Welcome to the awkward first draft

Oh hey! It’s January 2025. That means it’s been one year since my official ADHD diagnosis. That’s one year of fighting with learning about my brain: how it works, why it works the way it does, and how I can work with it instead of against it.

Can I tell you something? It’s not easy. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and call it pretty difficult. Learning that there’s a reason for the way I am and the way I do things felt super validating at first, and it still feels good to have that knowledge, but it brought with it a TON of overwhelm.

Wait…I have what?

In about mid-2024, I started seeing a therapist. I just felt so overwhelmed all the time. I mean sure, I have a full-time job, a 6-year-old, a poorly managed book blog, a book club hostess gig, and hobbies that come and go, never to see the light of day again.

That does sound like a lot, especially when combined with daily household management and cleaning chores, but my overwhelm encompassed more.

I was overwhelmed by the number of emails coming into my inbox, but I was too overwhelmed by the idea of going through them all and systematically unsubscribing to fix it. My closet was an overwhelming mess (whenever I actually got around to folding and hanging up my laundry), but the thought of figuring out how to organize it better and possibly get rid of some clothing? Ugh, incredibly overwhelming.

Raising a kid and tending to sometimes constant needs? Overwhelming.

Keeping up at work? Yep, overwhelming.

Basically, all the overwhelming things combined into one insurmountable mountain that felt soul crushing. So, I looked for a therapist.

When I unleashed that deluge of whelm on my new therapist and explained how I thought it was all somehow caused by my anxiety, she had a different idea and suggested I check out ADHD.

AHA!

Well, you can pretty much see how all of that turned out. I was able to get in for an evaluation pretty quickly and, despite having a hard time pointing out childhood moments of ADHD, was given the official diagnosis.

Cue the celebration! I figured it out! Now I can fix everything because I know why it’s happening! I’m on top of all this!

Except I wasn’t. Everything that was overwhelming before was still there, only now I had another full-time job: researching the heck out of ADHD. I needed to know it all: the best apps to use, the ADHD planner that was going to be a magic bullet for my productivity, the best blogs to read, which social media profiles to follow, which books to check out from the library, which podcasts I needed to subscribe to…it was like my new mission.

You can imagine what that led to….😬😬😬

Yeeaaahh there are basically a bajillion. Over the past year, I have listened, scrolled, signed up, purchased, ruminated, and followed far too many things in order to understand my late-diagnosed self. I’ve found some things super useful, some things life changing, some things super annoying, and some things just meh. Overall, it’s been a whirlwind of a year.

So, why exactly did I think maybe it was a good idea to add more bits of content to the internet by creating an ADHD-themed newsletter??

What I’m Doing Here

There are a few reasons for my being here in this new space. The biggest ones are:

1. Focus

One of the first things I noticed about newsletters these days (at least, those sent by people with ADHD) is that they have a very well-meaning section full of links. Links to great articles, great profiles to follow, great websites to visit, great YouTube videos to watch, etc.

Guys, I have MAJOR FOMO. I am a diehard content consumer—a connoisseur of content, if you will. I will want to click all those recommended links. I will have a hard time choosing which ones I have time for and which ones I don’t. I will save those gol dang newsletters in my inbox for months because I never feel like I have enough time to really open them and sit with them and consume them.

My hope for this blog/newsletter is to create a piece of content bi-weekly or so that is nice and focused on ONE topic. It will still contain a link or two to something cool on the internet, but not 15 links to cool things on various subjects on which you feel the need to click, lest you miss out on something great.

2. Community

I will put my ADHD research, confusion, random finds, cool tools, and more into a newsletter for other people with ADHD (or maybe their loved ones, and let’s be honest, probably my mother-in-law). I will discover and learn things about my brain, and maybe you want to hang out and discover them with me?