Mental Health

I feel like a walking stereotype sometimes...millennial woman, dog mum, therapy goer, recently diagnosed with ADHD, it seems to be the experience of a lot of women I know. The older I get, the more I learn about myself and how I experience the world we all live in. I started to feel curious about the possibility of being a neurospicy girlie after my husband was diagnosed in early 2023. I kept gaslighting and talking myself out of it by saying-the doctor is going to laugh in your face when you ask about it, it's probably PTSD symptoms, you don't present the same way as others...etc etc I'm sure a lot of us have had the same thoughts. The most eye opening thing for me was trying some of the medication to see how I'd feel and immediately feeling calm and clear like I could actually form a thought without anxiety and negative self talk taking over. It was quite the experience and so surreal. Is this how you're meant to feel all the time?! What a strange and depressing feeling realising you aren't meant to struggle so much with day to day tasks or get mad anxiety about leaving the house or parking in a new place. Raw dogging it through 34 years of life with no diagnosis, medication and a whole lot of childhood trauma has been a time. But I've only come to realise how hard I've found it all and how much stress and trauma still lives in my body until this year.

I've been going to therapy on and off since 2019 and started going pretty consistently from 2022 where I've unpacked a lot; childhood stuff, estranged parent, traumatic workplaces and general day to day issues. I remember the day I got that first mental health care referral. It was my 30th birthday and I'd left work early to go see the doctor, it was raining which looking back feels like an omen. I did the DASS questionnaire (depression, anxiety, stress, scale), and scored severe and all of the domains. I remember the doctor doing her due diligence and asking me if I had thoughts of self harm to which I said no, shocked at both the question and the confronting results. I drove home hysterically crying shaming myself for letting things get this bad and not realising. Once I got home, I was keen to calm myself down and enjoy the family birthday dinner we had planned. That's when I found something in my letter box I wasn't expecting, a card from a person who shouldn't have known where I lived at the time. No stamp, so I knew it had personally been dropped off. Seeing this sent me into a tail spin. I remember calling my husband hysterically crying asking him to please come home. We did not go out for dinner that night and it took me until July of the following year to finally pluck up the courage to go and see the therapist I'd been referred to. In the first session she asked me, why now and not back then? My unfiltered response was, because I felt ashamed. Ashamed I'd let things get this bad. Ashamed I didn't even realise I was still in survival mode. Ashamed I'd let myself get blindsided on my 30th birthday.

I've spent 4 years speaking with my therapist on and off about everything in my life. I always leave feeling lighter and motivated to continue working on myself so I can keep growing and healing. I'll never regret getting that mental health care plan and going to therapy consistently, but I always felt like I had learnt all of these great strategies and had become very self aware only to not be able to access any of it when I was heightened (which upon reflection was all the time, multiple times a day). There always felt like I was missing something and I continued to shame myself and feel like a failure for not being able to consistently implement what I'd learnt. Then, in March of this year, I got an ADHD diagnosis.

Since being medicated, my capacity to maintain a baseline and keep my nervous system calm is crazy. I used to nap endlessly after work or on days off because I felt so exhausted. I don't do that anymore because my meds allow me to deal with things without feeling escalated or like I'm holding onto every little thing that use to send me over the edge multiple times a day. Those inevitable daily hiccups now feel far away and not like they sit inside me for days/weeks/months on end. I am finding it hard trying to get to and stay asleep at night as it feels like every thought that was pushed aside during the day comes flooding in as soon as my head hits the pillow. Finding the balance of medication paired with therapy whilst trying to maintain healthy habits is HARD. I feel like I now have the key to being able to apply all the things I've learnt in therapy because I can stay calm and regulated for long enough to think clearly and respond to situations appropriately, (by my standards anyway).

I look back on my childhood, teenage years, 20s and early 30s with a different lens now. I feel a lot of grief and sadness for that little girl who just wanted to be seen, heard and understood, but at the same time I feel immense pride for how resilient and strong she was to get through everything that was thrown at her. She got me to where I am now and I can finally look back and feel compassion for her instead of judgement. It's interesting to reflect on situations and notice the patterns I've naturally fallen into where circumstances would change, but I still felt the same anxiety and trauma response. I now realise my nervous system was just looking for a familiar pattern to fall into as that is all it knows from my formative years. It took me a few goes to break this cycle after setting some boundaries with family, then immediately falling into a toxic work dynamic that left me feeling sick about going in each day and then moving away for a year for work. Over and over again it left me with all of the same feelings; anxiety, guilt, shame, symptoms of illness without anything being physically wrong, the list goes on.

It took moving back home and having all of 2024 off work for my nervous system to finally have a fighting chance at getting out of the survival mode it had been in for most of my life. That year was the start of a lot of things for me. I set some solid boundaries around what I wanted to take on from a work perspective because I knew if I took on too much too early, I'd burn out again. I found some good balance working part time in 2025, but 2026 has been the most balanced yet. I attribute that to consistent therapy with EMDR, medication and having built enough self awareness to know when I'm overwhelmed and being able to respond appropriately. Having the ability to stop and think before going into fight or flight is a foreign feeling I didn't know was normal until this year. You look back and think, how was I functioning before? But you don't know what you don't know.

I'm pretty pleased to have found some answers and to be able to enjoy the life I've built with a (mostly) calm nervous system. Sometimes the calm is unsettling, but I have to remind myself chaos isn't the norm, calm, quiet moments are welcome and soothing. Shedding that shame and negative self talk have been pivotal and I can finally say I am being more kind to myself than ever before. If you hit the point of burnout, the recovery is long and the likelihood of repeating that pattern is high without having the time and space to let yourself heal. Life really is too short. I'll be forever grateful for having the ability to take time for myself to rest and slowly figure myself out so I can live the life that feels authentic to me.

I hope some of these stories and thoughts help others to feel seen because we really are all just fumbling about trying to live our lives. None of us really knows what on earth we are doing, so I think being honest and authentic helps us all relate to each other a little more easily.