Tomgång: What They Call Idling, I Call a War

There’s a Swedish word for it. Tomgång. It’s what an engine does at a red light — running, burning fuel, going nowhere. Empty running. That’s the closest anyone’s ever gotten to naming what happens in my head on the bad days, and it’s not even English.

I have a body that quits mid-sentence and a brain that gets blamed for it. For years I had no name for that. Now I do: CRMD — Chronic Resource Management Disorder. Not a diagnosis a doctor gave me. One I built myself, out of necessity, because the existing vocabulary was lying to both of us — me and everyone standing over my shoulder wondering why I’d gone still.

This isn’t a tidy essay. It’s a field log. I’m not smoothing it out for you.

The Careless Mistake Question Is a Trap

They ask it on every assessment: how often do you make careless mistakes? Rarely. Almost never. And that answer gets used against me — proof, apparently, that I’m “high-functioning,” that nothing’s really wrong.

What the form doesn’t ask is what it costs to get that answer to “rarely.” Everything I put my name to gets checked, re-checked, dragged across the finish line by force. The form measures the output. It has no column for the price.

Idling Isn’t Wandering. It’s the Lights Going Out.

People say ADHD minds “wander.” Mine doesn’t wander. It goes dark. There’s a difference between drifting off and the receiver simply losing power while I’m still standing there, hand on the dial, trying to turn it back on and getting nothing.

I can stare at the same sentence for the twentieth time. I understand every word. I have no way in. Nothing to hook it to. The engagement mechanism isn’t distracted — it’s off, and I am fully conscious for the outage.

From the outside this looks like laziness, like I’ve stopped trying, like I need to just focus. From the inside it’s a stress state with the volume turned all the way up and no sound coming out. Cloaked stress — the kind that never reaches the face. I run on muscle memory while some other part of me claws around in the dark hunting for a hit of dopamine — anything — just to keep the machine from stalling completely.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: sometimes the fix isn’t rest. It’s being seen. Someone saying “I noticed you finished that” can flip the switch back on faster than an hour of trying alone. It’s not praise I need. It’s proof I wasn’t idling for nothing — that the tomgång had a point.

The Tracker Lies to You on Purpose

My wearable says my HRV is good today. My body says otherwise. This is the trap: the tracker measures signal. It has no idea what the cost was to produce that signal. Sovereignty here means treating the sensor as one voice, not the judge. If the pain behind my eyes says no, the readout doesn’t get the final vote.

A “stable” reading can be the most dishonest number I own. In a body running on CRMD, stable often just means the nervous system has stopped screaming out loud while the tendons are still locked in a stalemate nobody can see, but is highly felt. There’s a difference between actual recovery and rigid freeze wearing recovery’s clothes. The nausea. The dog-whistle ringing in my ears that never fully cuts out. Those tell me more about my energy debt — my energiskuld — than any app ever will.

The Clearance Sale

And then there’s the humming.

Out of nowhere, half-lyrics, fragments, na-na-na’s — noise with no source, coming out of a mouth attached to a mind that is, at the exact same time, completely still and completely empty. It sounds unhinged from the outside. It feels like nothing from the inside. Like watching someone else’s hands work.

It’s not a tic. It’s not a bid for attention. It’s a pressure valve on a system stuck in freeze — something in me clearing debris it was never given a cleaner way to clear. I don’t know the mechanism. I just know the sequence: the noise comes out, and only then does the body let go.

On a good day it’s just strange. On a day already loaded with tinnitus and a locked neck and the nausea that comes with both, this involuntary clearance sale is one more physical event happening to me, not chosen by me — and it’s exhausting in its own right, on top of everything it’s discharging.

Because the body doesn’t save. It borrows. Every stretch of function I get is pulled forward from a day I haven’t lived yet, and eventually the debt collector shows up whether I’ve got anything left to give or not. The humming, the freeze, the idling — none of it is dysfunction for its own sake. It’s the settling of an account that was never going to balance itself quietly.

This is a field entry from the Architect’s Log — the working notes behind The Energy Debt: Why living with ADHD and/or Fibromyalgia can be a fueling paradox. I’m not cleaning these up before I post them. If tomgång means something to you too, I want to hear it.