Waking Up

Excerpts on realizing you're on a roller-coaster ride and didn't even know you bought the ticket...

...I’ve been really low, lower than usual, in a really dark and confusing place and no idea why.

Then I had a strange experience: when I looked around me, I could see underneath things, like under the surface kind of thing and it made me realize a lot of it was an illusion – an illusion of things being okay, an illusion of control/manageability, an illusion of a true life. I know it sounds crazy, but it was pretty powerful and shook me up but I had no idea what to make of it at the time.

It felt like something woke up inside me and was pissed off and confused. It felt like the real me had been trapped or asleep inside of me and now it was waking up and wondering why she was living someone else’s life – like the person I am now is not the person I really am inside – I’m not living the life the true me wants to live. I felt like the real me had been possessed by someone/thing and didn’t realize it until now, and that upset her because she wasn’t sure how to free herself.

...it felt like the universe sucker punched me in the stomach and I started to cry and to mourn myself... I read about how having a partner with ADD can make you a shell of a person (for various reasons but mainly because of how crazy it makes you trying to deal with it), how it gives you the ‘frog in the pot’ syndrome, how it makes you isolate for various reasons, how it makes you accept so much unacceptable behaviour that you no longer know the difference and start questioning your own boundaries and expectations for proper treatment ...about how being in a relationship with an ADD partner is not much different than being in a relationship with an alcoholic... about no longer having goals for the future because you’ve been too busy dealing with the craziness.

All the work... all the sacrifice and tolerance, it did help quite a bit – in the more recent months the roller-coaster has stopped taking so many turns so often – life has become bearable – but I also realized we’ve been stagnant. I spent so much energy getting to this point that once things started improving enough for me to relax a little bit, I became too afraid to rock the boat by expecting anything more than tolerable. And that isn’t good enough. We stopped working on things as actively and became stagnant - not going forward at all, just existing. 

I got terrified and it jolted something in me.

It woke me up.





<3 M