just limited to the boring moments. It seems to affect every activity of mine. My life is a rush. In every activity, I rush. When the next move is known, it becomes boring. When it gets boring, it implies to me that I am doing something mediocre, that something isn’t worth doing.

Imagine yourself stepping through a mathematical proof (okay I haven’t done any big ones, so let us take the example of solving a calculus problem instead). Once the main logic is derived, and the approach solidified, the steps become mechanical. Mechanical implies monotonous. Monotony implies mediocrity. That’s when I start to rush. Rush to the end. Rush to the next task. What next task you may ask. None. I do not know what comes next. But that is exactly the problem. The goal is to complete the current thing, to get out of the mediocrity as soon as possible. The world at large is almost always more interesting. There exists something more exciting, more difficult, more fun. Like the Vedantic search for truth by dimissing things as na iti, my rush is a negation of living in the moment.

And that’s when the mistakes start to happen. The steps are skipped. Important details forgotten. Conclusions rendered incorrect because the steps taken to it are incoherent. The logical order is jumbled because we were focused purely on the rush and nothing else. The mistakes cascade and turn into a catastrophy (a mere 6 marks in my Math exam during my high school finals would probably have changed my career trajectory, but here we are thanks to the RUSH)

When the time comes to take a pause, to slow down and reflect, is when the repressed emotions hit. All the mistakes made by rushing, even if the wounds are decades old come back to haunt you. To mock you for your inability to fix them, to persistently haunt you by making you feel insecure about your mediocrity, never confident of yourself, or of your abilities. You push these uncomfortable thoughts away, anything to get away from them. Mindlessly numbing yourself with whatever entertainment you could find: books, games, social media, endless scrolling, constantly reading the news. You never fix the rush, to slow down, to observe, to pause and to plan. After all how can one focus when then is a loud speaker screaming at the highest volume, full of impatience to get done with the thing at hand asap and to move on to the next one.

So here is to trying to deal with being bored. To not confusing the predictable with the monotonous and ultimately the mediocre. To pace myself. To focusing on playing the long game. To living in the moment. To be.