Falling 4 Stories: ADHDing
Disclaimer: I am stealing this title from my immensely talented artist, writer, photographer, wordsmith husband, but that is another story.
Being creatively blessed often means that life is funny, crazy, bursting with ideas, and full of mess and mistakes. Some call this blessing ADHD (which my daughter and I thought was aptly described on a TikTok as Attention Deficit Hey Donuts! Or simply ADHeyDonuts).
Stories about creativity, spontaneity, mess and mistakes (also known as falling down, failing, resilience, or bouncing back) are bound up with my life story. There are often events that make me and my family laugh and cry (often simultaneously).
According to my grandfather, I used to beg him for stories by saying, “Tell me a story! But make it short.” So here are four short stories sharing some ADHD moments:
The 20 Questions that Never Were
My husband, two daughters, and I were driving to get frozen yogurt at Sweet Frog about 20 minutes away. We started the drive saying we wanted to play 20 questions and began the game. Somewhere in the middle of the first few questions, an ADHeyDonuts moment happened where my 14-year-old got distracted. A conversation began about ADHD and escalated to a bit of an argument. We spent the next 15 minutes in an intense conversation/argument about the experience of ADHD. There were some raised voices and some passionate statements. About two minutes from our destination, my 9-year-old, who had been silent for the entire impassioned conversation about ADHD, exclaimed, “I thought we were playing 20 questions!” We all burst out laughing with this hysterical realization which broke the tension and allowed us to finally continue our game!
Modeling Magical Mistakes
I was leading a song with movement that goes through the entire year of holidays for Kindergarten through seventh graders at our synagogue. As I got to the third holiday of the year, I said the wrong holiday, which coincidentally came after a description of Yom Kippur as “Fast and Pray, Mistakes Were Made” (note that “mistakes were made” was accompanied by a oops-life-happens shrug). As we laughed and started over, I realized the link and continued to embellish and enjoy trucking through the song, mistakes and all. We ended up having so much fun with it! In fact, a teacher came up to me after the song session to tell me that a student who was on the verge of tears broke into a smile at my silly mistake and proceeded to enjoy herself.
Finishing 4 Stories
I started this blogpost about 6 months ago and when faced with my self-imposed task of posting on Linked In once a week, I asked myself, “What inspiration can I share today?”. The voice in my head telling me to post about ADHD resurfaced. I followed my intuition to my blog folder (containing several unfinished posts) and found these! So I am back to FINISH the stories. In the interest of throwing perfectionism out the window and putting my truth fully on display, I am using this 3rd story to tell the story of how I often struggle with completing tasks. This is beautifully illustrated in how my husband would find our home when I was an unpaid working mom (aka stay-at-home-mom): Laundry half-folded, grocery bags on the floor half-emptied, dishes half done, dinner waiting to be started, and perhaps a child in my lap as we read an Elephant and Piggy book together:)
My ADHeyDonuts Brain: Squirrely and Full of Ideas!
My brain is squirrely (easily inspired by the world around me) and full of ideas. This can lead to many rabbit holes, innovations, unfinished business, and a very circuitous route to accomplishing something. For instance, I was laughing at the circuitous route I took to signing up for an ADHD conference, of all things.
Caution: This story contains a peek into an ADHeyDonuts Brain and may cause dizziness, distress, and anxiety for linear thinkers.
How an ADHD-er researches an ADHD conference: She hears about it on a podcast and immediately looks it up. Then she realizes she is in the car at a light and needs to put her phone down. She gets really excited and starts dreaming about it and blocking off her calendar. Two days later she realizes that she doesn't even know how much it costs or what the agenda is. A week later, while working on a project about sharing the emotional load of care work, she stops to search up the ADHD conference. While reading about the speakers at the conference, she remembers an email she needs to respond to and starts writing the email. Realizing that she might meet this person at the ADHD conference, she decides to go back to researching the conference so that she can say definitively whether she will go. Having 9 minutes until her sister arrives for a walk, she decides she will let them know she will likely be there and writes on her TO DO list to register for the conference:)
Falling and bouncing back is the story of ADHD. The need to pick up the pieces and make it into a beautiful offering requires an unending amount of self-awareness, self-compassion, and the humility and confidence to move forward. Instead of beating ourselves with a stick over every mistake, the questions below help my clients and myself in moving forward after falling down. (The first question often provides the best answers for moving forward.)
What is working well?
What do I want to tweak?
What emerges when you ask: What is working well here?
If you want support in shifting out of blame and shame, and into self-compassion and forward momentum, book an Info Meeting with me!
