As I write this, the weather is cooler, the leaves are turning wonderful colours of orange, yellow and brown and with it the stickiness of summer that befell Melbourne this year has gone.
I have already had the fire on in the formal lounge, feeling its heat warm up my cheeks, and my toes. It feels cosy and lovely.
We have been a bit busy this past month with kitchen renovations. I designed the kitchen myself, handed it to a kitchen company and they brought forth my vision. Whilst going through it, I am never a happy person. I watch the details like a hawk, fearful that what I designed might not come to fruition, or indeed work. But the kitchen company was amazing, and managed my attention to detail very well. With every question, I was met with cheerful compliance and it has resulted in a relatively painless, quite positive experience. Yesterday, all my kitchen belongings were re-installed in their rightful place and I felt calm once again.
Pre-kitchen installation, we took the opportunity to edit down a lot of what we had. There were platters, bowls, cups and such that we had held onto, but never used, for decades. It was time to let them go. There is always a symbolism for letting things go, I find. We tend to place such meaning on these things. We inadvertently tie them to the strings of our heart and letting them go feels like we are unpicking those heartstrings, somehow. It can come with a bit of a wrench.
We are at the precipice of the third act of our life though. As such, we are consciously trying to downsize our belongings. I once came across the concept of Swedish death cleaning and I really liked the idea of purging our belongings that will not serve our children in any way, so that they don’t have to do it when the time comes for us to move on from this life. It is like doing a kindness for the future generation. It also gives us an opportunity to donate things and control what is going to landfill.
So, my mission for the next few weeks is to go through each repository of belongings and to edit further so that all we are left with are things that have purpose AND are used, or have such strong sentimental value that a simple photograph of them for the album simply won’t do.
We are also planning our holiday to the U.K. We leave in a few weeks and will be gone for a full four weeks. This holiday is all about visiting family and friends, some of which we haven’t seen for 18 years. We are concentrating our efforts on the south of England, making our way in our final week to my dad in Norfolk. Dave is quite keen to take a trip up to York, so we will see how that goes. He and Dave are quite keen to visit the viking sites, and I think Dave wants to visit the Crucible (a snooker venue for those who have never heard of it).
I have a new support worker starting today. Since my diagnosis I have resisted help. The internal ableism is strong I am afraid and I did not want to admit that. My NDIS review is coming up on Friday and I haven’t used much of my funding. It worries me that some of it will be taken away just as I have come to terms with how much support I actually do need. Anyway, my new support worker seems really lovely and she is here to support me with things that I need to get done around the house which I cannot do on my own (thank you autistic burnout), as well as help me engage with the community a bit more.
I will be honest here, and say that I have reached a point where I am really comfortable with my reclusiveness. Where once I couldn’t sit for five minutes with my own company, I now relish it. I am very fortunate that our family situation is such that I don’t have to work, which is just as well as I have never been able to hold down a job for longer than 6 months because of my unknown at the time AuDHD. Coupled with ME/CFS and Rheumatoid Arthritis which severely limit my energy levels, I have had no choice but to learn to let go and be comfortable with being on my own and learn it I have, really really well. However, the NDIS is pretty adamant that we participants need to be more sociable and that we also need to improve our disability which is weird given we have to prove we have a lifelong disability to actually receive the funding. So, I am trying to play the game and have the support worker assist me with getting out a bit more. I don’t hold out much hope, but I am trying at least.
I haven’t been in my craft room since January! I just haven’t been able to face it. I confided in a friend recently that I wondered if I had lost the will to craft. Sometimes with ADHD, the new shiny thing becomes not so new anymore and our dopamine deficient brains need something new to get that dopamine hit. I have cycled through many, many crafts and I think I have run out of shiny new things. I am quite sad about this. I have a beautiful craft pod in the garden and to think I don’t want to be in there breaks my heart slightly.
One of the reasons I think this is occurring is because when I am in there, I feel overwhelmed. It is not a massive space (2.8m by 5.6m) but I have ALOT of stuff crammed in there. Everything has a place and is labelled, but it does feel overwhelming to me when I am in there. There are a lot of things that seem to shout at me. It feels like a massive demand and with ADHD demand avoidance on a massive level is a thing, so there is that too.
I have been thinking that perhaps I should choose my craft loves (memory keeping and an emerging love of watercolour) and simply let the rest go, using the available space to create a bit of a sanctuary. I am not sure how to go about it though, and the very idea of where to begin fills me with overwhelm. Perhaps this is something the support worker can help me with. It would be nice to have a retreat that is almost hygge in its feel and aesthetic. Right now, it feels very white which I normally love, but I am craving an environment that is more akin to a hug right now.
I have had to severely limit my social media consumption. When I first began watching I loved the videos and images, which all seemed fun, funny or informative. I loved the feeling that I was somehow keeping in touch with what the world was doing. However, the algorithms have changed and now I am being fed the more dark side of humanity and my poor beleaguered soul cannot handle that at all. So all I have been able to manage is watching a bit of TikTok here and there (very limited), some very curated YouTube videos, and posting on my personal FB page about our renovations and trips which is more of a diary to me than anything else.
There was a time when I desperately wanted to leave a mark of myself somewhere. I romanticised the notion of offering the world something through my writing. I have always wanted to write a book. A common truism in this day and age is that the world needs to hear what we have to say which helped fuel the explosion of blogs across the globe. Some were incredibly successful too having learned the tricks to playing the algorithm game. For most of my thirties and forties, I was going through a crisis. After my mom died, my life felt so meaningless and I didn’t want my life to disappear into the nothingness that countless previous generations have done.
I couldn’t quite find the wherewithal (or imagination) to write a book, so I took a course on blogging and began a blog. This blog is my fourth iteration of that. With my blog I would be able to connect with people all around the globe, at least that is what I told myself. However, it became clear pretty quickly that I didn’t have a niche nor the motivation to learn how to play the algorithm game. Blogging is also pretty competitive, and I don’t do well at all in that environment.
We like to tell ourselves that we are helping people, and perhaps we are, but we are fooling ourselves if we think blogging is purely altruistic. There is a part of us that also wants to feel heard, seen and like we made a difference. We all want to feel like our lives mattered.
When I realised that I was never going to truly make an impact on the wider world, I started to really think whether or not that was a bad thing. I concluded it was not. We get one life and frankly we are all doing the best we can. Some people are destined to live lives that are larger than life, but others, like me, are destined to live smaller lives, lives that are quiet and seemingly insignificant, except to those closest to them.
Maybe it is a consequence of the last four years with its life limiting consequences and the amount of time I have to spend on my own, but I have come to accept that at the end of the day, life is HARD and all we are all trying to do is just live the best life we can, with the time we have been given. Sometimes that will result in a quieter life rather than a large and loud one. I truly believe that the very best thing we can do is simply to offer kindness to everyone in our path and the butterfly effect will do the rest. My life is small now. There will be no huge impactful waves coming from me and I am 100% comfortable with that. But with that smallness has come a level of acceptance that has brought with it a profound sense of peace. I no longer feel the need to be something I am simply not. I live a small, quiet life surrounded by a small family which means the world to me and I am grateful to have it.
Letting go has been my continual life lesson these past few years and once I surrendered to that my peace of mind increased a hundred fold.
The world is an increasingly scary, tumultuous place to be right now (has it ever not been this way?), and so my wish for you is a way to let go of all that doesn’t serve you and find some peace too.