Full disclosure: I started using the good ol’ Mary Joanna to help me sleep at night. Yeah yeah, I know that technically means I’m not sober by the broadest definition of the term, despite being alcohol-free for about a year new (hell yeah). But I use it medicinally to help with my constant waking up in the middle of the night, and honestly, it does help me get a more restful sleep
Sometimes after I smoke, I don’t immediately fall asleep, and when that happens, I either get horny, paranoid, or philosophical. It’s kind of a crapshoot every time which of my high personalities shows up. It’s usually the one I don’t want at the time, which means using it as an aphrodisiac is a gamble.
“Jess, this is not the time to ramble about how we’re living in a simulation.”
Last night, though, I had a strange experience. My wife was giving me a pep talk regarding my mental health, which has been pretty bad as of late. Nothing concerning, just the usual “What if life is meaningless and everything I do will eventually be forgotten?” Which is pretty heavy stuff to think about literally every second of the day, and I’ve been in this mindset for most of my life. Yay, anxiety!
But, in my high, pseudo-intellectual stupor, something my wife said really itched a part of me I didn’t know I needed to reach — the past Jesses (is that the proper plural of Jess?).
I haven’t been nice to past me. Not any of them. I tend to think of my past selves as different people, instead of a cohesive part of who I became. I look at Child Jess through my adult eyes and judge her unfairly for being, well, an outcast. A pariah. The weird autistic little girl who stims by spinning around in the back of the classroom and making bird sounds. I get mad at my younger self for having the nerve to not fit in and be popular. And as my wife said, that little girl is a part of me still, and every time I resent my childhood eccentricities, I bully her the same way I was bullied by other people.
PROTECT THIS CHILD.
Then I think of College Jess. The me who was skinny and outgoing and optimistic and popular and excelled at school despite barely trying. Although she’s a part of me as well, I resent her for being all the things I wish I was now. I’m jealous of a past version of me! It makes no sense when I really think about it — at that time, my mental illnesses were worse than they’d ever been before, and I’d sooner saw off my own pinky toe with a nail file before I’d willingly deal with my OCD at its worst again. But I only see this rose-tinted version of the past, with this girl who is infuriatingly everything I want to be. Everything I was.
Yes, I was that bitch.
The thing is, these aren’t two different people. They’re all me, and they’ve taken me to where I am now. And honestly, where I am now isn’t that bad. I have a wife and a girlfriend I love dearly (that poly life, I’m tellin’ ya). I’m back in school for music therapy, and I’m closer than ever to getting this degree. I even won a scholarship for it! I’m about to be debt-free, and I’m working on getting back in shape. And despite my depression being ever-present, my mental health has never been better. Everything is falling into place for once, and I owe it all to my past selves for bringing me to this place. I started thinking of these past selves as an Inside Out-type of inner council that influences my day to day decisions and emotions.
It’s going to be a process, but I’ve started making peace with my past. I want to continue to honor and integrate these past versions of Jess into myself as a whole. Writing this out was my first step in healing these broken pieces of me. If your brain works at all like mine, I hope this little blog post helps you, too.
Fair warning: I’m going to be writing about this topic a lot in the next few months for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a few paragraphs.
And yes, I will be using this topic as an excuse to post as many adorable pictures of little Jess as I can.
My last blog post delved a little into what it was like growing up autistic and how I’ve learned to mask to such a degree that most of my psychiatrists don’t even take me seriously when I mention that I’m likely on the spectrum. For that reason, I’ve been hesitant to “claim” the title of autism. If I’m “cured,” then I don’t have autism anymore, right? If I can blend in enough with the “normies” to not have any visible disability, and I can’t even get a proper diagnosis, I’m not really autistic. I’m just faking it for attention. Initially, I gave up on getting “properly” diagnosed for that reason.
Last week, I began research on my project for the undergraduate symposium. It will go hand-in-hand with my presentation that is conditional for my receiving of the Brehm fellowship, awarded to students who are looking to contribute to the field of disability research and advocacy. I chose autism as my focus, primarily because it has affected my life in deeply personal ways, even without a clinical diagnosis.
Even if I had to “change” to fit in with neurotypical society.
One of the books I found myself drawn to study was Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price. His research comes from a neurodivergent place, being autistic himself, as well as having a queer perspective as a trans man. The book focuses on the ways neurotypical “passing” folks have used “masks” to fit in with societal norms. Traditionally, these masks were forced on us by things such ABA, now viewed as harmful by most autistic advocates. Some of us, like me, consciously decided to, as I like to say, break our own bones to fit in someone else’s box.
At this point in life, after decades of studying people’s behavior and learning what works and what doesn’t in social situations. I “pass” well enough that I’ve hesitated to claim the autistic title. I’m scared I’ll be looked at as a fraud by the community, someone who claims the title for clout and to excuse my admittedly sometimes annoying idiosyncrasies. But as I’m learning, that’s about as nonsensical as me trying to pass as straight for so many years when I knew damn well I was pansexual, and about as harmful too. It’s harmful to the community, as I perpetuate internalized prejudices by denying my identity, and it’s harmful to myself, as I force my body and mind into a crevice they were not designed to fit into.
Cats make it look so easy.
Here’s the thing — Price explains that oppressed folks are ridiculously underdiagnosed because we’re forced to conform even more than people who are part of the majority. Straight white dudes can skate by on their privilege, but we have to try harder to make it in this world, and part of that involves hiding the less socially acceptable pieces of ourselves. Not only that, but the current diagnostic tools used for detecting autism is literally based on its presentation in white little boys. If you’re black, or an adult, or a woman, or any combination of that, it’s damn near impossible to get a proper diagnosis because of implicit biases in the testing process.
Here’s the other thing — a proper diagnosis isn’t a requirement to be part of the autistic community. In addition to the roadblocks mentioned above, there’s also the problem of access to testing, which is often prohibitively expensive and not readily available to everyone. For this reason, self-diagnosis (or as Price puts it, self-realization) is valid. If you relate to the autistic experience, you’re probably one of us. Surprise!
“ONE OF US. ONE OF US.”
So that’s that. I’m autistic. And no, I don’t have autism any more than I have pansexuality. It’s just part of me. And that’s important, because we need more people to advocate for people like us.
Just a few days ago, a dear well-intentioned friend of mine invited me to an online seminar about some wellness products. The speaker went on and on about how her tinctures and potions can cure this and that. And then — I shit you not — she spoke this exact sentence:
“Our products have been shown to eradicate autism.”
Almost immediately, I excused myself and logged off. I felt gross, like someone told me they could fix my gay, as if that wouldn’t erase the beautiful, loving relationship I have with my wife. This time, that sentence — it was about me. It took me three decades to come to terms with who I am. It took me three decades to learn to have a beautiful, loving relationship with myself, with my own identity. And the fact that someone tried to sell me a cure for that feels insulting.
We need more people to fight the good fight for us. We need more people to stand up and declare that there’s nothing wrong with us, just that society isn’t built for us. We’re not the problem, the current rigid sense of “this is what is socially acceptable and this is what is not” is the real problem. As long as we don’t fit into the narrow ideals of what is acceptable behavior, we’re going to continue to be dehumanized and discriminated against. So something needs to change, and maybe it shouldn’t be us.
This was a lot of words, but I feel like it’s important to say. I am autistic, and I don’t owe anyone a proper diagnosis to claim that. Not in a world that makes it prohibitively difficult for an AFAB adult to even get clinically diagnosed, let alone get assessed. Not in a world that beat all the quirks and idiosyncrasies out of me before I even reached adulthood.
Damn it, Rina Sawayama. This website is going to turn into a fan blog if you keep this up.
I swear this woman lives rent free in my head.
I was on my way to work, listening to her as per usual, when her song “Phantom” came on. I’d listened to it in passing, but I never really listened to it. The second verse just hit me like a truckload of turkeys.
If I could talk to you, I’d tell you not to rush You’re good enough You don’t have to lose, what makes you you Still got some growing to do
When did we get so estranged Haunted by the way I’ve changed Claiming back the pieces of me that I’ve lost Reaching in and hoping you’re still, waiting by the windowsill I’d bring you back to us
I wasn’t a popular kid. Quite the opposite, actually. A lot of it, looking back, was because of my (finally freaking diagnosed) ADHD and (still freaking undiagnosed) autism. I was the weird kid who spun around in the back of the classroom and stimmed by making parakeet sounds. I had special interests like 8-track tapes and Bon Jovi, stuff “normal” kids thought were strange. I had sensory issues when it came to smell and gagged at the scent of ranch dressing, which my peers loved to torment me with. I had to eat lunch in the library to avoid being pelted with the stuff! And it’s so easy for me to forget that I used to come home from school crying every day because kids are so fucking cruel.
What changed?
In the autistic community, there’s a term called “masking.” You hide parts of yourself to fit in. You learn to “pass” as neurotypical, because there’s no other way for people to love you. When I got into middle school, something flipped. I methodically studied what the “cool kids” were wearing and doing, and made myself into a caricature of who I really was in order to be the “most popular” version of myself. I clipped my own colorful wings to become something I wasn’t, all for my peers’ approval. And it worked. By senior year, I was unrecognizable. By college, I was — dare I say — popular. But little Jess—
—that Jess was dead. And I killed her.
I’ve brought up getting a proper autism diagnosis to my therapists several times, and each time I get almost laughed out of the clinic. But you’re so popular, and social. You don’t look autistic, whatever that means. You don’t go on and on about your special interests — because I learned early on that talking about the color of Richie Sambora’s toothbrush would get me ostracized. You don’t stim — because making silly little sounds and moving my body in ways that make me feel good aren’t “socially acceptable.” You don’t have sensory issues — because I had to force myself to deal with things that made me really uncomfortable, because otherwise, no one would like me.
I broke my own bones to fit in someone else’s box, and left me with a phantom of myself.
I wish I could tell my younger self that she doesn’t need to change to fit in. That she doesn’t need to hide entire parts of herself. That she’s valuable the way she is, and doesn’t need to change. That’s why autism acceptable — not just awareness — is so important. Because somewhere, some little girl is feeling the exact way I felt back then. And I don’t want her to feel like she needs to kill her autistic self in order to be loved.
I hope she’s still there, waiting by the windowsill.
Two things happened recently. I saw a beautiful post by a woman who was addicted to crack and got her life together, and made a heartfelt video about her journey. And then, this status popped up on my own memories:
“One Lake Michigan” is a valid unit of measurement in the Midwest.
It’s been a year since I decided to get my own shit together (for real), and while I did slip up a few times, this was the anniversary of the day my wife and I dumped our liquor and threw our vapes in the trash. That was the beginning of the arc of my story where I actually cared about my health, which led to my current character arc of “working out, taking vitamins and proper medication, and eating better.” It started with that small step of deciding I was better than getting blackout drunk every night and poisoning my body.
And it feels good.
Like, I actually LIKE my body now. Who’d a thunk?
This New Years was a dilemma, since it was the first New Year’s Eve I’ve ever spent sober since I’ve been old enough to drink. Would I make an exception for a nice glass of champagne?
Or would I invent my own tradition?
Back in February, Crass and I got legally married (still waiting to have that big official shindig until we have the money). Our first purchase as a couple was this mineral water we saw on some Ghost Adventures-type show. They were investigating a supposedly haunted Well in Texas, and they sold cases of water from it. This guy was drinking some and it looked like he was having a great time, so we impulse-bought a case of fancy schmancy stinky ass mineral water on our wedding night. Our first purchase as a married couple.
So anyways, we still had some leftover. Not because it tasted bad, but because it was the kind of water that’s hard to guzzle. You know, the kind of heavy water that tastes too mineral-y to be refreshing, but tastes good nonetheless. I don’t know how to describe it properly. I’m not a water reviewer, I’m a lifestyle blogger.
So we cracked open a bottle of fancy schmancy stinky ass mineral water, and celebrated at midnight by toasting with it and dancing to the Black Eyed Peas.
Let’s get it started, indeed.
It sucks that I can’t partake in traditional traditions like toasting with real champagne, or cracking open a cold beer at a race (because that’s a thing my hillbilly family does). Hell, I can’t even take Communion properly if I wanna get real technical, although now that I’m Methodist, I don’t use real wine anyways.
Might as well drink grape juice if this is the bread we’re stuck with.
Sometimes, recovery doesn’t look like a carefully curated TikTok video of all your wins. Sometimes, it involves sacrificing long-held traditions. But the beauty of letting go of tradition is that you can start your own, more meaningful traditions in its place. Champagne on New Year’s Eve is a nothing tradition to me. It’s just peer pressure from dead people.
Now, stinky ass mineral water on New Year’s Eve? That’s something unique. That’s something special.
So, this is it. The last blog post of 2022 (probably). And I even redecorated for the occasion! Like the new color scheme? I had to incorporate bluey-green, because it’s my favorite color, but the brown just takes it to the next level, right?
I also had to update my picture. I haven’t been blonde for a hot minute, which is so weird to me, but fitting. My teens were blonde, my 20s were weird hair colors, and my 30s will be black. I’m like a Pokémon that changes colors as it evolves, and I feel like I’m finally evolving into the most powerful version of myself. I’m about to reach level 30 and become a mighty electrifying Ampharos after spending several levels as a cute, nonthreatening Flaafy.
Now I just need an Ampharosite so I can have badass hair.
This evolution has brought on a lot of changes, many of which I’ve documented in this blog. I stopped drinking entirely, which is wild to me because I love beer (hit me with your best non-alcoholic beer recommendations in the comments, readers!). It just wasn’t serving me anymore and was causing more damage to my body and mind than I liked. In addition, I got formally diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder and started taking the medications I actually need. Those two changes alone have been revolutionary. I’m not the same person I was this time last year by any stretch of the imagination, and it feels good. I wasn’t a huge fan of that version of me. I like this one more.
But the thing about evolution is that it doesn’t stop happening. In order to be the absolute best version of myself, I need to keep working on the most important project I’ll ever be tasked with — Jess J. Salisbury. Me, the person. Not the blog, although that’s a part of it.
The new year is supposed to be a time of setting goals and making resolutions, many of which won’t make it to the end of January, much less the end of the year. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to set goals I can easily set aside at the first sign of failure. My goal is to hit the gym at least three times a week. So what happens when I have a busy week and fall off for a few days? Do I just give up? That’s why I don’t like viewing my goals as “resolutions.” Instead, they’re part of a sort of year-long bucket list.
So what do I plan to do? I’m glad you asked! I’ll start with the goal that’s most pertinent to this website.
Two blog posts a week
That’s right. No less than two blog posts any given week. If I screw up one week, I’m challenging myself to jump back on it the next week. I recently wrote a post about the direction I want to take this blog, but feel free to drop more ideas for things you want to see here. I’m thinking more music musings, some book reviews, maybe some more spiritual stuff, and of course, my guide to living with ADHD, as well as the fiction I’ve been working on. There’s no shortage of things I like writing about, so make sure to keep checking back for new content often!
Keep a planner all year
I started keeping a planner a few months back. Surprise! It’s done wonders for my mental health as well as my organizational skills. My initial trick was to get a subscription to a monthly planner, so every month I’d have fresh new pages with new prompts and visuals to keep my attention. But then, the unthinkable happened — my December planner got lost in the move! Thinking quickly, I downloaded an app called Zinnia, which is essentially a journaling app for your phone. And this has been ridiculously helpful for me, since I’m on my phone all the time anyways. I can’t leave it at home. It’s always with me, everywhere, all the time.
Get down to my goal weight of 140
Ah yes, the dreaded weight loss resolution that everyone either makes or makes a blog post decrying. Yes, losing weight for vanity reasons is a slippery slope into nasty things like eating disorders, and I’m first in line to support the body positivity movement. But here’s the thing about being body positive — it only works if you’re treating said body positively. I gained a lot of weight over the last several years, and I’ve realized I can’t blame it all on my psychiatric meds, especially now that I’m taking Adderall, which should balance the antidepressant weight gain out. No, I gained this weight because I’ve treated this temple like a freaking dive bar, poisoning it with copious amounts of alcohol and greasy low-nutrient foods. This extra weight I carry is a physical manifestation of the baggage that came with being a compulsive binge eater in the beginning stages of alcoholism. I’ve cut out those two habits and already dropped nearly 30 pounds. Now I’m adding the habit of working out regularly and staying active, and I haven’t felt this good since I was in high school and in the best shape of my life. By the end of 2023, I should be down to my pre-gain size, and I’m so ready.
Become conversational in Arabic
Wallah, I mean it this time. It’s easy to forget in my white British-American English-speaking bubble that nearly half of the world is bilingual, but working at my new job has made me acutely aware of how much I suck as a global citizen. Like, I’m useless in any country that wasn’t once taken over by the Brits. But nearly everyone I work with is bilingual. I live in an area with a pretty hefty Arab population, and most of my coworkers and several of our patients can speak Arabic with ease. I don’t exactly plan on being a diplomat to Egypt or a Quranic scholar, so I’m not holding myself to incredibly high standards here. I just want to be able to say basic sentences and hold a conversation in Arabic. Right now, I know how to say “hi,” “bye,” and “give me bread,” which is useful if I’m ever like, in a dire bread emergency in Lebanon or something, but it would be nice to know some pharmacy-specific phrases.
Do 75Hard AT LEAST ONCE
I tried this already. Remember that? Just one of the dozens of things I’ve started and didn’t finish? I’ve been using the “bUt I hAvE aDhD” excuse for too long. Okay, so lots of successful people have ADHD. They’re not whining about how they can’t finish the thing. They’re out there, taking their Adderall and meditating and doing everything they can to do the damn thing. And that’s what I want to do. So 75Hard is a bunch of arbitrary rules you have to follow for 75 days. But I’m gonna follow them if it kills me, just to prove to myself that I have self-discipline, the thing that has evaded me my whole life. I don’t know when I’m going to do this (although it will probably be in the summer when it’s nicer out and I don’t have to do my daily outdoor workouts in a blizzard like a psychopath), but I want to do it once. Just so I can say that I did it.
Release WUJ 2023
Speaking of things I’ve started and never finished, I’ve been saying new music is on the way since our last release, “If I Stay,” which came out more than a year ago. This isn’t just a “me” thing, since I’m only one member of the band and this will be a group effort, but as the frontwoman, I need to make sure we keep moving in the right direction. I’m tired of stagnating as a musician. I write songs to be heard by others, and if no one’s hearing us, what’s the point of having a band? And speaking of which, I want to be more “on top” of our social media this year. People need to hear us, and if it takes TikTok or Instagram to get our music out there, so be it. The world is changing and so is the music industry. I need to take advantage of modern social media and learn how to use it to get us noticed. And speaking of music, there’s my final, most crucial goal for the year.
Finish my classes with at least a B and get that music therapy degree (finally)
That’s it. The degree I’ve been working toward for literally twelve years is so close to being mine. I started down the road to being a music therapist at 18, when my parents convinced me to change my major from pre-med to music (unlike every other parent ever), but I came to the conclusion that I was too mentally ill and messed up to ever help anyone else. And that’s a fucking lie. I now believe my mental illnesses and neurodivergences will make me a better music therapist because I’ve been on the other side. I will know how my clients’ minds work even better than a neurotypical music therapist would because I’m one of them. And now I have the tools, medications, and coping mechanisms I need to make it through the schooling I need. It’s too late to turn back now. I’m going to get this degree and get a fancy little “MT-BC” after my name, once and for all.
And there you have it. I’m done with being mediocre. Only I have the power to change my life for the better, and this is the year I finally do it.
Seriously. Every time I’ve tried to do anything by myself, I usually fall flat on my big dumb face. And if there’s anything I’ve learned about my particular brand of ADHD, it’s that I need someone else there to hold me to my word. Accountability is a necessity for me.
My wife and I have been trying to get back in shape, which isn’t a new thing. Years of heavy drinking and treating our bodies like dive bars instead of temples has turned us into bloated, chonky, weak shells of our former selves.
And our former selves were HOT.
The problem is whenever we tried to commit to working out or eating better, we let ourselves make tiny excuses until eventually those tiny excuses rolled into bigger excuses, and soon enough, we were right back at the start. Maybe we could stop drinking and smoking cold turkey, but starting a new habit was going to take a lot more effort. And help!
When we joined our local gym, we were invited to try working with a personal trainer. And just having someone to show us the ropes and cheer us on helped so much, so we signed on to have him train us weekly. (Even though we’re going to have to hustle hard to pay for it, ick.) And having someone hold us to our word is helping immensely. We’ve been training three days a week now and I’m already seeing results. It’s amazing what happens when you’re nice to your body for once.
But even if you can’t afford a trainer, just having someone else around to help you stay motivated works as well. Find a friend who wants to get in shape as much as you do. When you don’t want to work out, there’s a chance they do. And they’ll be the one push you to get in the gym and do the damn thing. There’s a saying in Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible for good reason (and not just because it’s an entire chapter of emo ramblings).
Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.
Ecclesiastes 4: 9-10
Sometimes you need a little help, and there’s no shame in that! Think about a goal you want to accomplish, and find some folks to rally around you and fight alongside you. Maybe it’s working out and getting healthy, or maybe you’re trying to stay accountable for finishing a project. Just find your team and get moving!
I feel bad for leaving everyone on a sad note with my last post, so this one is more optimistic, I swear!
My wife and I stopped drinking earlier this year. Officially, for real this time. We haven’t had as much as a drop in the last several months. And frankly, I’m pretty okay with that. Sure, there’s some FOMO when my friends are sipping on a nice craft beer or mixed drink, but for the most part, I don’t miss it. I’ve lost weight, I don’t have no-reason hives nearly as often, and I’m not constantly in a daze from being drunk or hungover almost every day.
We were paying money to have a bad time.
Something peculiar happened when we stopped drinking though. We found ourselves unable to relate to a lot of our friends who did drink a lot or rely on drugs to have fun. Suddenly, sobriety was lonely as hell. I call these growing pains, though. As in, we’re finally growing up, but the people around us are stagnating. It’s a good problem, although it doesn’t feel good in the moment.
My old church and pastor are problematic for a lot of reasons, and if you’ve snooped long enough through my blog, you’d know why. But my former pastor did have a lot of wisdom I still love by to this day. One of his sayings was “show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” As 90s sitcom “special episode” as it is to admit, the people you surround yourself with influence you more than you think.
Think of it this way. If someone’s standing on a table for some ungodly reason, it would be hard for them to pull another person up onto the table with them. It would be much easier for someone on the ground to pull the person on the table down to their level. It’s best to climb onto the table alone. That doesn’t mean you can’t have any friends when you’re working on yourself, though. Maybe people will see that what you’re doing is weird and different and better, and they might even climb onto a table as well.
These are good influences, definitely.
The point is, the road to getting better is lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of hanging out at bars and partying your life away, meet new people at gyms or church. Learn a new hobby and join a local group for it. Even online groups like r/decidingtobebetter on Reddit can be helpful. It sucks distancing yourself from old friends, but holding onto habits that hurt you in order to still relate to them is not worth it. You can’t keep breaking your own bones to fit into someone else’s box.
This is a bit of a different post from my usual. Typically, I post about things that affected me after overcoming them, as sort of a little inspirational “oh look I overcame this challenge and SO CAN YOU” type of thing. I don’t often report from the trenches, but here we are.
My depression is worsening, and I don’t know what to do.
When I was younger, I felt like all the best things in life were yet to come. There was so much to look forward to, so many things to see and experience. I spent hours daydreaming about the life I wanted to live, and I was convinced if I did everything right, did all my homework and stayed out of trouble and was a generally good person, I’d get everything I wanted.
Now, I see that life doesn’t work out that way. Bad things happen to good people. Life is mostly one storm after another. Something is always in pain, physically or mentally, and you just keep chasing some kind of high to forget about it for a moment. So my band played one of the biggest arts festivals in Michigan. What does it matter if one month later, I’m struggling just to peel myself off the couch and go to work?
I feel like I don’t have anything to look forward to anymore, like all my best days are behind me. I’m almost 30. I feel like I’ve wasted my youth, and I’m never going to get a chance to do it over again. At this point, I’m just slowly catapulting toward death. And I’m not suicidal, frankly because I’m horribly afraid of death. I don’t know what comes next, and that’s scary as hell.
I guess my depression stems from fear. Im scared of dying. I’m scared for when my parents die. I’m scared I’ll never get my music therapy degree. I’m scared my band won’t make it and no one will ever hear my music. I’m scared I’ll never get to have kids. I’m scared I’ll never get my house on a lake. I’m scared my boss secretly hates me. I’m scared my wife will someday decide she’s sick of my bullshit and leave me.
I guess I’m scared this is all there will ever be for me.
The thing about us ADHD folks is we’re natural daydreamers. It’s in our wiring. Many of us are so lost in our own heads we don’t notice what’s around us (or perhaps that’s a “me” problem, I don’t know).
Me, I’ve always loved to daydream about the future. It’s fun for me to imagine where I’ll be in 5, 10, 15 years or so. Of course, I’m at the age where I’ve done imagined myself now. Like, 13-year-old Jess imagined being 30, and in those daydreams, I was Richie Sambora. I am now closing in on 30, and I am still not Richie Sambora.
What all 13-year-old girls aspire to be, right?
But I still find things to look forward to. Maybe it’s the optimist in me. Sure, shitty things are going to happen, like, ya know, my parents dying, and my older siblings dying, and all my friends dying (unless I die first, which would also be sucky because, well, being dead). But there’s a ton I still have yet to do.
The thing is — going back to the dying thing — I have this nagging fear that I’m going to die before doing all the things I want to do. Not because life is short, but because my attention span is.
I think a lot about the story I’ve been writing since I was in high school, but could never sit down and write because of my ADHD. Or the music therapy degree I’ve been working on since 2011 but put on hold twice because I couldn’t handle the coursework due to my ADHD. Or the multitudinous amounts of things I haven’t been able to do because of being broke, which mostly circles back to me spending my money as soon as I get it because I like instant gratification because— get this — I’m ADHD.
Everything I haven’t done in life is because of my ADHD.
Maybe this is you. Maybe you have a million things you want or want to do before you die, but it all feels so unattainable. This isn’t just an ADHD thing, either. It’s a human thing. So if you’re reading this and are not ADHD, here’s a tip you can use too.
Create a “why” board. Put pictures representing your ideal life into a collage, and put that shit everywhere. As your lock screen, on your fridge, on your bathroom mirror, wherever you’ll see it daily. This collage represents why you’re doing what you do. These are the reasons you go to work, or study for your tests, or save your money.
“But Jess, isn’t that just a vision board?” Well, kind of. But this goes further than just Pinterest-worthy magazine cutouts. This is your plan for your life. Make it personal. Imagine what your dream house would look like and find it on Zillow. Imagine your dream career and Google the uniform or outfit you’d likely wear. If kids are part of your plan, search for pictures of children that look like you and your actual or imagined partner, which is definitely not creepy at all.
For inspiration, here’s mine:
There’s a little set of cards with inspirational quotes and phrases that came with a set of gemstones I bought to decorate the new apartment with. One of them says “Imagine your ideal self — then start showing up as her.” I put that card in my living room where I’ll see it every day, because it’s true.
You are what you do every day. If you keep eating like garbage and laying around playing Sims all day, that’s who you become. That’s what I was turning into, and my dreams of becoming a music therapist and getting back into shape and eventually buying a house and starting a family seemed so out-of-reach. But I had an epiphany. I wasn’t going to magically become The Best Jess if I kept living the way I was living, and honestly, what a wasted life that would have been!
It’s a hard truth, but you have to choose to suck less, and you have to keep choosing to suck less every day. Soon, you’ll wonder why you were ever living like a zombie to begin with. I picked up my computer to play with my virtual dollhouse last night and put it down after five minutes. It just didn’t seem worth it to me. I had so much more I wanted to do!
Get all the support you need. Get your friends and family on board, especially those you live with. Make that “why” board and show them, perhaps. Explain why everything on it is important to you, and come up with a plan to accomplish those things. Maybe you’re like me and just need to study and save money, and while it seems impossible now, with the right supports, you’ll get there. Take your meds. See a therapist if you can. Do whatever it takes to crawl out of the hole. But the best place to start is by determining your “whys” and letting them stare you in the face every single day.
So, as part of my “Jess needs to suck less” plan, I’ve been meditating a lot. One of the tools I’ve been using for this has been tarot cards. Yes, I know it’s silly and kind of woo-woo, but meditating on the meanings and symbolism of the cards really puts me in a focused headspace.
And being ADHD, that is a hard headspace to get into.
One of my newfound habits has been drawing cards every morning and trying to relate them to my life somehow. Strangely enough, a lot of the time, they make a crapton of sense. Like, maybe God and the universe are telling me I’m wasting my writing and music talents by doing nothing but playing The Sims all day.
“Your Sim’s guitar skills are at level 10 and yours is at 6. What the hell?”
Today, I did a morning spread that asked a bunch of questions, like what I need to keep in mind today, and I can have the best day possible. One of the questions was “What do I need to let go of?” The card I drew? The emperor.
What?
If you don’t know much about tarot, the emperor usually represents all good things: stability, structure, healthy masculine energy. It’s the “fatherhood” card of the deck. Was my deck saying to let go of my daddy issues? Because like, my dad’s the freakin’ bomb.
But I did a little digging into the meanings, particularly the implications for health, and oh man, did it hit me. According to the website The Tarot Guide…well, I’ll let it speak for itself.
Shit.
I mentioned in a few previousblog posts that I was attempting the 75 Hard challenge. Basically, two 45 minute workouts a day (one outside), follow a diet plan, drink a gallon of water a day, and read 10 pages of a nonfiction book daily. And it was going fairly well…for a while.
The cracks started to show though. The water was making me pee literally every half hour, taking away valuable time at work. Intermittent fasting was working (I lost ten pounds!), but I found myself half-dead by the time I was able to start eating for the day. And the workouts. OH GOD THE WORKOUTS. I kept having to restart my 75 day counter because I couldn’t keep it up. I spent so much of my energy unpacking and getting the new apartment in order, I barely had the motivation to even move by the time my workout times rolled around.
To be fair though, I was killing the reading requirement.
In short, I wasn’t listening to my body, and my body was protesting HARD. I remembered this time I got really into working out last year. I was also in the midst of being a guinea pig for an experimental treatment for chronic hives. This required regular blood work. One morning, after a night of going hard at the gym, I went in for my routine blood draw. Later that afternoon, I got an urgent call from the doctor. My blood had a whole lot of something it wasn’t supposed to have.
I should have learned right then and there not to push myself over my body’s limit. I’ll get to a point where I can work out twice a day for 45 minutes, but I need to ease into it, for the sake of my own health and well-being. It’s not worth killing myself to finish some internet challenge.
Besides, I’m done with “challenges.” Challenges are temporary. I don’t want to go hard for 75 days only to fall back into bad habits. I want to change my lifestyle entirely. I want to learn to care for my body like the gift it is. I want to eat things that nourish me, stay active (but not, ya know, almost give myself a fatal blood condition), and dedicate my time to learning to be my best self for me.
Maybe I’ll do the 75 Hard challenge someday. But now is the time for self-care.
JESSA JOYCE 