What we’ve got here is, failure to prioritise

With apologies to Paul Newman and Strother Martin …

Prioritise or die!

OK, so Luke was just being a cocky bastard, and the captain was taking him down a peg or two. In my case, I’m being a cocky bastard by actually wanting to get stuff done, and it’s OCD playing Strother’s role as captain, and knocking me back. (Well, I say OCD, but as with all of these things, who knows. It’s probably not directly a Tourette problem, but it could well be related to Aspergers / ASD, and potentially any other co-morbid conditions that I don’t even know I have).

So what is it that knocks me down the hill?

Simple, everything is important. I need to get everything done, or I feel stressed and anxious.

Just to illustrate the point, here are some things that I want to do, but are perhaps big jobs, or there’s a learning curve involved, or simply that I don’t get around to because other things get prioritised naturally for me, by circumstances or other people.

• Ripping all my CDs to the hard drive (which includes tagging them appropriately, backing them up and making sure they are in suitable folder structures with a consistent naming convention)
• Reading. Yep, I want to read everything.
• Listening to music. I used to love music, it calmed me. These days I feel stressed because I don’t give enough time to my favourite bands, and because I don’t discover enough new music, or because I have so much music and still can’t decide what to listen to.
• Painting & drawing. I want to do this, but it’s one of those things that life gets in the way of.
• Learning to use my telescope. I got a telescope (a nice one!) from Mrs. Twitchy a couple of years back, and I really want to learn to use it properly.
• Watching TV & films. There’s a whole list of things I’d like to see, as well as a list of things I think I should see to improve my life.
• Learning stuff. I realise we’re in the realms of the unreasonable now, but I want to know and understand everything. This is very closely linked to stress in my reading and TV watching habits as well, since I often feel bad when I read “light” stuff or watch an action film instead of something that might teach me new stuff.
• Sell/donate all my CDs and DVDs. Once the CDs are ripped of course. I don’t need these things, but I want to rip them first, and I also need to catalogue them all before I can either sell them or give them to charity.
• Move stuff from my parents house. I have a lot of stuff in the UK, much of it books I would like to have here, and much of it is probably rubbish I could get rid of. I want to sort it out. Incidentally, this stresses my Father out as well, and he in turn passes the stress on to me.

This is just a short list. There are many more things that belong on here – some big, some extremely minor.

It’s not that I don’t know how to prioritise – I do. I probably know better than most how to do it, and I’m extremely organised at work (I have to be!). It’s just that I can’t do it. Physically can’t. I try and make a decision on these things, and everything is equally important, so I end up doing something else entirely, or just flicking through Netflix and watching something crap – not even something on my “to be watched” list, because that seems to complicated.

It’s a hard problem to explain to people, because they think I’m just bad at prioritising and start telling me to make a list and rate tasks with priorities etc. etc. etc. Everybody has their own methods, and I know them all. I’m sure they all work very well for the people telling me, but they don’t work for me.

So, I can’t be the only one that has problems with this kind of stuff. How do other people handle it?

Oh, and if you want tips on how to prioritise stuff, I’m your man!

 

What is Tourette Syndrome?

It’s probably worth at this point defining some terms, since a large part of the problem is that most people aren’t aware of what Tourette Syndrome, or any of its co-morbid friends, is really all about.

Well, I’ve got news for you: there really is no such disease!

Yup.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NIH) defines Tourette Syndrome as:

… a neurological disorder characterized by repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations called tics.

Which is of course a pretty good start. It then goes on to talk about common symptoms, whether people can control them, and a whole host of other information that I wish pretty much everybody on the planet was aware of.

The bottom line though, is that it’s a condition about which we don’t know very much. TS itself is defined in the DSM, but it’s basically a collection of symptoms that seem to belong together rather than a well-defined condition, and since every sufferer probably has their own collection of co-morbid symptoms it would probably be hard to define a “textbook” patient.

This reflects the (non-genetic version) of the definition of “Syndrome”. As defined by Wikipedia:

A syndrome, in medicine and psychology, is the collection of signs and symptoms that are observed in, and characteristic of, a single condition.

Once we throw OCD and Aspergers into the mix as well, both of which are also mostly a collection of symptoms that are grouped together for convenience, and both of which are fairly common amongst Tourette sufferers, we end up with a mish-mash of symptoms that is hell for the patient, but very hard to label.

We’re also in the realm of Autism Spectrum Disorder with all three of these conditions, and a lot of the symptoms come down to a matter of degree.

Of course labels serve a very useful purpose: they let doctors and experts talk about the problems in a wider context; they allow fellow sufferers to form communities and talk about their experiences; once a label is applied it can make it much easier to obtain treatment. So I am not against labelling in that respect. In fact I think we need to if we are to make any progress. As long as we are prepared to revise our definitions of those labels the more we learn about them (aka. Science!)

The downside of labelling is that it can create stigma. In the worst cases it may even deny people access to the care they need, or the insurance they need in order to get that care.

This is why it is so important that everybody understand what is involved in mental illness. It is, for the most part, invisible (OK, so I spend a fair amount of time wishing my tics were invisible, but they are the exception rather than the rule).

Look around you now, who do you see? Which of those people has a mental illness? Who has OCD? Who is depressed? Who suffers from crippling anxiety attacks? Who is anorexic or has PTSD? Which of those people is on the autistic spectrum, has a genius level IQ but falls apart in social situations? Who is the new mother with postpartum depression?

There is no way of knowing.

Mental illness affects a huge number of people, and the more it is understood, the less it is stigmatised, and the easier it becomes to talk about it openly and help those who are suffering.

I will leave you with the image I use for my Twitter account, as I think that sums it up quite well and is most probably worth a lot more than the 600 or so words in this post.