Depression and the misunderstood Impossible Task

From Sue Kerr, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents we have a link to M. Molly Backes' tweet:

I so get this and I appreciate Backes' explanation of it. I have Impossible Tasks. Usually I have one or maybe two Impossible Tasks. I just can't get started on them. If I'm somewhat forced to face them, I can procrastinate the day away. I enter them on my calendar. I slide them forward to the next day. Repeat.

Currently my most egregious Impossible Task is the right and left directionals on the front of a Volvo. It's a 17-year old car and it looks it. It's a spare car that I'm not taking out on the roads, because the inspection is overdue. Because the right and left directional housings need to be replaced. Because the cable release for the front hood won't work.

When I was in my 20's and not so afflicted by Impossible Tasks (and coincidentally, PTSD) this would have been something I took care of in an afternoon. Maybe a few days, if I needed to order parts. I would have considered it fun. So far this has stretched out for several months.

Impossible Tasks seem to accumulate. So I'll go from having one or two, to having three or four. When I get to three or four, I feel a lot of weight on me.

I don't always get to three or four Impossible Tasks. There's a couple of curves like sine waves going on, with peaks and troughs. One curve is Tasks. The other curve is Availability/Energy, which folks sometimes refer to as Spoons. (See Christine Miserandino's 2003 essay, Spoon Theory). Inevitably, people who are constrained by Availability/Energy, due to disease or mental illness, are called spoonies.

When the Task curve is low, and the Spoons curve is high, I can complete a task or maybe even two in a day. Then the momentum shifts positive.

When the Task curve is high, and the Spoons curve is low, and then another Task arrives it's bad. It snowballs like an avalanche and if the total Tasks gets up to five, it's hard to get out of bed. I don't get out of bed.

You'll note that with certain patterns between the two curves, Spoons and Tasks, the cumulative effect is Underwater.

Friends who are not constrained by Spoons, or who knew me back in the day when I could do anything, just don't intuitively get that the Volvo sits there because I've got problems and I'm mentally ill. Especially the friends who've known me for a while, they think I can do anything and maybe there's no reason they should understand this without explicit communication.

I really hate the Impossible Task. I wish I had a way to signal that I'm subject to the phenomena. I'm sorry when I let people down. I hate to be ineffective. I know I appear as lazy or indifferent.