It is officially summer.

This means that I am finally making progress on dry-weather-dependent tasks on the somewhat crumbling house - sanding, filling, and repainting the garden room’s dubious frame, which is now more filler than wood, and enjoying the sunshine as I do so. I have realised in the last few weeks more than ever how important it is to me to be making progress on something, really at all times. As I learn more about ADHD, so many things make sense retrospectively - my constant drive to be doing, the picking-up-and-putting-down of tasks, the difficulty staying motivated over the longer periods needed by big pieces of work (and very long-term readers may recall the hell that was my PhD, during which I procrastinated 300,000 words of blogging, rebuilt a cob house, took up writing for magazinse, and had a baby, all to escape my literature review**)… All of this makes much more sense when you put it in the context of a constant chasing of dopamine and seratonin. It is good, if a bit sad, to learn these things about myself, and to realise too where so many of the strategies I have evolved have come from, and frankly how bloody good these strategies have been.

That said, I posted back in March that I was bloody tired, and that hasn’t shifted yet. The summer has brought a sense of lightness, though, and I am back to walking outdoors most days, surrounded by exploding hedgerows and the formation flight aerobatics of the death-defying swifts who have semi-moved into our barn. (The elder childebeest turned 15 on the first of June, and celebrated with a sleepover in the upstairs of said barn, which, it must be said, is a pretty awesome teen space; fairy lights and rudimentary flooring complemented by a large inflatable bed and itinerant cats - what more could you want?)

I walk past the door to the pottery studio most days, but have yet to get back into a work pattern that gives me space for this. I am trying not to feel guilt about this, but at the same time there is an element of self-reproach involved in being jack of all trades, I sometimes think, and I do wish that I had found That One Thing I’m Supposed To Do, though think increasingly that I’m just a mapgie, destined to hop sideways from one shiny gem to the next, and perhaps that is OK after all.

I’ve been asked to co-write a book with my professional hat on. I don’t really want to do it, if I’m honest, but feel perhaps I ought to, with career goals (I believe one is supposed to have these at this stage) in mind. Still, though, given how much I enjoy writing but how little time I have for it, I prefer to think that it still might happen that I will instead find space to write the novel I have now begun a dozen times. I find the autumn a more energising time, though, perhaps because the academic cycle is now so hard-wired into my being that it’s a time of new beginnings and sharpened pencils for me at a cellular level. We shall see.

And you? How is June treating you?

** Only a mild exaggeration.