With merely hours to go until I stop work for the holidays I find myself in a weird place. It's like being in a sort of liminal space only mental not physical.
I think there's been an element of that ever since COVID.
Five days a week in the office was a chore but it set boundaries. Working from home has significant advantages for me but the one big disadvantage is that the line between work and home becomes more blurred when you don't have a specific area solely for that purpose.
In a Teams channel at work, someone mentioned PDA — I didn't know what it meant.
Pathological Demand Avoidance:
a persistent and marked resistance to 'the demands of everyday life’, which may include essential demands such as eating and sleeping as well as expected demands such as going to school or work.
It puts a name to something I've experienced for most of my life.
I just don't like being told what to do, it's why I've never liked work. No matter the role. I'll enjoy certain aspects but they are usually the parts where I have an element of control and can geek out to my heart's content. It will usually be something that I over-engineer or go to unnecessary depth on.
But normal daily "you must do this" stuff frustrates and infuriates me. It's probably why I procrastinate so badly.
I don't just procrastinate at work, I do it all the time. My family say that my favourite/most used phrase is "in a minute" — many a true word said in jest.
I delay getting out of bed or going to sleep, getting out of the bath, off the toilet, doing things for others, doing things for myself. I will actively seek distractions to justify not doing something, at least for a while longer. "I just need to do X" or "I have to finish Y" or "I need to quickly look up Z" — the distraction becomes hyperfocus and, without realising it, half an hour, an hour, or maybe more has disappeared.
This can obviously cause problems.
The more I learn and discover the more I am able to explain why I am how I am.
