Me and My House Plants are Surviving
I love house plants, I dream of rooms full of lush green plants springing from glorious vintage plant pots and hanging beautifully from shelves. But in reality I have a few dusty plants clustered around the TV and fireplace. I'm always quick to tell people that I'm terrible at looking after them. Admittedly a few haven't made it, such is life, but frankly some of them I've had for years and they are still going strong(ish). So I'm coming to realise that maybe I'm not as terrible a plant mum as I may think I am. At least not all of the time.
As it turns out they are largely not that easy to care for, their light and water requirements are terribly specific and if your measly living space isn't up to scratch they will dramatically keel over in their pot, sprinkling (over-watered/under-watered) soil all over the carpet. Yes this has happened on more than one occasion. I'd love to say I have a pissed off ghost upon whom I could blame this, but to the best of my knowledge, I don't.
Anyway there is a more serious point here and it is this. Of the plants that have made it this far, they are ostensibly surviving. Not thriving. Which seems like a fitting allegory for my own life. When I think about my life thus far I would always consider that I have managed, but I cannot in all honestly pin point a period of my life where I felt like I was thriving. I have looked for answers to this over the years, why life feels like treading water with the waves threatening to constantly overwhelm me. Feeling broken. Wrong. Weird.
It is only recently that I have discovered through research and conversations with those closest to me, that it is quite possible that I have ADHD. With all the mental health rabbit holes I've been down over the years ADHD was not a diagnosis that I ever considered. But the more I look into it, and the way it presents in adult women, the more it began to resonate. It feels like the answer to a question I've been asking my whole life.
The usual impression of ADHD, or shall I say the somewhat simplified version is someone who is hyperactive, can’t sit still, can’t pay attention, acts out maybe, never shuts up. When I was at school during the 90s and 00s this was the definition of ADHD and was usually associated with those who where more ‘troublesome’ in class. Once I realised that the other side of it is more of an internalised hyperactivity, particularly presenting in women and girls, it all started to make sense for me. My mind has always been a noisy place, sometimes more that I can handle, sometimes driving me mad. It never really occurred that this could be different to how others experience life because you never really know what is going on in someone else’s brain. I always wondered why I felt so much and so deeply but I put this down to teenage angst in my younger years and just told myself everyone must feel the same.
I will say that I'm often uncomfortable with labels, I can sometimes find them useful in my own explorations to try and understand myself but they are not something I often share with the wider world. Mostly, and if this doesn't confirm my ADHD I'm not sure what will, I flit so quickly between things that one minute I'm proclaiming I want to quit my job and retrain as a Physiotherapist, the next I'm going to become a successful Forex trader. So needless to say a label doesn't fit me for long.
Because of this constant bounce from one thing to the next I feel a lot of imposter syndrome around labelling myself, as if I don't really deserve the label or that is doesn't quite fit in some way. This one feels somewhat different. I am naturally quite a private person so I won't be proclaiming it to the hills any time soon but I hope by leaning into it I can find a way to be kinder to myself. To accept that my brain is different and it may take me a little longer to get to where I'm going, I may get side tracked. It's all ok. I need to forgive myself and find ways to work with my brain that truly fit. I imagine that as I unpack this more and more over the weeks and months my feelings will shift and no doubt it will be something that I will talk about from time to time in this space as a way of working through those thoughts and feelings and maybe connecting to others with whom my stories resonate.