The Tunnel and the Flood

The list started before my feet were on the floor.

Make the bed. Clean the office. Send the work emails. Water the plants. Clean the office again, because apparently my brain wanted to mention it twice.

All of it urgent. None of it ranked.

So I did none of it.

I went upstairs. My coffee was ready, because I pre-made it the night before. I poured myself a cup with protein so I could have a cold brew later with my vitamins. Then I plopped down in front of the TV at 7am and watched sports highlights.

That was it. That was the whole morning.

And here is the strange part. It was the first time my head had been quiet all day, and the day had barely started.

My head doesn’t clock out

I don’t get a break from my own brain, even when I’m asleep.

I dream about work. I dream about the separation. I dream about my ex-wife. I dream about all the priorities I didn’t get to. My head runs all night, so I wake up already tired. The day hasn’t started and I’m already behind on rest, because the one place that’s supposed to be quiet isn’t.

I can barely fall asleep without the TV on. My head is going at all times, and the TV is the only thing that gives me separation from my own thoughts. It puts something between me and the noise.

That’s what the highlights did this morning. Not laziness. Separation.

For 45 minutes I wasn’t in the flood.

The flood and the tunnel

I’m medicated. People assume that fixes the focus problem. It doesn’t fix it. It trades it.

Off my medication, here’s what happens. My brain throws twenty tunnels at me at once. Twenty things, all lit up, all screaming that they’re the important one. I can’t pick. So I freeze. That’s the flood. Too many priorities firing at the same time, and the result is I sit on the couch and do none of them.

On my medication, I don’t get fewer tunnels. I still see all twenty. The difference is I pick one and disappear into it. And once I’m in that tunnel, I’m stuck in it until I come out the other side. Everything else falls away. The other nineteen priorities die quietly while I’m gone, and I don’t even notice them dying.

The medication doesn’t rank the list for me. It just trades the flood for a tunnel.

And the tunnel never picks the important thing. It picks the interesting one.

Yesterday I built a website instead of saving myself

Yesterday I was supposed to work on financial reporting. For the lawyers. For my court case.

That’s not a small thing. That has a deadline. That has people waiting on it. That actually matters to my life.

I started it. And then I started building my website instead.

I worked on that website all day. I got very little done on the finances. The website tunnel grabbed me and I was in it until I was exhausted, and by the end of the day the thing that actually mattered was barely touched.

Look at which tunnel won. Not the one with lawyers attached. Not the one with a court date. The website. The fun build. The thing nobody was making me do.

That’s the whole pattern in one day.

The boring thing is the problem

I used to think this was avoidance. That I was running from the hard stuff because it was painful.

But that’s not really it.

The truth is simpler and more frustrating. The mundane and the boring just aren’t fun or exciting to me, and my brain won’t grab them. That’s it. It’s not that the finances were too painful to face. It’s that they were boring, and boring is something my wiring physically refuses to pick up.

So I’ll sit there and look at the boring task for hours. Days. Weeks. Months. I want to do it. I know I have to do it. I’ll stare right at it and still not do it.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s wiring.

And watching yourself not do the thing you genuinely want to do, over and over, is its own kind of exhausting.

I skip the medicine on purpose

Here’s the part that makes the least sense, and it’s the part I most want to be honest about.

I know the things that help me.

Take the protein. Take the medication. Go for a walk. Ground myself. Get a workout in. I know, for a fact, that when I do those things, I’m less likely to fall into the flood. They work. I’ve felt them work.

And I skip them.

My mind is racing, and all I want is to get the thoughts out and get them done. Stopping to eat or walk or train feels like one more thing standing between me and the noise I’m trying to clear. So I blow right past the exact things that would clear it.

It’s the same wiring twice.

I skip the boring task because my brain won’t grab it.

And I skip the thing that would help me do the boring task, for the exact same reason.

The flood doesn’t just stop me from working. It stops me from doing the things that would calm the flood.

This article was a tunnel too

Here’s how this very article got written.

I sat down at 8:00. I looked at my emails first, because of course I did. Writing this was on my to-do list, my daily task, the thing I was supposed to do. And the second I looked at it I thought, I don’t really want to type all this out.

So I texted my friend Mara. She told me to try Wispr Flow, a new app she’d heard about. I went and looked at Wispr Flow. I looked at downloading it. I downloaded it. Then I dictated this whole article out loud using it, and honestly it was fantastic.

Then I decided I needed the perfect image. So I went digging through my phone and my iCloud. I found a photo I took from the Shard in London back in 2020. It looks like London Bridge station, all the trains converging and pouring into a tunnel. Which is basically my whole life in one picture.

Then I couldn’t export the photo from my own albums.

It’s now 9:05. I started at 8:00. I just burned an hour, on an article about how I burn hours, and the only thing I actually wanted was to get the article out.

The article about the tunnel was a tunnel.

What I actually know

I don’t have this solved. I want to be clear about that.

But I know a few things now that I didn’t used to put into words.

I know my brain is going to hand me twenty urgent things before I’m even awake, and that the urgency is a lie. Most of them aren’t urgent. They just all sound the same volume.

I know the flood and the tunnel are two versions of the same problem, and that medication moves me between them instead of out of them.

I know the only things that reliably give me separation from the noise are the TV, a walk, meditation, and getting the thoughts out of my head and onto something.

And I know I skip those things at the exact moments I need them most.

Knowing all of that doesn’t fix it. But it does mean that when I’m sitting on the couch at 7am watching highlights and feeling guilty about it, I can at least name what’s happening. My head finally went quiet. That’s not the failure. The failure is the twenty hours before it, when I let the flood run me.

The real work isn’t getting more done. It’s learning to do the small thing that calms the flood before the flood picks the tunnel for me.

Builder’s Note

If your brain works like mine, you already know the move that would help you most today. The walk. The water. The one task you keep staring at. The thing you keep skipping.

So here’s my real question for you.

What’s the thing you know would help you, that you skip anyway? And what do you think you’re actually chasing in the moment you skip it?

I’d love to hear it. I’m still learning how to stop skipping mine.