Its 4am. There is a cup of steaming coffee in front of me. My phone is on silent to help me avoid the ping of notifications. I have my study schedule for the day broken down into small achievable goals so as to not overwhelm me. I have the pomodoro app downloaded on my phone to reward myself with breaks after I finish my aforementioned small, achievable goals. I looked at myself in the mirror this morning as I was brushing my teeth, reminding myself of all the reasons, I needed to finish the chapter on 'Quality control in the audit of financial statements' like YESTERDAY and how, if I didn't finish it today I would fail my exam, never get a job, never find love and die alone with cats eating my body because no one cared enough about me to bury my body. I have done everything Chat GPT told me to do, when I, in frustration typed in 'how to fucking force myself to study' yesterday.
And yet, I sit there with my books opened, trying to force the muscles of my hand to lift the pen on the table, that somehow seems to weigh 100kg all of a sudden. I bribe my brain with coffee and beg it to cooperate in memorizing the chapter, but it deserts me when I needed it the most, instead looping the song 'APT APT' like, temples with loudspeakers, blaring bhajans during festivals. As I try to reign in my monkey brain, it suddenly replays the highlight reels of the last one year and the comebacks I should have said to the aunty who asked my how many more times I was going to fail my exams.
Like a theatre artist performing the same show every week, I too wake up at 4 am every day and play pretend at studying for my exams. It may be hard to believe, given my current situation, but there was a time when I actually used to good at studying. Sure, I was not making scientific breakthroughs or building a business and selling it for millions of dollars before I reached puberty, like kids these days, but I did manage to get above 80% in all my tests (well all except for math, but whatever, math is the language of the devil) and was by all accounts considered to be a good student. This makes my current situation of having to implore my brain to do its basic function of reading the text and memorizing it even more perplexing because I used to be like 'chitti the robo' when it came to memorizing theory in school. Where did I go wrong? how did I lose my way from the path of academic excellence? had the goddess Saraswati abandoned me because I became an atheist after leaving school?
Today as I'm contemplating my life choices and having an existential crisis, I spy in the corner of my laptop (which was open in case I needed to clarify my doubts, not for any other purpose of course) an innocuous bookmark of a reddit page appropriately titled by the past me as 'COME BACK AND READ' 2 years ago, which obviously I forgot all about, because who actually reads anything they book mark? Today as these storms of emotions roiled within me, I took the cowards path out by distracting myself with shit that I don't need in my life instead of trying to get to the root cause of what was causing my procrastination and actually --you know, better my life.
It was a reddit post by _bananagoggles_ about how she had always been the top student at school, acing all tests with like 2 hours of studying, breezing through her studies at school by putting in the bare minimum. Until of course it all came crashing down by the end of her first semester at college, when she was failing all the classes she took and was about to be expelled for non-attendance. And I was like that spiderman meme, 'Is this person me? and am I this person? Are we the same people?' She then talks about how she was diagnosed with ADHD after she went to the therapist to bring her careening, train wreck of a life back to the right track (her words, not mine), which obviously led me to the conclusion the of course I probably had ADHD too. Obviously, ADHD was the reason I was failing tests like _bananagoggles_. Obviously, ADHD was the suspect, the root cause of all my life problems. ADHD was the Joker to my Batman, an evil force in the world, that I had to destroy, if I was to live a happy life. So, I did what any sane person would do when they suspect they have some sort of an issue in life and went to google - ' Do I have ADHD?'.
Immediately google gave me a list of all the symptoms that people with ADHD suffer through. Difficulty sustaining attention-check. Easily distracted/bored - check, check. Avoidance of tasks that require sustained mental effort-check, check, check. After an hour of sleuthing about on the internet, I was absolutely convinced that ADHD was wreaking havoc in my life, and I did not even know it. One of the symptoms of ADHD was hyper focusing on random information and let me tell you, I have never felt more called out in my life- I had just then finished reading a book on Ghengis khan, Gengis khan people(granted it was a very engaging book which left me with a deep desire to become a nomadic shepherd living in the remote mountains of Mongolia, drinking yak milk and riding horses all day), instead of finishing the chapter on 'Quality control in audit of Financial Statement' which I should have finished like YESTERDAY.
After wasting about half a day imagining scenarios where I give a TED Talk 10 years from now about how I turned my life around, realized my full potential and created a million dollar business after I got properly diagnosed with ADHD, I realize that I have wasted yet another day and still have not fucking completed 'Quality control in audit of financial statement' which I should have finished like YETERDAY.
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