The Soft Space of Daydreams
& the end of my twenties
2024 was the year of 28. I’m turning 29 in January. Before the holiday season kicks up and I’m forced into a cycle of manic cleaning, cooking, socializing, and juggling work and life demands, I just wanted to do a brief reflection and express my gratitude for how far I’ve come.
28 was the year of taking all of the heartache, the bad habits, and the things that hurt and let go of what I no longer needed. For whatever reason, situation by situation, my hand let go of the electric fence that tethered me while I charred on the inside.
This past year may have been my healthiest year yet.
Throughout our journey of trying for kids for the past three years I’ve done nothing but troubleshoot my existence and attempt to figure out the anatomical reason why we haven’t been able to conceive. It was so unfortunate that I had to lose faith in the OBGYNs, PCPs, and Fertility Doctors in my area to take the initiative to do my own research. To figure out for myself why I was experiencing what I do and invest my own time and money into digging into the root cause when my doctors had proven for YEARS that they wouldn’t. I began to see my doctors as a method in which I could order blood tests, as a resource, but not the -only source- of information.
I started working with a new therapist that pulled me out of my sickest cycles of behavior. Throughout those sessions we dug into some of my deep seeded behavior patterns that kept me on an existence akin to cortisol addiction. One of the difficult parts of living with ADHD is sometimes having to trick your brain into a state of stress in order to generate the dopamine necessary to do tasks that it doesn’t find joy, intrigue, or urgency in. Consider that pattern on a larger, deeper scale, and that’s how I’d been operating my life. Signing up for things just to feel alive, forcing novelty to avoid existentialism, hammering urgency to manipulate my brain chemistry when all I really needed was rest.
Probably the biggest game changer of this year is that I began working with a dietician who has been helping me plan and organize my meals in ways that support my TTC (Trying To Conceive) goals. Not only was it incredibly affirming to have a registered dietician tell me that I had a strong understanding of how nutrition worked within the female body, but that I was on the right track, and that I really just needed support and the occasional guidance. It has helped immensely.
I started doing yoga 3-4x a week consistently, meditating, and making a dedicated effort to “look for the good” and document it, even on days where it feels damn near impossible. For such a long time, I was shrouded by my own fear that it wouldn’t work, or that because I kept getting distracted a few times that it wasn’t for me. One of the worlds most prolific ADHD researchers, clinical professor of psychiatry Dr. Russell Barkley said in a seminar once that the attention span is neuro-plastic. This means that it is malleable, it can be improved, and it damn near brought me to tears when I even considered that I might be able to help myself without resorting to medication. (You can watch the lecture that’s split into two parts here and here) Meditation is a tool that has been effective in managing how things effect me emotionally throughout the day as well as the compounding interest of stress on the mind and body. For the past 10 years of my life I have struggled with existential panic attacks that I felt grossly victimized by in the sense that I couldn’t even remotely control them or predict when they would occur. Through therapy, meditation, and finding peace, these have become more or less obsolete.
I started to become more mindful of who was important in my life and letting people go who didn’t deserve my friendship/compassion/love and attention. Slowly I began to take notice of those that wouldn’t reach out when I stopped reaching out. I began to realize that that was a necessity for me, to feel thought of and considered. I decided that it was a disservice to those that couldn’t operate that way because I would eventually harbor resentment towards them if I’d communicate it multiple times and behavior wouldn’t change.
Of course the initial sting of those losses had to happen in order for my brain to understand the pattern that I would be okay after they left. That the sun would still rise, fresh bread would still smell amazing, and my dogs getting excited to see me would still make my heart happy.
Now for the truest gift of this year. A new dream.
An unselfish dream. A dream that benefits me and my family. One that gives back to the earth and celebrates it. One that it manageable and pulls me close to a connection that my family has held with the Earth spanning centuries. This dream doesn’t demand a loan or the need to go into debt, or place any harsh deadlines on my life.
It’s more of a list than one particular picture, so here’s a few:
- Build up my own food storage/learn canning food preservation
- Starting and maintaining a garden
- Owning livestock and processing them for family consumption
- Building up a home apothecary with tinctures/teas/ and remedies I know and trust to work
- Shopping local
- Volunteering at a community garden/seed library
- Explore new parts of my locality and becoming an expert in the flora/fauna that calls this area home
- Share my produce with others in my community
- Slowly altering my home to reflect the type of person I am and want to be
To live in rhythm with the seasons, to dance in lock step with nature’s grace, and imitate its effortless beauty and cadence in the hopes that I too can achieve balance. I don’t believe there is true enlightenment, I believe there is only practice and intentional harmony. Like grazing your fingers lightly on a violin string to create a harmonic, it has to be soft-handed, and precise in its placement. You can’t white-knuckle peace, you can only guide yourself into it by building up the habits needed in order to see the glimmer.
If you’re reading this, thank you for taking the time <3 I’d love to know more about you feel like you’ve grown as a person over the past year and what your current dream is for yourself!