Letting Go and Going On

On August 31 I will celebrate my fourth Wedding Anniversary.  On September 4 I will acknowledge that my husband has been gone four years.

If you do the math, I was married roughly four days to a living man.  If you see it through my eyes, I have been married nearly four years.  Legally.  My husband and I were together for nearly six years.  We were engaged for most of that time.  To both of us, the engagement WAS the marriage- with jewelry.  We had been married long before the diamond showed up.

I realize that there are those who would suggest that my loss is somehow less valid because my husband and I were not given the luxury of more years.  There are those who would suggest that I should somehow "be over" the loss because he has been gone so long.  I would suggest to those that they shut the F up.

Today I gave several things that belonged to my husband to a friend of ours who will manage them responsibly.  That friend drove over 2,000 miles to take possession of these things and told me how he will manage transporting and handling them.  There is no question in my mind that these things will be handled responsibly and with respect.

And yet...

My step-son and mother-in-law both demanded that they be given the things that my husband had that they wanted within the first month of his death.  I complied with those demands.

What is left are things that my step-son would like to sell- because they mean nothing to him.  While those things have a financial value, that value is insignificant in view of other- and more important - points.  And all these things mean something to me.

Today has been difficult and ugly in many ways.  I let go of things that my husband loved.  It was like losing him all over again.  Right now, I hate everything.  I'm second-guessing myself, I worry that I didn't get every possible "buy-in" from people who don't live here.  I worry about the fact that I don't care about them.

There are more things that I will need to deal with and deal with reasonably soon.  I have been managing pneumonia lately and find that I have lost some ability to breathe and function as a result.  This tells me that I need to understand what it will mean to go on.

I need to get rid of "stuff".  I need to live more simply.  I know this.  But doing the thing I know leaves me anxious and bereft.

There are no easy answers.

There Are Elephants in this Room

To my mind, it is time to declare a moratorium on elephants in rooms and let them into fields to be free. On the downside, this means that we have to get honest- and perhaps brutally so.  We will have to talk about difficult subjects at a level deeper than the lip-service that has become popular.  Additionally, we also have to forgo the ever-so-popular civil disobedience.

In short, we have to decide that the issue is important enough to take a stand in a very unpopular way.  We need to responsibly speak up- and then stand our ground.  We have to decide that stigma can no longer be tolerated and that people who live with mental health issues be allowed a safe place to discuss them.

Lovely pipe dream.  *sigh*

My ADHD life includes some lovely side effects.  While ADHD itself is a neuro-biological differentiation. it usually brings "friends" along with it.  Those "friends" are called co-morbids and they live in the Mental Health spectrum.

ADHD  carries along "the three D's".  They are Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Dysgraphia.  I have Dyscalculia and, to an extent, Dysgraphia.  In short, I am wicked ugly with numbers and I can only write because I can draw.

Dyscalculia is number confusion.  Math leaves me in a cold sweat and I transpose and substitute numbers routinely.  I can't balance as much as a checkbook because I am bewildered by numbers of any kind.

Dyslexia is letter confusion.  Letters flip about and become incomprehensible.  Written communication becomes a horrific mine field and reading can be nearly impossible.  Some report that even pictographs are confusing.  

Dysgraphia is a challenge of writing and fine motor skills.  I was taught to "draw" rather than to try to "write".  I was blessed with people who taught me to see the task differently as a way to master it.

With the "three D's" more complex issues exist and thrive.  Among others, they include depression, anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, substance abuse (frequently as self medication) and more.

Just to keep everything fun, ADHD is often considered to be nothing much and people who live with it to be "drug seekers"because the medications that are generally most helpful are also stimulants.  

So a person with ADHD doesn't just have to try to deal with their non-existent social skills, whatever co-morbids are tagging along, and often crippling impulsivity, they are told that their only problem is that they don't try hard enough and they need to "get over it" because ADHD isn't real (it is), is over diagnosed (it isn't) and EVERYONE has issues (they do- but that doesn't negate mine).

What I'm saying is that we can't have serious discussions about mental health without recognizing that there is some mental illness that we don't want to discuss.  We have to understand that real people have real experience and that some of it makes some folks uncomfortable- but those people need to have a safe space to relate their experience too.

Mental health doesn't pick and choose.  It doesn't target only the thin, beautiful, talented, or socially accepted.  It gets some of those, but it gets a bunch of us "regular folks" as well.

In order to have any credible discussion of mental health, we have to become willing to challenge preconceptions and stop the disbelief.  The experience of the individual has to be considered and valued.  The stigma must end.

In the perfect world, stigma around mental illness would end and the elephants in the room be allowed to roam free.

ADHD Isn't REAL

EVERYONE has problems remembering.
EVERYONE has problems managing time.
EVERYONE is socially awkward.
EVERYONE gets distracted.
EVERYONE has problems staying on task.

YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT.

*sigh*

Isn't this kind of like telling the autistic to "suck it up?"

The history of ADHD suffers by a myriad of definitions and the scholars that use these definitions.  In 1967 I was diagnosed with "Minimal Brain Dysfunction".  The theory was that it would "go away" at age 12 or so.  Didn't happen.

Later it was Attention Deficit Disorder.  That didn't work either.  It didn't take onto account issues of hyperactivity or impulsivity that were a part of the lives of the people who live with the disorder.

Still later it was Attention Deficit, Hyperactivity Disorder.  That brought on complaints as well.  For many, hyperactivity had been tempered by age.  Impulsivity hadn't gone anywhere and the hyperactivity had been refined by time and social modeling.  Many believed that "ADHD" didn't define their experience.

To this day we see people who define themselves as "Primarily Inattentive".  The DSM has a rather narrow band of descriptors that clarify impulsivity and most who fight with impulsivity would prefer to downplay that part of their reality.

Okay.

I have ADHD- Combined Type.  At the age of 52 (well, nearly) I am still hyperactive.  I fight daily with impulsivity.  My attention is seldom.

Is that all there is?

Nope.

The average ADHDer lives with the equivalent of 100 television sets in their head.  Those sets are ON 24/7 and they are all on a different channel.

Can you think functionally in that cacophony?  Didn't think so.

We ADHDers MUST.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  "That can't be possible!!!"

Want to live in MY brain for awhile?

Unless a disability is visible, it is ignorable.  I know this to be a truth.

My friend Mike has been a quadriplegic since his teens.  He is in his 50s today.  He lives in a large motorized wheelchair.  You would think that people would be willing to accept both his strengths and his limitations.

Not so much.

I've watched people trip over him and then get pissed because he didn't move out of their able-bodied way.  I know he gets left out of social situations because of the way others perceive his limitations.  In my perspective, he is limited by others- based on their beliefs about him.

My disability is in my brain and it affects how I am perceived.  I personally know of two people who took my husband aside to advise him to get rid of me early-ish in our relationship.  One did this on my birthday- when I would have liked my husband to be with me- my mother had died two months earlier.  Hubby took the meeting because he thought the person could be helpful from a career perspective.  What he got was a pissed off me- after hearing that an irrelevant someone else spent that time to tell him to get rid of me.  That person was useless from a career perspective.

I'm open about my ADHD.  That gives others permission to either disregard me entirely or assume I am functionally retarded.

That's special.

You don't have to believe that ADHD is real.  You don't have to believe that gravity is real either.  At the end of the day, your belief is meaningless.