Friends,
It has been a hard few weeks for us all. My last two posts were bursts of energy and resolve, and now I am resting. I am resting because if I don’t, I will burn out, and I know this. I am grateful that I know this now, and if I’d known it even ten years ago, I would have suffered so much less.
That’s still the grief I fight; all the suffering I could have avoided if I’d had been diagnosed with ADHD sooner. I used to feel the lost potential, the bad grades in math, the social issues, and the other annoying shit. But the suffering gives me the most grief. I lost so much time recovering from suffering, and I could never understand why everything had to be so god damn hard.
The world right now feels insane to me. I can’t find my bearings. Nothing makes any sense. But still. I am getting up in the morning. I am putting pants on and leaving the house. I am working. I’m writing all the time. I’m tinkering with my paints. I am putting my phone on DND more often, because lately, the pinging of my phone is making me insane.
I would not have been able to manage this if I had not gotten the right diagnosis. So yes, this time is impossibly hard. But I also know that in terms of my mental health, it could be much much harder.
Despite the Worst Thing Happening, I have not had an anxiety attack. Moments of panic? Yes. A full blown panic attack or meltdown? No.
This alone is a miracle. A reason to be thankful.
When 2016 happened, something inside of me broke and never healed. I think it was because my brain started doing math, and I knew that was a turning point. I wanted to believe that it wasn’t, but in my heart of hearts, I think I knew. Accepting this has helped me heal a bit. My heart is battle worn and covered in scar tissue, but it beats on.
I am not thankful that this happened. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I have always thought that was bullshit. It is so hard not to dwell on all the ways this could have been avoided.
And yet, we are here. We are alive anyway, and we’re going to try and survive this, being well aware that some of us may not. In my moments of fear, I remind myself of all the crazy shit I have lived through. If there is anything that I know, it is that I am a really strong person. I don’t know why or how that is. Not everyone who survives bad shit is made stronger by it. The phrase “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is BULLSHIT. What doesn’t kill you may destroy you utterly, and leaves you merely surviving. Which isn’t living.
I just want to be myself, fully myself. She is a person that I am still getting to know, a person who denied herself so much joy because she was buried in shame and self-doubt. Who felt like she would never find her place in the world. Who wrote and wrote and wrote and got so close to “making it”, was always JUST shy of the big prize, the production, the award. Who worked and worked and worked and still felt ten steps behind.
None of that matters to me anymore. When I let go of the careerism, the need for validation, and just started telling my own story, the rest of it fell away. I still care about my career, but I am much more interested in being a witness to this moment. My creativity is going to be my resistance.
I’ll be a writer forever. I never did this for the money or the accolades. I did this because writing is how I make sense of the world. Even when I didn’t fit in anywhere, even when I was struggling to make friends and had no idea what I was going to do, writing has been my way in. And in this fuckshit situation - and as has been the case with every single fuckshit situation I’ve experienced during the course of my crazy life - it will be my way out.
No matter what happens, I will write. I will get out of bed in the morning.
And not only will I survive, I will live.
I am very thankful for each and every one of you. Some of you are brand new to our little community, and I hope you stay. It’s always strange when you amass a new group of people who are reading your work, but also lovely and affirming. I am not entirely sure what my writing is going to look like going forward, but what I do know is that it may be random as hell, and I embrace my randomness.
I wish you all a peaceful holiday, whatever that means to you. Try to do things that make you happy.
I leave you with this quote from Joanna Newsom - one of my favorite musicians - from an interview with Arthur Magazine in 2006 (the whole interview is amazing). I turn to it whenever I am feeling hopeless.
The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again. But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime. It’s what my dad talks about sometimes. He says the only way that he knows there’s a God is that there’s so much gratuitous joy in this life. And that’s his only proof. There’s so many joys that do not assist in the propagation of the race or self-preservation. There’s no point whatsoever. They are so excessively, mind-bogglingly joy-producing that they distract from the very functions that are supposed to promote human life. They can leave you stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form. And those joys are there and they are unflagging and they are ever-growing. And still there are these things that you will never be able to feel OK about–unbearably awful, sad, ugly, unfair things.
-Joanna Newsom
"That’s still the grief I fight; all the suffering I could have avoided if I’d had been diagnosed with ADHD sooner."
Wow, this so resonates with me. I was diagnosed (after first self-diagnosing) with ADHD this year, at age 63, as was my son, at age 35. We both knew we were odd and mostly celebrated that fact, but figured that was because we were both deemed "gifted" by our school systems at a very young age. I was diagnosed with depression as a young mom, and my son with anxiety as a young adult. Evidently, no mental health professionals we encountered ever considered ADHD.
The suffering resulted from what I believed to be a range of unfortunate character defects, and that my poor son had inherited some of those traits from me. We've both dealt with so much shame and imposter syndrome.
I grieve for the fact that a considerable amount of our suffering was avoidable, especially the missed parenting opportunities that would have made raising my son easier for both of us.
The positive paradigm shift of how I see myself is ongoing. The self-blame is diminishing. I believe it's the same for my son. Even in these darkest of times, I am truly grateful for this.
I love your writing and your voice. I look forward to reading more from you. Thank you for being brave and vulnerable.
I loved this! It is reassuring to have a reason why life always felt so hard but I will always be sad for my younger self that it never even occurred to anyone around me that reason could be a ND brain. I generally thought I was just a weird little kid and an even weirder adult. I am here for whatever writing you wish to bestow upon your readership!