Waves

in which the grief finally caught up to me

Photo by Michael Olsen on Unsplash

Something I have learned over the course of the research I’ve been doing for this Substack is is how controversial the very existence of ADHD is. There are people who simply do not believe that it is a real disorder, or that people are just drug seeking, or that “everyone has ADHD”. For a person diagnosed in mid-life, it feels like a heaping dose of gaslighting on top of the grief. 

I had plans to write about other things for this post, but this week, I have been waylaid by grief. 

I should caveat that I am grateful that I was able to be diagnosed and treated. Millions of women are out there suffering, and many of them don’t even know they have ADHD. However, life is not a Live Laugh Love stencil, so sometimes gratitude just isn’t enough to squash the bad stuff. AND THAT IS OKAY. I think I have a whole other post in me about toxic positivity.

The first couple of months after starting medication, I felt so much better that I felt elated. Whatever regrets or feelings I had about it that were negative were eclipsed by my utter relief. This is the longest I have gone since I was twelve years old without having at least one panic attack. They are debilitating and exhausting in a way that’s difficult to describe. Even if I wasn’t having panic attacks, I was experiencing low level anxiety pretty much daily. That constant anxiety was absolutely a direct result of my ADHD. It has held me back from so many things. It made me unable to thrive and function in situations where I needed to do both. It has had physical consequences as well. Being in a state of fight or flight is terrible for your body. I am healing my body, my mind, my heart, and my psyche. Healing, as it turns out, is hard work.

The absence of the anxiety - my constant companion, my most familiar enemy - has changed my brain. I think differently. I behave differently. I respond differently. I am literally re-learning my own mind. I have lived with this untreated for thirty years, and knowing that I could have avoided so much suffering is difficult to bear. There is also the lost potential. I don’t know for sure if being treated for ADHD sooner would have made me a more successful person. On paper, I did just fine. I have two degrees, fifteen full length plays, a good marriage, tons of friends, and a modicum of financial security. I don’t think that my teenage self could have imagined a better life for herself. However, I have always known that I was capable of so much more. I feel like I have fallen short. I have felt this way since I was a child. The amount of work and struggle and suffering that went into building this life is more than I could ever describe. I built it brick by brick, and the castle was knocked down more times than I could count. Two steps forward, one step back, over and over again. 

I am both proud of myself for enduring it and absolutely god damn furious that it could have been easier. I’ll never know if I could have been more successful if I had been diagnosed sooner, but I am allowing myself to grieve for the version of myself who could have done better. Who maybe could have reached her potential. I have to let go of this unlived life, this road not taken. It is difficult to grieve for something you didn’t even know was an option. 

I also grieve how much happiness it has stolen from me. I think about how my mental illness impacted my marriage, and it makes me want to scream. I think about all the times should have been joyful, but instead were fraught. The times I had anxiety attacks, because how can you get lost even with GPS? The times a dinner menu would completely overwhelm me and I couldn’t make a decision. The times the emotional overload would leave me drunk and sobbing. I know I am mostly a good partner, and I know that I am worthy of love, but I wish so much that my mental health crises hadn’t taken time away from us. That I was able to be more fully present and emotionally available. That I could have trusted myself more, and by extension, trusted him and our marriage more.

The grief is coming in waves - some ferocious, some gentle. Some toss me around a bit before subsiding, others just nip at my ankles and make me more aware of the ground underneath me. What I do know is that like the ocean, you cannot turn your back on grief. It’s coming whether you like it or not, it’s best to see it before it crests. Unresolved grief is one of the main interests in my creative work at the moment. I think Americans in general are absolutely shit at grieving, and if you look at the long history of this country, it is obvious. I will not let my grief make me hateful, even if it is the easier course. I tried that. All that hatred did was start to eat me from the inside out. We are surrounded by zombies who have been consumed by their own hatred, and their only choice is to infect someone else (sorry for the mixed metaphor).

I’m choosing to ride the waves instead. Grab a boogie board. Hold your nose and dive under. Swim with the riptide until it deposits you on the shore. Let it toss you belly down onto the pebbles. Scrape your arms with clam shells. Let the wet sand cradle you before you stand up and do it all again. The tide will go out eventually. Nothing lasts forever.