When at the Crossroads
Recently, I found a habit called daily pages. The premise is simple, sit down in the morning and write about anything at all. No pressure, just put pen to paper and let your words flow. The idea is to give yourself a grounding moment during some sort of a morning routine, and to let the thoughts flow however your brain decides. Of course, the first couple times I sat down I didnāt know what to write and I would overthink the need for a topic. I had to remind myself that a topic isnāt the point and if I donāt know where to start then quite literally writing āI donāt know where to startā is enough because it gets the pen moving.
Iāve come to love this practice, this mindless moment of mindfulness. Itās a nascent habit, and hasnāt quite taken hold as a daily practice but that exact thought has helped me realize that it doesnāt need to be. I went on a trip about 10 days into my new morning routine and put pressure on myself to get my pages in anyway. After a couple days of this I realized I didnāt want to be writing. I was scribbling on the pages just to fill them, that's not a thoughtful practice. This was entirely not the point of the exercise. I donāt always need a grounding moment, and holding onto a practice for the sake of keeping some streak alive diminishes the point of it. So, I stopped and I enjoyed the trip without the self-imposed guilt about not following through on a new routine (which is all to common a side effect of ADHD). And when I got home? I went back to my morning pages and picked up right where I left off because I wanted to, not because I made myself feel like I needed to.
Routine matters, habits matter, seeing things through matters. But, itās also so important to see things for what they are and to define, for oneself, what follow through looks like. Arbitrary metrics and streaks are everywhere we look as every facet of our lives has been gamified to the point of nausea. Break the streak. Let it die. Life will go on, and when you stop doing something for the sake of doing it you may just find you actually like it. Or, that you fucking hate it, but you just couldnāt bring yourself to break the streak.
Doing so led me to my next realization with my morning pages - I am writing for myself, to myself. I can be honest because it's a simple piece of paper and some flowing thoughts. I have found that I can let myself pull on threads that I didn't realize I was afraid to pull on before. I think part of it is our natural tendency to shy away from addressing hard thoughts, which is something I have separately been working on, but I found that a large part was feeling like I had a safe place to let these thoughts out, to explore them, then to examine them.
I have always been a fan of the aimless walk. It helped me through my CS classes, it's helped me work through relationship issues, it helps me just get away from my phone and recharge my brain. There are few things more powerful than a walk without a destination (or a phone) because it's when your brain is free to unload a string of transient thoughts as if purging its cache and performing cleanup duty. When I need to work through complex or jumbled thoughts, this is usually my go to because I often arrive back at home with clarity of mind and a distilled understanding of whatever was troubling me.
I have found myself maximizing both of these introspective techniques as of late. I am at a crossroads in life and am struggling to pick a direction. I gave myself a challenge in November (no, not that one...) to say yes to whatever opportunity came my way. I reached out to every recruiter that had messaged me earlier this year and had the conversations. I am still far from being able to decide on what it is I want to do, but I think I have been able to form some opinions. I have a better idea of what my priorities are, of what I don't want, and of what is troubling me so much.
I still feel lost, but I think it's important to add a bit of color to why I am feeling that way and it's not just that I am uninspired at work. I have been waiting for - no, working for - this moment for years. I have spent the last several years as the solo provider while my partner has been in graduate school and I am only just now realizing the toll that pressure and stress took on me now that she has graduated and is embarking on the next phase in her career. Now that things are stable and the burden is shared am I realizing how much I ignored what was going on inside. I mean, I wasn't totally unaware but I chose ignorance.
Around a year ago, at the end of 2024, I remember feeling burnt out. Well, I wasn't exactly sure what I was feeling so I read and journaled and did my walks and found some really great content for living with ADHD and the negative effects we so often ignore. I think it was a night shortly before Thanksgiving when I decided I needed to see a psychiatrist again, to try medication again, because my years of doing this solo were just not enough anymore. Well, I had made the decision again, I suppose I should say. I had known I needed to ask for help for a long time, so this time I found a way to put myself in a bind. I took advantage of being in the mood I was and booked the next available appointment and fortunately it was within a cancellation window. I know, pretty extreme... It sounds silly, but I knew that the next day, if I could get out of it I would probably back out. So, I trapped myself and thank god I did because I was really needing help.
Now, of course I didn't go so far as to mention feelings of burnout or being overwhelmed or being stressed. One step at a time when it comes to asking for help (ahem). No, on that front I continued to ignore the alarm bells inside and soldiered on because I thought I had no other choice (ahem, again). We were so close and I could do it. And I did do it. We got here, to now. And I have immediately crashed. The signs all pointed to this exact thing happening and yet I did not care and I have been struggling with that for the past six weeks. The strange part about this, though, as I sit here and open myself up to a handful of anonymous strangers is that I am grateful. I hate feeling this way, yes, but I am grateful that I finally feel this way. Maybe that's the path I need to take, right now. The one that takes me right through the pain instead of around it because that is what I have been preparing myself for over the past year. I have accepted professional help and felt how it's helped me. I have found incredible resources from people like Kelly Banks that have helped me feel less broken and have helped me learn more about myself.
Now is the time for change, but I'm not so sure now is the time for a big risk. I've been risk on every day for almost four years, now. I think a big part of me wanted to be ready to take even bigger swings and take on even more responsibility because I think I thought that once we got here, I would be good. I would be able to share the load with my partner and increase the stress I could handle. I do want that, one day. I do want to be somewhere from day zero and I do want to pour blood, sweat and tears into building a company. But, I am finally realizing I wanted to want that right now. Only because of the work I made myself do over the past year can I realize that I need to get myself right, first.