When you are composting there are two types of materials that you need to include: browns and greens.

The browns are your sticks, your cardboard, paper, egg shells, coffee grounds, dried leaves. These are the things that left to their own devices will just sit there doing nothing. They are stable.

The greens are the things that people usually think of when they think of compost – the food scraps. This is the bits of the vegetables you didn’t use for cooking or the cooked food you didn’t finish eating but there’s too little of it to save for leftovers. This is the fresh cut flowers that aren’t so fresh anymore, the grass clippings from a freshly mowed lawn. This is the exciting stuff that does the decomposing.

Each type of material has its pros and cons and they must be in balance for the compost to do the thing you want it to do. Too much of the browns and your compost does not decompose. Too much of the greens and you get a slimy, smelly mess. When the balance is just right, the compost becomes a rich, fertile mass that you can spread in your garden to ameliorate the soil and grow beautiful new things.

As with gardening, so it is with life.

I have found that I have my browns and my greens and if they are not in balance I feel out of whack myself.

My browns are the stable anchors in my life: family, friends, health/exercise, home, income, painting, reading, sometimes writing, tumblr (MAYBE, as far as the internet things are concerned).

My greens are the exciting, shiny, new ideas and hobbies that I pick up and put down with great frequency: sewing, embroidering, various business ideas, Substack (I love it. I hate it.)

As someone with ADHD I mostly suffer from an imbalance of too many greens, ie: pursuing too many shiny new ideas and neglecting my foundations. Shocking, I know!

My rallying cry is always: come back to the browns!

While the theory states that too many browns means that nothing happens, I’ve never really found this to be the case. As someone who is always interested in the world and the littlest (and biggest) things, I am never bored. This only really becomes an issue if I’m too tired from the kids, have had too little interaction with friends, my home is cluttered and/or dirty, and my job sucks. But when tended to properly (I’m especially bad about neglecting exercise in this particular season of my life) my browns anchor me and make me feel like my life is amazing.

The greens are my special interests, fun hobbies, new things I’m learning. But I tend to fall into these too deep and chase them for too long and fall into existential spirals. Usually that’s in the form of pursuing a bunch of different hobbies and wondering why my art is going nowhere. Lately since I’ve been laid off it’s been a series of business ideas that all leave me exhausted, unfulfilled, and ultimately, unpaid.

I had the epiphany again a week or two ago that I’ve been neglecting my browns and spreading myself too thin. It’s left me exhausted and cranky and depressed. Too many greens have made me a stinky, slimy mess.

So it’s back to basics. Stop chasing shiny new ideas for a bit and batten down the hatches. Narrow my scope until I feel steady, then slowly branch out. Whatever other number of metaphors we can mix and match and toss in there.

It’s a constant struggle, but I keep learning that whenever I am irritated it’s usually because I neglected my browns and chased the greens too hard.

I’ve been falling into this trap rather often lately as the pressure to make money continues to mount as our savings dwindle. Each shiny thing feels like the thing that will save us, but that is a lie that the squirrels in my brain tell me. The browns will save us. It’s the idea of doing less to get more done. Or in less productivity-brainwashed terms: doing less will make me happier.

So that’s where I go from here. Do less. And move my body more, dear Goddess I have neglected myself for too long and my joints just aren’t what they used to be anymore.