Have you just tried doing the thing?
People like to say “Why don’t you just do the thing.” They have no idea how those words sting when you just can’t, even though you have the ability and the desire to.They sound simple, almost harmless, but they trigger a deep reaction in me, because I have already beaten myself up and interrogated every angle of why not before anyone else opens their mouth. I have done all the judging, all the self flagellation, all the punishment long before anyone else gets involved.
It is strange writing this because this week’s article has not been an article at all. It has been an exploration and excavation. A self coaching session that started with a simple question and ended with me understanding something about myself that I have never been able to articulate. Something massive. Something that might change everything. I realised it is me that says those words to myself. “Just do it.” Usually followed by “you useless fucking idiot.”
When I face a task I cannot start, the first thing I do is ask myself whether this time will be different. I want to. I always want to. But the next thing that comes is dread. It hits hard and fast. A tightening in my chest. A shift in my breathing. A voice in my head that mutates instantly into cruelty. You should be able to do this. You are incompetent for not doing it. It is writing a birthday card, for god’s sake. It is filling in a dentist form. It is a five minute email. What is wrong with you? Task paralysis makes it sound passive or mild. What I experience is anything but. It is fear, pressure, and my nervous system shutting down to protect me.
Except nothing is wrong with me. Not in the way I thought. Not in the way I was taught to believe.
What I understood today, while writing this, is that starting is not a behaviour for me. It is a transition. A channel I have to enter. A cognitive tunnel. An autistic monotropic state that I cannot simply walk into. I can only get there under very specific conditions: interest, safety, rhythm, depth. Or fear. And fear has been my ignition system for most of my life.
This is the part of my reflection that broke me open. I do not just avoid tasks. I place them in what I call my toxic boxes. Dark chests in a warehouse in my mind, stacked like the final scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. They sit there for months or years filled with radioactive dread. Things like selling my French house. The one I have avoided for eight years even though selling it would change everything for me financially and mentally. The first step is so small. Search for an English speaking estate agent. Send an email. But I cannot do it. Not because I do not want to. But because I know that opening that box will deliver hundreds more to my warehouse. Legal processes in a language I do not understand. Utilities I set up twenty years ago. Tax forms. Bank accounts. All waiting, all heavy, all toxic.
Today I realised that the fear is not of the task. It is of the cascade behind the task.The emotional and bureaucratic avalanche that begins the second I take the first step. My body knows this before I do. It freezes to protect me. It tells me “not now, not safe, not alone.”
So the task sits in the box, leaking dread into my mind at three in the morning. The panic wakes me, the anxiety peaks, and with that a small pressure release, and the lid seals again until the next time.
This week I finally named the thing I have been doing all my life, and I don’t believe it has been named before. Trauma Based Task Initiation. For certain tasks I have to push myself into a forced monotropic state by berating myself. It is not flow. It is not interest. It is a survival tunnel that turns off every external signal. I stop noticing hunger, light, sound. I have worked through nights and entire weekends in this state without realising time had passed. People see competence. I feel nothing except the most urgent physical needs.
And when I finally finish something from the toxic boxes, the feeling is not pride. It is not accomplishment. It is not “I did it.” It is relief. Relief that the experience is over. Relief that I survived it. Relief that I can remove that box from the warehouse. It feels like trauma ending. It feels like I can breathe again after being submerged for a little too long.
Not everything is like this. The things I love pull me into monotropic focus effortlessly. Synthesizers. DJing. Deep technical software engineering, the kind of work that carried me from analyst all the way to Managing Director and Technical Fellow. Music that builds and drops in predictable waves. Patterns and rhythm that act like a key. I can slide into that channel whenever I want when the topic is fascinating to me. I lose myself for hours or days and it feels like I have limitless energy. I have been incredibly lucky to have spent my life and career in environments that trigger this state more often than not, building some of the most critical systems in the asset management industry. This version of monotropism nourishes me. It is joy.
But the forced version is nothing like that. It takes pressure, fear, and a kind of internal bracing that feels completely different from flow. It is not a doorway I walk through. It is something I have to force myself into by being horrible to myself, because it is the only way I have ever known to get certain things done. Writing this has shown me that difference in a way I had never seen clearly before.
I also realised something else today. I can start tasks for other people with almost no friction. Emotional reward opens the channel instantly. Co-working inspires me. Someone sitting with me negates the block. This has always been true. I never understood why. Now I do. My brain needs safety and fascination to begin. It has never been about discipline, but about setting up conditions.
What I have written here is not the article I intended. It is the conversation I needed to have with myself. It has shown me the shape of my own mind in real time. It has made sense of decades of shame. It has reminded me of the boy who learned not to need anyone, who needed a hug and never got one, who believed that independence was strength and that asking for help was failure. It has opened my eyes to how long he has been steering my life.
If I was coaching someone on this, I would invite them to think about the times they have successfully begun and completed something. Not the big achievements, but the small, ordinary moments when they found themselves able to begin. I would ask what emotions they felt toward those tasks, and what emotions were present in the ones they had to force. I would ask what the difference felt like in their body between slipping into flow and having to push themselves into it. There is insight there.
I would ask what they could do to spend more time in the places that feel natural to their wiring, and how they might outsource or scaffold the parts that always feel punishing. And I would ask them to choose one small thing they usually have to force, and experiment with lowering the barrier around it. Not to conquer it, but to understand what their brain needs to approach it without fear. That is where change begins.
Today I saw something clearly for the first time. I do not need more discipline, and god knows that speaking to myself in that awful way has never helped me live with myself. I need to create entry points. I need support with the first step. I need safety instead of fear. I need to stop using trauma to force my way into the tunnel and start learning how to enter it with less cost. And I finally understand why I can start everything for everyone else, and almost nothing for myself. I have realised I do not need to be independent all the time. I am allowed to ask for help. This is not a flaw. It is a pattern.
Patterns can change once you can finally see them.
What’s the one thing you still can’t start, even though you want to?
ADHD Paralysis Is Real: Here Are 8 Ways To Overcome It. https://add.org/adhd-paralysis/
Modesto-Lowe, V., Chaplin, M., Soovajian, V., & Meyer, A. (2013). Are Motivation Deficits Underestimated in Patients With ADHD? A Review of the Literature.Postgraduate Medicine, 125(4), 47–52. https://doi.org/10.3810/pgm.2013.07.2677
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/behaviour/demand-avoidance
Executive Skills Questionnaire (ESQ) - https://embrace-autism.com/executive-skills-questionnaire/
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398 https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398 (Original work published 2005)
