The Teleported Hamster

It’s the day after Christmas as I’m writing this, and I am holding two truths at the same time: this Christmas was the best I’ve had in the last five years. And: it’s December 26th, and I feel fucked up today.

I feel dysregulated and overwhelmed.

I feel guilty and unstable.

I feel disoriented and ungrounded.

Time is passing by like a moving train and I have no idea how to catch up to it.

I had a genuinely magical Christmas. We stayed home, so there was no travel stress. We slept in, made pancakes, cooked all our meals, watched movies, got a Christmas Eve workout in, and opened presents together (and with our pets!). We went to a family member’s home later in the day, opened gifts, ate amazing food, and had a lovely time.

It was simply everything I could have wanted for a peaceful holiday.

AND—today, I feel as disoriented and emotionally fragmented as if I had traveled across the country for a week.

Apparently, it doesn’t really matter how ‘severely’ I have deviated from my routines. Deviating from them at all is enough to make me feel unwell.

Apparently, socializing out of my usual context *at all* is enough.

My ADHD brain loves novelty, spontaneity, adventure.
My autistic brain loves certainty, sameness, structure.

When all of that is true all at the same time, it feels like something is pulling your upper body to the left and your lower body to the right, the end result is you falling face flat on the floor.

What. The. Heck.

This has been a very familiar feeling for me this season. I traveled more in the month of November than I have in the last two years, and I believe much of that is thanks to the ADHD medication I started taking in September (Vyvanse).

Traveling went from feeling like a wall of impossible to actually doable. Before medication, the executive functioning demands for travel were so overwhelming that it would give me debilitating anxiety and severe meltdowns.

(Think sobbing while driving on the interstate and feeling suicidal until your partner firmly but gently tells you to stop people-pleasing because it’s making you fucking miserable and to just come home.)

Not a good time.

I would try so hard to make it on those trips when I was unmedicated. And a huge part of me would want so badly to go. But my capacity for travel just… wasn’t there.

On meds, traveling has still felt hard and stressful, but there’s been an undercurrent of solidity: This is a lot, but I can handle it. I want to do it. I can do it.

It’s been a huge sea-change for me.

From my November trips, I noticed each time I would crash hard the day after I got home. It sort of felt like on the trip and before it, I was in go-go-go mode. Once I got home and entered a familiar space with fewer demands, plans, and expectations, all of the exhaustion would catch up to me. I’d have a difficult few days feeling like more like a blob of gelatinous resin than an actual human being: a crash in my mood and energy, and an overall sense that I just can’t get my feet under me.

This is what’s happening for me now, after Christmas.

Deviations from my routines and the things that anchor me feel so much more dysregulating than they used to be. I don’t know if that’s empirically true, or if it’s just that I’m more self-aware now. I know there are consequences to overextending my social and cognitive batteries.

The main characteristic of my experience hasn’t really been a depression, or low dopamine, or exhaustion. It’s parts of those, to be sure. But what I’ve been feeling most has been this overall disconnection with myself. Like I don’t know who I am anymore—ungrounded, uncentered, disoriented. Space-time-reality feels less concrete and tangible, and I don’t feel well. I feel floaty and strange.

Almost like I teleported.

Like I’m a hamster at the pet store, and I got put in a box after someone decided to bring me home, and now I’m in a totally new enclosure with a weird pink hamster wheel that doesn’t feel familiar at all, and my bedding feels different and smells different, too, and the water bottle makes an odd noise when I drink from it, and I don’t know up from down. All of it makes me want to hide, but I’m hungry, and there’s actually some tasty food in the bowl, so I’m staying out to snack on it.

But then maybe a week later, I get returned to the pet store. And now I’m back with my familiar bedding and the green wheel that’s a little bigger, and the purple hide-y hut, and the water bottle I’m used to. And that’s all well and good.

But it still feels weird. I still feel disrupted.

It doesn’t erase the fact that something happened in between leaving and coming back.

I feel like two separate slices of bread. There’s the ‘me’ who left and the ‘me’ who returned, and they feel so far away from one another.

And then on top of all of it, there’s this expectation that I should just be able to carry on as I have before, because that’s what everyone else does all the time. That’s what all of my other little hamster friends do.

But as I see that happening all around me, I start to get angry. Why are we all pretending like this is normal? Like it’s no big deal?

It does not feel normal. Not for me.

I feel bruised.

ADHD medication has supported my executive functioning demands to be able to travel, but it has not eliminated the cognitive, emotional, and physical cost of traveling. And all of that catches up to me when I get home.

I wonder if there’s a balance, here. I wonder if I might be on my way to finding it.

If what makes me feel disconnected to space-time-reality-identity is as a disruption in my routines—then in this lens, it makes so much sense that the holidays are hard for me.

I’m feeling ungrounded because I get disconnected with my daily rhythms and the simple daily joys that make me feel like Tina. There’s a blend of structural concepts underlying this, ranging from autonomy to authenticity.

Who am I? What are the things I love and enjoy doing? What fills me up and makes me experience joy? What helps me feel connected to myself?

I am my routines, my rhythms, the things that anchor me to my existence.

Coming back to center after traveling, in my experience, is less about mindfulness, breath work, or somatic exercises, and more about coming back into your authentic self. Unmasking, if you will. Doing the things that feel authentically you and make you feel the most like yourself.

Doing things that carry a 90% satisfaction rate—”I am so glad that I’m doing this, I really enjoyed it, would like to do it again.” Our longings, our natural interests, the things we do when no one is watching or expecting anything from us.

When the world around me feels like a new enclosure I didn’t ask for, I have to find the things that haven’t changed, that don’t change. I need my own sensory anchors that remind my brain I am still the same person, regardless of which ‘container’ I am currently sitting in.

My personal sensory anchors are journaling with fountain pens (writing for me), writing on my computer (writing to share), and going to the gym/moving my body. When I get to do these rituals, it feels like I get to connect back to the before me.

Oh right, this is something I’ve been doing for years. Oh yes, I do love this. Oh yes, I have so many memories of doing this from before.

It smushes the slices of bread together. Before Tina and After Tina, instead of being separate, disjointed, estranged, get to come together to be one solid unit. Not two separate pieces of bread, but a whole and complete sandwich, filled with the things I want and love to do.

The more time I’m able to spend going along with my normal routines, the more I feel like “me” again.

Identity, I have come to find, is something we have to actively stitch back together every time the world pulls us apart.

I had the opportunity to go visit my aunt after Christmas. This weekend, actually. And I almost went. I almost really did. I know it would make her (and me!) so happy—I miss spending time with her. We used to spend so much time together.

But I recognized how bruised and banged up I was feeling on December 26th. And in that moment, the possibility of traveling, maybe that night after work, or maybe the following morning, felt technically possible... but like I would be choosing to hurt myself to make someone else happy.

It would please the ADHD me, the spontaneity and adventure. but it would hurt the autistic me, the one that benefits from processing time and the chance to wrap my head around plans in advance.

So, I decided to plan a visit for next weekend instead. That felt like a big win. it means that I have another week to orient and ground myself before traveling again.

It felt like choosing myself.

I don’t think it’s going to exempt me from feeling disoriented when I come back from this next trip. But I do think that it’ll help me remember that it’s okay to feel fucked up after traveling. It’s okay to feel like a teleported hamster. And it’s okay to need time for the things that feel most like ‘me’ to help me feel like myself again.