Yesterday if someone was watching me clean my house, they would have made a reel out of it. I was trying to clean and organize my room so I could get the rest of the furniture from my grandmas and put it directly in there. But my ADHD hit hard and I was all over the place.
Today it got me thinking about all the ways that my ADHD has hindered my grief.
I need to stay constantly busy in order to not lose my mind. When I watch TV or a movie, I am doing something else the whole time. ADHD causes me to have so many random thoughts that often times if I am not doing something I am not paying attention to the movie or the person talking to me.
Random thoughts is what often triggers my anxiety and then my grief.
Tomorrow, I have to have an endoscopy due to my chronic acid reflux. This is a simple minimal risk procedure, but my brain has been all over the place today. What if they find something? Losing Matt then having Grandma get sick and the blows life deals it would not be a far stretch that this is the next curve ball.
Last time I had a procedure done Matt was alive and was there with me. He reassured me that everything was going to be okay. This time I have no one to do that for me. Sure people could tell me but I would not believe them.
ADHD has been one of the reasons I struggle with emotions and then I go into the rabbit hole of thoughts. I did this when Matt was alive to the point that he would often call me out on it as I would start to pull away and isolate.
After he died the random thoughts have been centered around how I could have saved him. Knowing that I would not have been able to do that. Isolating from people. My ADHD and the thoughts it produces makes it had for me to tell people what is going on in my head.
It makes writing blog post challenging sometimes as a bounce from thought to thought. Idea to Idea. Rereading what I wrote to make sure that it is not going to be confusing to someone. My conversations with my sister are like this and luckily she follows the random thoughts.
Grieving is not an easy task for anyone. But people that have other things going such as ADHD might find it more of a struggle as they cope. I turned to drinking to relax then realizing that was not helping I used my creativity to get it out.
I had to find a way to stop all the ADHD random thoughts from eating me alive so I drew and filled a sketch book with broken hearts and other dark things to process. To start to feel whole again. I decided to write and just get the thoughts out.
Slowing my brain down enough to process the grief I was living with. Allowing myself to not feel every time a random ADHD thought triggers a grief moment. Not allowing myself to get into the cycle of I can’t do this because Matt is not here with me.
ADHD triggers anxiety which makes things feel real that are not. I have learned not to believe those thoughts. If I did I would have never made it out of bed after Matt died.
About Laurel Snook
Laurel became a young widow on October 2, 2020, her husband Matt had a heart attack he was only 37. Matt was a juvenile diabetic and they always knew he would die young but she never thought that she could be a widow at 32. Navigating grief with anxiety, regrets and guilt have been a struggle for Laurel. They had gotten into a fight days before he died and they had talked about divorce. One of the things that helped her the most is finding other widows who understood the pain she was feeling. In February she decided to start writing her story. Self-care is something else she started to do daily and art has become her outlet to get what she is feeling out which she shares on her Instagram. Being a young widow comes with its own challenges but we are not alone in this journey.
You can find her on Instagram @HealingPorcupine or her personal blog link- Healingporcupine.com.
I feel this ❤️ thank you