(No more) Tickets please - An AuDHD guide to going out.
When part of you craves novelty and excitement, but another part just wants to stay home, it can make for a lot of strange behaviour.
A few months ago, I had tickets to see a band I’ve enjoyed for some years but never seen live. When the day of the gig arrived, I couldn’t get myself together enough to drive to Brighton to see it. I put it down to too many competing priorities, but I knew I was lying to myself.
Soon afterwards, the same band announced a gig at St Pancras church, an easy trip for me, so I bought tickets again. My enthusiasm remained high until, on the appointed day, it suddenly evaporated, and I missed them again.
After that, I moved my kitchen calendar onto my desk so nobody would be able to see everything I’ve planned for the future that I will probably end up avoiding.
I’d thought I was past the worst of this issue, but it turns out that the ADHD part of me, always on the lookout for a good time, shows no intention of letting up on impulse buying tickets to sometimes several events simultaneously, considering a commitment four weeks into the future one that may as well not exist at all.
All the while, even before the purchase is completed, the autistic part of me has begun work on the development of an exit ramp.
It’s impossible to explain the creeping dread and anxiety that develops when a much looked-forward to event appears on the horizon. The thought of having to maintain conversation is exhausting, sure, but it’s the disruption to routine that hurts the most. Informed that the second coming is occurring this evening at the park up the road, I’d tell you ‘I’ll be staying home with the dogs and a good book, but do let me know how it all goes.’
Just last year, a rare appearance of the aurora borealis in southern UK had people awake into the early hours to catch a rare glimpse. Personally, informed by the anecdotal information that it always looks more impressive in a photo taken with your phone, I was happy to wait until the following day and marvel vicariously at other people’s late-night experiences.
I fully accept that staying home as some form of resistance to uncertainty is futile, it’s just that I’d prefer to deal with ambiguity whilst pottering around in my garden, dead-heading the roses.
It’s suggested that extended exposure to an anxiety-inducing situation reduces the intensity of the feeling over time and, whilst this might be true for some, all I can tell you is that on a visit to the London Eye some years ago, an attraction I cannot recommend for someone who isn’t good with heights, I wished the blessed thing would move a bit faster and get me back down to the ground. Forty five minutes is a long time to either keep your eyes fixed on the horizon or, when that doesn’t work, tightly closed.
I have learned that placing any kind of firm requirement on myself, even if it’s something that was my idea in the first place and something I was originally keen to do, will often result in strenuous attempts to wriggle out of it at the last minute. When working in the corporate world, I once arranged an informal Christmas meeting for my team but, when it came to it, the only person who didn’t attend was me.
Always an avid reader, a pursuit best enjoyed alone, in bed, with the curtains drawn, I used to run up eye-watering fines at the local library for my refusal to return the books I’d borrowed. My justification? I resented being told what to do, even when it cost me. So now I just buy second-hand books, which feels very much like a win/win.
My earliest recollection of missing something I’d thought I wanted to attend, is the time me and my friend Dave Clark piled into his brother’s mini and headed off to the Hammersmith Odeon to make use of two spare tickets he had to see Motörhead on the ‘Ace Of Spades’ tour.
We’d got around two miles up the road when I decided I’d rather sit around doing nothing all evening, asked to stop the car, got out, and walked home.
My friends were bewildered, as was I to a degree, this being long before I had any idea why I behaved like this, but the overriding emotion was one of relief.
The habit reached it’s peak some years ago, just as I was emerging from a depression that had hospitalised me.
I developed a habit of arranging to do things that would have been enjoyed by the man I aspired to be but, unfortunately, not the one that I was.
In planning events for a future me that would never exist, I found that just imagining myself living a fuller social life already felt like enough. So much so that actually doing it seemed like an unnecessary complication.
For a time, I would keep the unused tickets in my drawer and review them occasionally with a confusing mixture of regret, sadness, and relief.
Having said all of that, I do know how to go out. I’ve seen a lot of things, and been to a lot of places, for someone who can always find a good reason to stay home.
The strategy guaranteed to ensure I turn up to something is other people relying on me. As much as it pains me to let down the excited and enthusiastic part of myself, it becomes intolerably uncomfortable to disappoint someone else.
But while having arranged to go somewhere with someone might always result in my successful arrival, it’s at this precise point that my mind turns its attention to the next challenge.
When can I go home again?
While most fans would confront Springsteen’s legendary four hour sets or comedian Ken Dodd’s marathon performances into the small hours as tremendous value, I want to know what time we’re starting and what time it ends.
It’s common practice for me to Google the finish time of a show I’m attending so that I can work out the nearest tube station and the earliest train home. Encores, notoriously bad in terms of disrupting carefully made travel plans, and indicative of poor emotional boundaries, often have to be missed.
When my children were born, I had been in the habit of spending a lot of the weekend either watching football or playing cricket, depending on the season. Whilst I enjoyed both, the length of time away from home increasingly felt like a burden, to the point that I endured years long struggle between the part of me that wanted to stay home, pushing them on a swing or getting glitter in my hair, and the part that insisted it was ‘wrong’ or ‘unhealthy’ to give up parts of myself that were familiar and longstanding.
When I first bought a season ticket to watch my football team, long before the birth of my children, to compensate for the temporary loss of familiar structure, I had to create a new routine that would generate a comforting level of predictability. So I’d eat the same breakfast, always drink my morning coffee from a specific mug, leave at the same time, park in the same place, buy a Mars bar in the same shop on my way to the ground and resolve only to eat it at half time if my team were winning. Most weeks, I returned home with an unopened Mars bar in my pocket.
As the children got older, I started to miss games to be with them which provided me with what felt like important legitimacy. It’s easier to tell someone you have to stay home to look after the kids, even if it isn’t really true.
But children grow up, so I got a dog.
At the vets recently, during one of the six-monthly sixteen hour round trips we take to see her specialist in Scotland, another owner and me were exchanging information about our respective charge’s ailments.
‘It’s more rewarding when you have to really look after an animal than it is to just have ‘a pet dog’, the other owner said to me.
‘Yes, and it’s another good reason to stay at home.’ I thought, without saying it out loud.
Daisy, my Labrador, has been at the root of a significant shift in me. She has caused my life to become simultaneously smaller and much bigger, as the pull to keep me at home with her has made me more reclusive, but opened a channel of vulnerability and connection that I often find hard to replicate comfortably with humans.
Nevertheless, it carries thin validity when I refuse invitations these days, citing a reluctance to leave my dog at home alone, especially as the dog is perfectly happy to be left, although I don’t tell anyone that.
It isn’t unusual for her to barely raise a quick whip of her tail when I return after having been somewhere without her. I’m not even sure she notices. Really it’s me who misses her simple and straightforward presence to the extent that, whatever I’m offered, Daisy invariably feels like a better alternative.
For so long, the habit of arranging events and then missing them felt like an emotional failing, but as I learned more about what I truly value rather than what I think I ought to value, I developed a more honest inner dialogue, and began to close the gap between who I am and who I thought I was expected to be.
There can be a feeling of bereavement at the acknowledgement there are lives we’re not built to live, and letting go of them is often a difficult process. So when I book tickets to see the same band twice and don’t show up either time, perhaps what I was really looking for was not the experience itself but more a normality that I sometimes find hard to produce, something that marks me out as just like other people who get excited about going to concerts or on holidays.
Recently, I went to a gig with my daughter and had a wonderful time.
After the show, there was trouble on the tube, so we got a cab back to the station, staring out at the lights, snaking through London back roads towards home.
‘I see Phoebe Bridgers is touring later this year,’ I tell her.
‘Are you going to get tickets?’
She knows about the time, after the release of her first album and long before she was famous, I had tickets to see her in a tiny London venue but didn’t go.
‘I’m going to try,” I say.
On the day of the presale, I’m staring at the queue marker, waiting for my turn, as it crawls along the screen.
When I’m let into the sale, I’m immediately crashed out again and back to the start of the line.
For a moment, I feel disappointed and frustrated, but then I realise I’m probably only chasing a feeling that I think I should have but don’t really want.
This week on ‘Sideways’ the podcast I co-host about addiction, recovery and friendship, we’re discussing compassion fatigue.
We hear about a knitwear related world record, and we both feel grateful for trousers.
It’s better than I’m making it sound. Probably.
You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, but don’t confuse it with the other one called ‘Sideways’ made by the BBC which is also really good but doesn’t feature a lyric quiz.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.
Thanks Graham this has helped me understand my daughter beta x also z xx close friend