drop the plastic balls

jennifer Lynn Barnes, a YA author, tweeted:

One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone

asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.

 

 

When you are struggling to function, it’s important to identify what are your glass balls. Feeding yourself, caring for your children and/or animals, taking your medication, and addressing your mental health are all examples of glass balls. Dropping them would have

devastating consequences and likely cause you to drop all the balls. Recycling, veganism, and shopping local are plastic balls. They may be important, but they will not shatter your life if you drop them in the way the glass balls will. Plastic balls will fall to the floor and stay

intact so you can pick them up again later. Glass balls will not.

Literal explanation: If you cannot do everything you want to do, it’s important to identify which care tasks are necessary for you to function and prioritize them until you are in a place where you can do more. For example, if you are in a very stressful time in your life and cannot stay on top of cleaning your cat’s litter box and sorting the recycling, it is best to stop sorting the recycling and use your energy to find a routine that works for getting your cat’s litter box scooped

frequently. Not recycling for a time will have an extremely small impact on the world, but not caring for your cat will have a huge impact on your cat.

my pre-pasted toothbrushes

 

My personal executive functioning kryptonite is brushing my teeth. When I was going to school or working, it was never a problem. The daily ritual of standing at the vanity every morning and getting ready to leave the house coupled with the motivation that I didn’t want anyone to be grossed out by my breath made it easy. When I had my first daughter, I struggled mightily to get my teeth brushed. Not only was I not really going anywhere, but the “wake up and get ready”

morning ritual had been replaced by “get woken up by a screaming

baby and run as fast as you can to feed said baby.” Sleep deprivation, being homebound, and focusing on the new and overwhelming

experience of caring for a newborn left brushing my teeth as a rogue task with no home in my daily rhythm.

When my second daughter was born amid the lockdown of the pandemic, the old problem of brushing my teeth returned full force. Add postpartum depression and undiagnosed ADHD to the list and it wasn’t long before it became The Impossible Task. After eighteen months of self-compassion and various adaptive routines that didn’t seem to stick, I finally had an honest moment with myself and

ordered a box of 144 pre-pasted toothbrushes. I kept them in a bowl by the front door and would grab one whenever I went by them to the kitchen or out the back door. I kept the used brushes in a mason jar

until I could figure out a way to recycle them, but even I felt shame at all the single-use plastic.

 

 

 

 

“You know, those single-use masks everyone is wearing in the pandemic are made of plastic too,” my friend Imani Barbarin said to me. Imani is a talented disability advocate who often speaks about the intersection of disability and environmentalism. She pointed out that the acceptable use of plastic is always set according to what a healthy person needs to be healthy (think masks, gloves, plastic

prescription bottles, kinesiology tape… even home delivery supplements that individually package your daily vitamins), but when it comes to someone with a disability using plastic, everyone wants to shame them for killing the planet. “You need what you need,” she said to me in a gentle but firm voice. She was right. Besides, if I didn’t figure out how to brush my teeth more often, the impending dental

visit was sure to require ten times the amount of plastic to fix the damage.

The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function. Running your sprinklers every day for fifteen minutes is wasting water because that’s more water than your yard needs to live. Grocery stores and restaurants throw out good food daily and

that’s wasting food. Not getting a dripping faucet fixed when you can afford to is wasting water. But using something is not the same as

wasting something. It’s okay to use a paper plate to eat if you’re

depressed and otherwise would’ve struggled to eat at all. Someone with diabetes can use disposable needles and you can buy a fucking prepackaged salad so you eat. The impact that you could have on

the world when you are fully functioning far outweighs the negligible

negative impact that one household’s disposable plastic or extra

water usage will have. There may be times when your local officials ask you to curb resource use because of an imminent scarcity, and when that happens you can do your best to muddle through. But it’s not wrong to prioritize your functioning and find other ways you can contribute to environmentalism.

Climate change is real. Environmentalism is important. But we are not going to fix the earth by shaming people with mental health and neurodiverse needs out of adaptive routines they need to function.

Take that energy to Congress. Those who feel anger at someone with clinical depression or ADHD for not engaging in eco-optimal behaviors are seriously deluded.

One of the major tenets of health professions is harm reduction. No one is made functional overnight, and some people may always have barriers. The goal then is to take steps that reduce harm, first to self, then to those individuals around us, then to our community. You cannot jump right to community harm reduction before first

addressing individual harm reduction. Therefore, if a newly widowed woman struggles to eat, she is released from the obligation of

having an eco-perfect diet not because eating ethically is

unimportant, but because when the real-world choices for someone are eating dairy or eating nothing, it is always the ethical choice to eat. It is always the ethical choice to encourage that person to eat whatever they can manage. Harm reduction is always ethical.