Vyvanse coveting and moving boxes

My world has narrowed way, way down to the immediacy of packing or purging every last one of my belongings as I get ready to move from New York to New Jersey. It's not happening immediately, but it feels immediate with all the things I have to do between now and then. I packed one box, and it felt like a victory. Yesterday, I wrote most of a short story, and that felt like a victory. Lately, it's not that I can barely get out of bed, but more that when I do, I'm a blank, a blob, brainless. I have these lists I make endlessly, of work that needs to be done nownownow, but then every past fuckup enters my head the moment I sit down and I think to myself, You'll never finish, so why bother starting? Your query sucked, so don't bother with the next one. Which is funny because one of the projects involves rereading some old work, and as I'm doing so, I remembered how much I loved that particular job and what it brought me and what I brought to it. I want to be that person again, even though the only way I can think of to do so at this moment is getting a prescription for Vyvanse, which has been the catalyst for a lot of the most proactive decisions I've made in the recent past. I only took it for four days, but those were four powerful days.

That malaise makes it hard to envision that in three short months I will be living in a real, adult home, one I might even be proud to show off. It makes it hard to get excited about going to England or Toronto or anywhere else, even as I take a travel writing class and start to dream about what it might be possible to accomplish, about starting, if not over, something new and exciting and different. It even affects me when I pick up a new book, which only occasionally will grab my interest, more often my eyes glazing over and giving me that sinking feeling of, Why aren't you writing?

I know that there's no way I'll, say, undo thirteen years of object accumulation in a weekend, or even a week, but that pernicious all or nothing thinking is hard, if not impossible to shake. It's not that I want an easy out with a prescription, I just want a small escape route, a few hours of relief from that heavy, oppressive knowledge that nothing I do will ever be good enough. Yesterday, I somehow tricked myself into that route, working on a story in the second person, and etching the first few sentences of another one, tangentially inspired by One Direction. Buoyed by all the exercises we did in my writing workshop, I remembered what I loved about erotica when I first discovered it, what I still love about that moment when a story idea pops into my head. There is an escape, but one where I can practically feel the synapses firing, drawing lines from one moment to the next, where I'm envisioning the action and doing my best to let my fingers, with their bitten up cuticles and pink nail polish, translate it. It's been so rare lately that I think I've convinced myself I can't do it, despite wanting to keep doing it more than I want anything else. So that's what I'm up to, packing moving boxes and carting books all over the place and unearthing dresses and random objects and hoping each morning that I have something to be proud of when I fall asleep at night.