The Ship That Will Never Carry Us Home
What gets me through days I mourn I life I could have had
When I was growing up, my seat at the kitchen table faced the window out to our backyard. The huge Sissoo tree in our neighbor’s yard would catch the light from the sun and flicker in golds and greens.
I would sit there, fork in front of my face, mouth open, until someone snapped their fingers and brought me back.
40 years later, I’d sit in a psychiatrist’s office talking about starting on 18mg of Concerta to manage my just-diagnosed ADHD.
The day after that, I took my small camper out to a lake to sit in stillness and quiet and sort through my life. I called my daughter and cried, apologizing for never taking her pleas that she has ADHD seriously. I called my ex-husband and cried, apologizing for the 20 years he has spent dealing with a co-parent with little to no executive function.
Then I sat and cried for me and the 40 years of my life that could have been so, so different.
I had two emotions come over me the first time I took my ADHD medication. The first was overwhelming joy in that I just stepped out into a world, like Dorothy stepping into Oz, that I didn’t know could exist in color.
Was this what it was like to be normal? Is this how everyone else is able to walk around the world? Has everyone else been like this their whole lives?
The second emotion was deep, mournful regret that it took 48 very long years to come to know this other world existed.
My life suddenly became a Choose Your Adventure book where I relived memories spanning my entire life, but suddenly, there was a second option to the sole one I was given.
Where would I have placed my own self-worth if teachers hadn’t made me feel, or worse yet told me, I was lazy, dumb, and unmotivated? What men would I not have allowed in my life?
How much more money would I have earned in my life if my employer, instead of continually putting me on performance improvement plans that were never going to work, understood my brain and let me find my own solutions?
What kind of childhood would I have given my daughter if I had been able to recognize her ADHD because I recognized it in myself?
I spent far too long wallowing in the land of what might have been. I was angry, regretful, ashamed, and bitter. This is not how I want to go through the next 48 years of my life.
It took the re-reading of one of my favorite books, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, to snap me back just like when I was eight and staring out a window:
“We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” - Cheryl Strayed
What I longed for, cried for, raged for, was never mine. I can’t bring that ship back to the shore. It’s gone, and I’m still here. I am still here.
I recognized that if I stayed in this place of mourning the life I could have had and spent the rest of my life longing for it, I would miss the one I have.
For the love of God, I looked at my life and felt incredible pride over the fact that I went 40 years with an undiagnosed neurological disorder and did the best I could. My life has been everything I could make it given the resources I have had.
I also realized that the life that I would never have chosen was what made me every beautiful thing I love about myself: a fierce advocate, an untiring fighter, and a passionate, creative soul that feels deep empathy.
When I think about my sister life, I recognize that living that life may have meant not having parts of the beauty and pain that makes me who I am. And, regardless of everything I have fought, I love myself. It’s just that now I get to love myself in a way that lets me understand myself.
I am not squandering one minute of the second half of my life mired down in what I didn’t know. The rest of this life is mine to move forward every day in genuine acceptance of myself and my whole life. I’ll take it.
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