The Tea Is I Have ADHD

I say this not for sympathy because the reality is we have all got something, welcome to being alive in this century, take a number — but because context matters when I tell you that for twenty something years I have been trying to fix the wrong thing.

The message has been consistent and well packaged: fix the chaos, optimise the morning, cold plunge your way to a regulated nervous system and here’s a gummy that will give you a pilates bod in 21 days guaranteed. Madness is the enemy. The method is the antidote. Get yourself together - Edna Mode.

Where it gets juicy is: what if the madness was the method all along?!

Like the baddie I am, I have been on antidepressants when I needed them. I have been in a therapy chair and will be for the foreseeable future because I’m not precious about it and it keeps me functional and humble about being the favourite grandchild. There was a period not that long ago where I couldn’t picture my future and not in the vision board sense, the board was not completed but more envisioned so definitely fully committed… again, adhd. More in the sense where you reach for yourself in the quiet and find nobody home. Not even you. Just the echo of all the versions you have been performing and not a single one of them is actually there.

People were telling me how great I looked (purr). With my hair done, face card lethal, waist still missing but I was receiving that information like a report on a stranger’s life. Nodding. Smiling. Genuinely detached from who they were describing. I had curated and presented a version of myself so consistently that even I had started to lose track of where she ended and the actual me began. That particular kind of lonely doesn’t have a clean name.

The method, when I finally found it, did not come from fixing the madness. It came from learning to read it.

Every morning I run. That’s it. Yes anticlimactic, I know, you’re welcome. Before the emails, before the content calendar, before I have let anyone else’s urgency become mine — I run.

Some days it is long and cinematic and I feel like the protagonist of a film about a woman becoming herself, I’m Every Woman by Chaka Khan playing at full volume. Most days it is short and reluctant and I am in active negotiation with my own body like we are in a hostage situation (a cute running fit is always the motivator, trust me on this one). Without it I am a bit lost. The day happens to me rather than me happening to the day.

The run is not me defeating my ADHD. It is not discipline or optimisation or me finally getting myself together in the way the wellness content implied I should. It is me working WITH it. My brain needs movement to regulate before it can do anything else — the run is not the antidote to the chaos, it is the chaos (and my anxiety) being listened to. My nervous system has been trying to tell me that for twenty something years and I spent most of it trying to override it with complex systems that lasted approximately four days.

The colour coded habit tracker lasted two days. The eleven step morning routine lasted four. The elaborate journal with the prompts and the stickers lasted until I lost the pen (it has been six months, she is gone, we move). Step six in my morning routine was to hydrate. I couldn’t even get to step six. Yeah, look… I was trying my best for the me that needed me then #selflove.

What works is one thing. One non-negotiable. One anchor that works WITH my particular brand of madness rather than against it. Not the routine that looks good on paper but the one my nervous system actually responds to.

The challenge is not to find a better routine. It is to find the one thing that works with the specific texture of YOUR madness, not against it. The one small unglamorous non-aesthetic choice is that when you do it your nervous system exhales and says, ok.

Today I showed up for myself first. Mine running in the morning and not spending 16 hours anxiety cleaning and avoiding existence. Today I took myself seriously. The chaos was not the enemy. The chaos was the data. You just have to be still enough to read it.

The pity party ends when you decide it does. Not when you feel ready, not when the chaos clears, not when you finally have it together in the way the Pinterest board implied was possible. The madness is not clearing. It can be the method. Learn its language.

Start there, the rest finds you after.

Drop a tutorial when you figure it out and thanks in advance babes xx

This piece was written for Fluff in collaboration with The Ritual by KIC, currently discussing the theme: “Method in the Madness.”

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