Gratitude has always been a difficult thing for me. It’s not that I am ungrateful for my life or anything that I have, or that I take things for granted, it’s that I have always felt that every single thing I have could be yanked away from me at any moment. Part of that is because of how I grew up, but another part of it was my undiagnosed ADHD. I knew that there was something wrong with me, and I always felt like I was on a tightrope. One false step would send me plummeting to the depths. Gratitude - which I view as a peaceful and clear eyed acknowledgment of the good things in your life - felt almost like a jinx. It felt like tempting the fates. I always expected better of myself and my life, because I never felt like I was doing enough. I felt like I was letting everyone down, all the time. It’s hard to explain.
When I think about where I was at this time last year, and well into the New Year, it stops me in my tracks. It was an aggressively cold holiday, the sky gunmetal grey. I was exhausted and beyond comfort. I had never felt more alone in my entire life. I was drinking too much, which I realize now was self-medicating my ADHD, and it was making everything worse. Despite the support and forgiveness from the people in my life, I could not bear being forgiven again. Who was I to deserve any more grace? At that moment, I felt like the world’s biggest failure. I felt like the tenuous sugar casing I’d constructed my life out of was caught in a rainstorm, and I was helplessly watching it dissolve into nothing.
All the ways I tried to fix it, to compensate, to handle it, to atone for it - fruitless. The masks were off. It was just me, in all my fuckedupness, laid bare for the world to see. The shame was so thick, so viscous. I was covered in it, my limbs fighting through the muck, my feet in piles of molasses. It was only a matter of time before everyone in my life wised up and cut ties.
There is a passage from A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara that has stayed with me since I first read it years ago. The protagonist, Jude, scarred by years of abuse, thinks about the Axiom of Equality, which states that x always equals x. When he endures abuse by a lover, his thoughts are as follows:
But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself—his very life—has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected...he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond that he finds himself suspended in the air, between the ecstasy of being aloft and the anticipation of his landing, which he knows will be terrible, he knows that x will always equal x no matter what he does...no matter how much he earns or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he thinks as his shoulder cracks down upon the concrete, and the world, for an instant, jerks blessedly away from beneath him: x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.
I came back to that passage over and over in my mind. There was no fixing me. I was going to lose everything. No matter how hard I tried, one thing was true.
x=x
That was my rock bottom. It never looks exactly like you think it will. I am grateful for it. That bottom led me to get diagnosed and treated for my ADHD, and the mystery about myself I’d been fruitlessly trying to solve for my entire life was no longer a mystery. The bottom also led me to some healthier behaviors. I stopped drinking for a while, and while it wasn’t a panacea, it brought me to a more mindful place. I started doing yoga consistently, and even now I am still practicing nearly every day. It connects me to my body, and keeps me from dissociating and spinning out. It puts my mind into alignment and reminds me to breathe. I am amazed at what my body can do.
In the past eight months since I started medication, and the five months since I started this Substack, I can hardly believe how much I have changed. I am still me - it’s not as if my personality changed - but I am a better version of me. The more I let go of the shame, the more amazed I am at what I am capable of.
I am a religious reader of
, and recently an interview with (one of my favorite writers) was flying around Substack notes. It’s a couple of years old, but I’d never read it. This particular quote is one I think a lot of us can relate to, especially women in middle age:I feel like I deserve to celebrate a lot this year, honestly, just for making it through the past two years without losing my mind completely. One of the joys of growing older is paying attention to your little victories. It’s so hard to give yourself credit for anything when you’re young. A lot of us were taught how to beat ourselves up from a very young age. We were supposed to keep doing that forever, like it was our job. Once you truly shake that off, you’re free. Then you surprise yourself with what you can do, what you can get through, what you can create and celebrate and enjoy.
If beating myself up were an Olympic sport, I’d be a multi gold medalist. I truly didn’t know another way to be. If I didn’t beat the shit out of myself, nothing would get done, and I used shame as a motivator. What I realized was that the shame was not actually productive. It was holding me back. I was missing my life.
Learning to release the shame and not beat the crap out of myself has not been easy. It’s a work in progress. The shame got too familiar and comfortable. It became an excuse not to do things. It held me back so much more than I ever could articulate. And it kept me from true gratitude. Gratitude isn’t a place of faux humility (something I hate), or a way to subtly brag. It is something I realized that I had to find deep within. I had to be grateful for myself - my strength, my resilience, my able body, my creativity - before I could truly apply gratitude to other areas of my life.
All of this has been a long winded way of getting to what I wanted to say - I am grateful for all of you, my readers.
I started this Substack because so many women my age are suffering with ADHD. We were overlooked, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood. I felt this was a grave injustice. I felt a calling to use my voice to amplify awareness and invite community and transparency. It became something so much more than that for me. I was in a creative rut, and having this Substack has given me both a purpose and a consistent writing practice. I thought that only my friends and family would read it, but in the space of less than a year, there are nearly a hundred of you on this journey with me. I no longer fear retribution for what I’m putting out into the world. You have all made me feel supported, valued, and less alone. Your feedback and kind words and comments have given me comfort and confidence. This community is full of so many brilliant, thoughtful, kind, and amazing writers. I feel lucky to be a part of it.
I am taking a break from publishing until the New Year. I am recovering from COVID, and I am headed to celebrate the holidays with loved ones, so I need a bit of a break. I’ve published weekly since July, and I’m really proud of that. I am proud of myself for showing up and doing the work. And I’m proud of all of you for making it through this insane year. I hope you are proud of yourself, too.
I wish you all a peaceful holiday and a Happy New Year. Thank you again, for everything.