Earlier tonight, I was thinking about the tagline I picked for my blog: finding meaning in the mess.
I started to wonder: what if I’m not really living up to that tagline? I haven’t exactly been philosophizing about finding meaning.
But then I thought, well, finding meaning in the mess is kind of the default in life, isn’t it?
Despite our best efforts (and I think even for neurotypical people), life is often a mess. What we choose to do every day—or have to do—is all in the pursuit of survival first. But once that’s out of the way, it becomes about finding meaning, even if we don’t consciously realize that’s what we’re doing.
So I’m covered!
Haha. But I think I originally conceptualized this tagline as something I might explore further, kind of in a silver linings way. This year has felt particularly chaotic, so the question becomes: What have I learned from that? Did some good come out of the chaos?
And I believe the answer is yes.
But I also think I’d be putting the cart before the horse if I didn’t address something else first:
I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.
The other night, I realized I’d been thinking about it so much that I started to get nervous: was I experiencing a sense of impending doom? That can be a legitimate medical red flag.
I don’t know if that’s what’s going on. But it’s true that death feels everywhere right now.
Look at this administration. We’re seeing death all around us: the death of rights, the death of certain values (integrity? honesty?), and actual death in Ukraine, Gaza, and around the world of people who relied on USAID for sustenance.
I can’t look at the news without seeing death.
And then in our little family’s orbit:
My husband’s father died the same week our baby girl was born. His grandfather passed away a few weeks later. My grandmother had a stroke recently, and it seems like the end since she’s no longer responsive.
And of course, my mother died when my siblings and I were kids. That loss is as present as ever since becoming a mother myself.
But somehow more affecting, in some ways, is the sudden, brutal death of our dreams.
In just a few months, and even as grateful as we are to have our daughter, we’ve gone from working on home projects and dreaming of future plans and vacations… to just existing.
Knowing our life here is now temporary.
Knowing that any day now, we’ll find the foreclosure summons in the mailbox.
We poured so much energy into the fight at first. Side jobs, side hustles. I was out doing grocery deliveries three days after giving birth.
But the fight has since kind of gone out of us, as obstacle after obstacle knocks us back.
We’re not really talking about the future anymore.
I haven’t really sat down to process that…let alone grieve it.
I see photos of us from last fall and early winter, and I already don’t recognize those happy faces.
And honestly? I don’t really want to grieve it. It already sucks. The thought of sitting down and unpacking every regret, every smothered hope, every wrong turn, it’s just too much.
And despite my best efforts to convince myself otherwise, I’m not really finding any solace in saying things like:
This is our journey.
This is a new chapter.
This is just another adventure.
Maybe it’s some lingering trauma, or whatever you want to call it, from when we were kids. After my mom died, my dad used to say that: It’s a new chapter. He said it for different life events. But things never really settled down. Things never felt normal or stable again.
At some point he just stopped saying it.
And that train of thought led me to my first real sense of grief over my ADHD diagnosis.
After the evaluation, the practitioner told me I might feel some grief thinking about what could’ve been. I didn’t really connect with that at first. I thought:
“Well, that may be true for some people, but I am who I am, diagnosis or not.”
Except…
In a way, an ADHD diagnosis feels like being told other people were right about you all along. That you are the reason everything in your life is a mess. That you don’t see things clearly, you make stupid mistakes. And worse: there’s not much you can do about it except maybe take medication to get closer to who you should be… but aren’t.
And suddenly, I felt regret over getting the diagnosis, which, of course, is irrational, but hear me out.
The medication has helped. I feel more like a complete person. I don’t wake up feeling like a freshly-risen zombie anymore—stumbling around, confused, hungry, disjointed.
But… does it matter?
I feel better, sure. But who cares, when our family is on the verge of losing our home?
Great. I have a little more focus during the day. But what good is that when I can’t translate it into any real income?
This is the part where I could try to find a hopeful way to wrap things up. Something uplifting. Something sunny.
But I’m not going to do that.
Sometimes you just have to sit amongst the debris of your life.
And this isn’t a post about silver linings.
Psst. I’m starting to try to tackle my next steps, and to do that, I need to wrap my head around The B-Word (Bankruptcy). If you are interested, you can read more about that here.