I Feel Like Apologizing to Everyone
I'm on a weird 12-step-program tour but there's only one step.
When I first got my diagnosis, I had about 18 different emotions that I felt in the span of about 6 minutes. I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know which ones to feel first and it didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop them from coming and I couldn’t control which ones I felt when.
The one that hit me the hardest upfront was remorse. I was so incredibly sorry and I couldn’t even tell you for what and to whom. This was the first of the terrible feelings I would wrestle with in the days following the diagnosis.
To be clear, the diagnosis has been one of the single greatest events of my adulthood. Finally, things I do and have done my whole life make sense. This has allowed me to shed all of the negative adjectives that have carved deep scars in me that I thought were just character flaws.
Even though I know now it was not completely my fault, I have been a hot mess my entire life and that has caused a lot of people a significant amount of grief.
The first person I called was my ex-husband. The first one. If you’re new here, I have two. The first one is basically the hero of my life. We have been divorced for 16 years but we have a daughter together and that means we are tethered in some way until we die.
The realization that this man has been keeping our family together for nearly two decades hit me like a ton of bricks. He has done some heavy lifting in the raising of our child because I cannot be trusted to remember to do anything.
I called him sobbing, apologizing for every doctor’s appointment he had to take care of, every detail he had to remember, every text he sent me that I thought I responded to but didn’t, every time I got the dates wrong and screwed up our schedule because I couldn’t find the piece of paper on which I had written the days he would be on vacation.
I went deep.
Turns out, I didn’t have to. My ex-husband was kind. He reminded me of all the times that I did the heavy lifting but in my own way. The kind that doesn’t involve post-it notes, but rather laying down on the kitchen floor with my daughter when she was overwhelmed.
My ADHD never made me a failure as a parent even if it was, and still is, challenging to co-parent with me.
It didn’t make me a bad boss but that didn’t stop me from calling former co-workers and apologizing for having to deal with me never remembering to get things done or panicking at the last minute on a deadline and being a raging bitch.
I texted a friend that I frequently leave on read to let him know that it’s not that I don’t love him, it’s that I get overwhelmed by communication from all angles and so I shut down sometimes.
He told me he knows and reminded me that it’s never stopped him from repeatedly texting me because he knows I’ll respond eventually to one of them when I feel like I can.
My fear was that I had let everyone down and that they secretly harbored awful feelings toward me. In my grand tour of apologizing, I realized that’s not true.
Still, it made me feel better to share with them that it was never my intention to be flakey or forgetful and to point to something concrete and say, “This is why I am the way I am but I’m going to be better.”
I needed people to give me grace but what I needed more than that was to give myself grace. I’m working on that but it’s hard to come by right now. I have lived my life in a grace shortage for as long as I can remember. So now, I work on building that reserve. Grace is a gift I need to give myself.
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