SquarePeg Books

Kintsugi is this year’s word.

The idea is to accept a formerly broken object, and not just acknowledge but appreciate the scars telling that object’s story, maybe even admire that story and how that object is still together and functional.

Apparently, we have yet to start gluing things together. It’s entirely possible that some of the pieces are missing completely.

I have lost my shit.

Not in a huge, nervous breakdown way, but I may as well have.

I have failed at adulting, at its most basic: sucking it up for the good of the children.

I have not abused them, but I do feel I failed them by not being able to hold my shit together to pull my adult weight in the household.

I didn’t know it was “a thing” until I went through a  few breakdowns. 2018, 2020 (who didn’t?), 2021.

Arguments could be made that my unmedicated ADHD is going apeshit with the perimenopause (yay, 50). Apparently it’s a real thing, because dopamine drops even more during this period, so ADHD women in perimenopause are a research item, now.

When one mental issue goes apeshit, it tends to take the comorbidities with it. Anxiety spikes, extreme depression spirals, executive dysfunction, task paralysis, excessive sense of guilt and shame….

It’s bothersome.

Like, really? I’m 50. My adulting skills should be decently honed by now. How am I not able to just suck it up and get it done? Why do I struggle with anxiety spikes that threaten my very being over an incredibly basic but necessary tasks (like, say, holding down a part time retail job)?

My anxiety literally crushed my ability to function. The slightest thing drove me into an unstable crying jag that lasts hours. If my thought strayed IN ANY DIRECTION outside the sphere of dissociation I tried to keep my brain in, I lost it all. I literally collapsed into a non-functional blubbering mass, incapable of doing a load of laundry, much less a forward facing customer service job.

Anti-anxiety meds prescribed to me for “use as needed,” failed to take the edge off. I’ve scheduled an appointment to get with my Dr about going back into ADHD meth meds, perhaps review the other meds I’m on for depression and such, but I can’t get in sooner than the end of May. I keep getting notices that “an earlier appointment has opened up, but it’s either inconveniently timed for the day, or it’s already gone before 30 seconds has passed since the notification.

Meanwhile, I have a child with legitimate disabilities, who routinely sucks it up, every day, to put one foot in front of the other and climb the hill before them.

And let me tell you, the shame I feel when comparing myself to my kid, is enough to drown half the continental US.

Perhaps Kintsugi is harder than I thought.