Life Is Funny

The last 6 months of my life has been the hottest mess. Like literally, the hottest mess I’ve ever experienced in my entire adult life & that’s saying A LOT. So turns out I have ADHD, and also most likely bi-polar 2. I guess they usually go hand in hand with each other, especially when you sprinkle in all the trauma. I always laugh when I say stuff like that, but truly it’s not funny. It’s the only way I know how to not lose my sanity, dark humor. Anyways, let’s do a little recap of the shit show that has been my life: (spoiler alert - it got better eventually, usually does, right?)

So I made an appt to see a psychologist like a LONNNNNNG time ago, but since the world shut down & everyone went all dark and twisty because of it, they’ve been a little busy helping all of us figure out our lives. Psychologists, therapists, and just anyone who is in that field of dealing with any type of mental health support, YOU ARE A GIFT! I’d be lost without my therapist. Anyways, I finally get to the appointment & this woman's jaw is just on the floor as I’m going through my life story. Which always throws me off because I’ve always downplayed things to myself so I can just get on with life, ya know? Super great coping technique (JUST KIDDING)… so at the end of the appt she’s like yes 100% you have ADHD, a combined type. So I then go see my primary care doctor & I get started on meds. For the first few weeks, I was on cloud 9. I was getting things done. My brain wasn’t so loud. I could have one thought at a time and just not feel like an absolute overstimulated, irritable, basket case FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE. It was great. Then our family got super sick with whatever this is that’s going around. I never ever get sick & there were two times when I considered going to the emergency room because I ached so badly & I couldn’t breathe out of my nose which was causing me to have panic attacks. I stopped taking my meds bc my body physically couldn’t keep up with my brain. So I just let my brain go into the usual ADHD paralysis mode that it did without meds. So after I started feeling better, I started my meds back up & I felt good again.

So I had a follow up appt & we tweaked the dosage & basically it was all downhill from there. The dosage was too high & I was tense, way to hyper focused on things so I was getting irritable and angry towards my kids because they were “interrupting” me. Slash they were just being kids who wanted attention from their mom. So I dropped down to a smaller dose. It still wasn’t good. I still struggled to feel connected to my kids, I just kind of felt like a robot. So I talked to my doctor and we switched medications completely. The first few days of the new medication we awesome. I felt happy, and I was able to focus on things but also still be patient with my kids. It was a nice balance. But then all the other symptoms came back and I just couldn’t handle it. So I stopped taking them all together.

When I tell you I have never EVER been so depressed in my life. I felt like the walking dead, like a shell of a person. I didn’t get out of bed for 3ish weeks. Plus I had just been sick, so I was already in bed for like 2 weeks before that. So I was in bed for like a month and half. My mind was spiraling hard. I cried almost every day for all of those 3ish weeks I was in bed. In the midst of all of that I felt like my life was falling apart & I was failing at everything. My mindset was absolute trash & honestly, I believed that the meds were going to fix my brain & when they didn’t it made my mindset even worse. I threw myself a pity party the size of Texas. I just couldn’t grasp why everything had be so much work. Healing, functioning, parenting, it was all just so heavy for me & I just wanted something to be an easy for once. But that was a silly thought, because that’s not how it works.

One day, I got some laundry done or something, I can’t remember what it was, but I was so exhausted from just doing that one task. I was like no, I’m done with this. I’ve wallowed long enough and I’m allowed be sad but I’m not going to let this swallow me. I’m going to do the things I need to do to start feeling light again. I made a therapy appt. I took a shower, turned it as hot as I could stand at first and then as cold as I could stand at the end. And then I cleaned our room. So that the place where I was sitting all day, would at least feel peaceful and not cluttered and messy. Slowly, day after day I did more things. Reset more spaces in the house & a big, big thing or person I should say, helped me get out of the rut.

Her name is KC Davis. She wrote a book called “How to Keep House While Drowning” & she also has a podcast called Struggle Care. Her story was ridiculously relatable to me & she too, had a baby around the same time we had Liam. Right when the world shut down. Everyone remember what a fun that time was or have we all just shoved that dark time into a box and put it into the deepest corner of our brains? Yeah, me too.

Anyways one of the largest take aways from her book (I have tons but this one was the biggest door that was unlocked for me), was how much moral value I was placing on things. She calls them care tasks, which is an amazing term to use because it helps to peel away that moral value. Laundry, dishes, and cleaning aren’t chores, they are a form in which you care for yourself by making your space function for you, a.k.a: care task.

When it clicked while I was reading the book, I basically just internally combusted. I was so baffled at just how much moral value I was putting on tasks like dishes, laundry, cleaning, meal prep, organization & literally EVERYTHING! Not only that, but realizing how much it was effecting the probability of me doing actually doing those things on a cycle. “Well if I’m already failing, failing longer can’t hurt.” Then I’d be consumed with overwhelm when I finally did them because they were so much harder to do the longer I waited. The messes got bigger. The dish pile was higher. The laundry mound seemed endless. I did the bare minimum to make sure we didn’t have moldy dishes or garbage strewn all over. Even that was mentally exhausting because I wanted to do more but looking at task the way I was made it seem monumentally harder to push myself to complete it.

Another one of her biggest points is “you don’t exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you.” Hello! Duh, I’m over here preaching about how everyone is different & I’m trying to force myself to stick to Sally Sue’s 7 day cleaning schedule like it’s going to solve all my problems. Errrrr, wrong. No wonder I have a laundry room full of organizational receptacles I found at Target that went there to die because they were not jiving with my flavor of chaos. Look, if your pantry, fridge, cabinets, toy situation, closet, whatever it is, look like it’s out of a home & garden magazine, yes I am mildly jealous of you & I wish to live vicariously through your organizational skills. I wish I that could figure out a way to do that where worked for me in the long run. I tried, hence the laundry room of dead receptacles. And the moral of the story is, it’s okay that it doesn’t work for me. That was what the message in my last post was about. It’s okay if my functional is classified as dysfunctional, because it works for me.

KC made so many mind blowing points in her book, like so mind blowing I’m making stickers to put around on things so that I can have them as reminders. Because this mindset change isn’t going to happen over night & I need as many reminders as I can get. Here are a few of my favs.

1. You do not exist to serve your space, your space exists to serve you.
2. Shame is the enemy of functioning.
3. If it’s where you meant it to be, then it’s organized.
4. Rhythms over routines.
5. The best way to do something is the way it gets done.
6. Motivation builds motivation.
7. I am not a servant to the list.
8. When care tasks function only to fulfill external standards of what we should be doing, it actually moves us further away from real self care.
9. Glass balls & plastic balls.
10. Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while you eat a salad.

But the BIGGEST reminder I need, is that the word mental, followed by disorder or illness, doesn’t mean that I’m less than. It just means that what works for others, probably isn’t going to work for me. AND THAT’S OKAY.