Day 19: it just keeps happening!

I did a couple of the hard things that my previous email assured readers, courtesy of Ms Rachel, that you can in fact do. I guess this email is proof!

I am feeling more testy and scatterbrained than normal because I’ve spent the last couple of hours writing about AI, and there is no topic more recursively annoying. The short version is that AI isn’t intelligent; it’s a marketing term for a technology that can be quite useful but is being used for a colossal grift to prop up the growth/stock price of a bunch of wildly unscrupulous (steal everything) and dishonest (lie near-constantly about their technology) tech companies. I hate nearly everything about it and consequently I am very grumpy. But writing the article — and trying to make it readable, an awful task — is indeed one of the Hard Things I must do.

So was sending an invoice. I hate sending invoices; they key right in to my rejection anxiety. What if the client quibbles the amount? What if they don’t pay? The problem is, if I don’t send them, I don’t get paid. Like so many things in neurodiversity (or possibly just life, I’m sure this happens to everyone but I only know the neurodiverse side of it, sorry) it comes down to duelling anxieties. Two wolves, if you will. Eventually one Anxiety Wolf (being able to pay the mortgage) eats the other one (being worried about asking people for money in return for services rendered) and I enjoy a few minutes peace before the cosmic cycle births a new Anxiety Wolf and it begins anew.

The way I sometimes remember to deal with these things is something I’m going to call reverse urge-surfing. No, don’t run, let me explain. “Urge surfing” is a meditation-adjacent term which involves feeling an urge — let’s say, to eat a cookie when you’ve already had two today — and noting it, taking a scientific interest in it, rather than acting on it. Almost always, it will fade away; showing that it was in fact just another thought.

The idea of reverse urge-surfing is employed when I feel the urge to not do something, like sending an invoice. I’ve written about this only once before because it’s… a bit weird, but for me, it works. Essentially, I pretend that I’m a robot; or that I’m a passenger in my otherwise autonomous body. It’s a kind of low-key disassociation, I suppose. If it’s invoicing, I just kind of let my fingers do the walking across the document that needs sending and think to myself, “ah well, this is happening. That “Send” button will get clicked in a minute, and then I can take the wheel back again.”

I’m not sure I’m explaining it very well, but it works. Another place I find myself doing it is getting out of bed when there isn’t a kid yelling at me to do so; I can lose myself in arguments for and against getting up but I find if I pretend my legs are swinging up and out of the bed of their own accord, like someone else was holding a remote control for my limbs, my body makes up my mind for me.

I hope that was weird enough for you. Sadly, my artificial intelligence article is much weirder, and hopefully it will soon be finished and published so I can subject you to that too.

Until then, thanks as always for reading.