Since I’ve gotten REALLY honest about my goal of losing 30-40 pounds and getting back to my “athlete body,” I tell everyone —the lady at the pet shop, my friends online, and of course, the people at the gym.

I tell them how DIFFERENT I looked in 2021, how fit, how great I felt. About the injury, the binge eating, the reduced movement starting in 2023. And how I wanted to get back to how my body was before I wrecked it.

And I’ve noticed something weird.

Some were encouraging.

“Good for you, good luck,” said the pet shop employee.

“You can do it!” one friend said in response to a Note I posted.

Others were slightly discouraging.

“I ate healthy, exercised, and STILL gained 40 pounds (in my 30s),” one lady said in my yoga class.

“You look fine,” yet another said.

The implication was that I was being too hard on myself. Too unrealistic. I should just chill out. If I lost weight, great. But it wasn’t essential.

I get it. They were trying to make me feel better. That I didn’t HAVE to lose all that weight to feel better about myself. I could just stay cozy in my XL shorts and make the best of it.

And I don’t want it to sound like me being overweight is the worst thing to ever happen, in the grand scheme of things. I am incredibly privileged. I have a home to live in, food to eat (obviously too much), and parents and cats that love me.

And I’m still incredibly strong and surprisingly fit considering I have more weight on me than I ever have before.

But for me, it does feel like the worst thing.

Because my body is key to my identity. It’s how I move through the world, how I train, how I connect with people through my skating.

I’m 178 lbs right now. And that’s nearly 10 pounds lighter than I was at my highest weight.

I don’t look “that heavy,” as people remind me, but I feel it.

Instead of a ridge down the middle of my abdomen, it folds in on itself like an accordion, small pleats of fat.

I have a little dimple in the back of my thigh that becomes apparent when I flex.

My knees hurt more during hard exercise because they’re supporting more weight.

All of it negatively affects my life. Even if others don’t understand or even see that.

They don’t know that as an athlete, I am incredibly in touch with my body. That I don’t feel like “myself” this way. That it will keep me from my goals of returning to competition, getting better-fitting skates (my old ones were too small; my current ones are too big), and being cast in more roles.

There’s a lot riding on this weight loss; that's all I’m saying.

As surprised as I was by the resigned responses, I wasn’t offended. I got curious instead.

Why do we get so resigned about our bodies? And stop trying to make them better?

Then I realized the issue.

We’re in a totally different stage of life.

Most of the ladies (and gents) I’m in class with are retired. Seniors. They aren’t necessarily focused on losing weight, getting back to competition, or totally changing their life (as far as I know).

They are focused on reducing injury, extending their lifespan, and being able to keep doing activities of daily living.

Meanwhile, I’m 36 years old. I’m still young, or so people say.

Which is why I’ve been making my body and fitness a priority again.

And yet, I found the doubts creeping in.

Maybe I’m being silly. Maybe this was as good as it was going to get. Maybe I won’t be able to get that fit again.

But I didn’t stay that way for long. As I wound through my neighborhood on my bike, heading home, I realized I was doing it again. I was letting others' goals and opinions influence my own.

You may have people in your life who tell you to “accept yourself the way you are”.

People who tell you you don’t have to get fitter, get better, do more.

It’s often meant to spare your feelings. To keep you safe. To keep you comfortable.

And that’s often kindness.

Parents do this. Friends do this. Even teachers do this.

It doesn’t even have to be explicit. It can just be a lack of feedback, or old scripts being played out. Without being challenged.

But it can also be a subtle trap.

Because if you have too many people telling you what you don’t need to do, you never reach your potential.

And trust me, I’m a genius at this. For DECADES, I told myself stories. About my worth, my potential, who I was, and what I deserved.

A sample:

“All the women in my family struggled with diabetes and their weight, so so will I.”

“I’m bad at math.”

“No one in my family is good with money.”

“I fail at everything I try.”

“I don’t have the skills to make money.”

“I’m not meant to be successful.”

“I’ll probably be working until I’m 90.”

“I’m too old to lose all that weight.”

“It’s harder to lose weight in your 30s.”

(Just heard that one this evening).

And on and on.

And yeah, some of those seem to make sense. And some are based on actual history or facts.

Yes, the women in my family all have diabetes.

All had health issues.

All had emotional attachments to food, which reflected in their overweight (or obese) bodies.

Yes, my family went through hard times.

A foreclosure before I came here after my mom got injured on the job and couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage; losing everything we had; surviving on stale baked goods for days while we waited for her workman’s comp check to come in the mail.

And yes, I HAVE failed. Mostly as “normal” jobs and things I didn’t want to do (thanks, ADHD interest-based nervous system).

The bottom line? Those stories aren’t set in stone. They can change. But few question them.

When we believe those stories, we don’t try. We hold ourselves back. We stay small.

We don’t make things better.

I don’t want to tell myself the same lies over and over again, then realize one day it was all my choices that got me to where I was (not my body, or the economy, or family genes, conspiring against me).

Unrelated but also related: I don’t know if it’s the eclipse or what, but I realized the scarcity mindset I’ve had with money shows up in every aspect of my life.

I thought by keeping myself small, playing dead.

I could bob and weave.

I could outfox bad situations.

I could avoid being hunted by creditors like my family was when my mom was injured and wasn’t working.

But that’s the exact opposite of what I truly want. Staying small. Staying invisible. Staying SAFE.

Because safety is good, but it won’t let me reach my potential.

And even if I DO stay small and safe, that doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen.

My goal, as you may know, is to allow myself to be seen. To stop hiding —behind my body, my crappy mindset.

Well, this is part of it. Daring to try a big goal, not giving up even when it would be easier to.

I don’t know if I will lose 40 pounds. I don’t even know if I can lose 30. And I really don’t know if I will be able to compete and get roles again.

But I’m giving it my best shot.

Your questions for this week:

(journal, talk to AI about them, whatever helps you process)

What stories play out in your head? Do they empower or drain you? Write them down, then examine if they are indeed true or just conjecture. My shaman used to say, “if it couldn’t be proven in a court of law, it isn’t necessarily true”.

And

Who do you spend the most time with? And what specific stories of theirs bleed into your consciousness? Naming them helps you see that it’s not necessarily your truth.

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Note: I’ve changed the “niche” of this Substack more times than I can remember. This is what I’m settling into now —and I hope you’ll stick around if you’re already subscribed, or do so if you haven’t!

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At thirteen, I moved to Lake Placid, New York, to train as a figure skater.

I’d wanted to move there since I was eight, when I won my first competition at the historic Olympic Center.

Five years later, I got my wish. Sports history was everywhere.

The oval where I learned to speed skate is where Eric Heiden won five Olympic golds in one Games. The 1980 “Miracle on Ice” happened up the hill at the Olympic Center.

I skated next to Olympians. I later covered them as a journalist. I ran into them at the grocery store.

I’m Christie — writer, journalist, figure skater, speed skater, from a town small enough that strangers used to stop me on the street and ask, “Are you Lake Placid Skater?”

(That was my blog. I was seventeen. Bright pink template. People in Russia and South Korea read it every week. I still don’t know why.)

I got my first byline at eighteen. At twenty-one, I was contracted to write the only comprehensive history of figure skating in Lake Placid, published by The History Press.

I spent the next two decades reporting on elite sport while living inside it — athlete, official, club president, sometimes all three in the same weekend.

I built my whole life around skating — competing, performing, coaching, officiating, writing, running a skating apparel shop with my mom for over a decade. In 2019, I won an International gold medal on home ice in Lake Placid; in 2020, I was featured in an ice show alongside Olympians, (and simultaneously covered it for several outlets).

I should have been on cloud nine.

Instead, I was burned out, overworked, and, although I didn’t want to admit it then, pretty miserable.

Just a few weeks after that show, COVID took almost everything I’d built.

The rink closed. The business closed. I had a minor existential crisis, got diagnosed with ADHD, and came out the other side knowing I was supposed to be writing.

Then three years ago, to add insult to injury, (literally) I nearly got hit by a car on my bike and couldn’t walk for two weeks. I had to take a hard look at who I was without sports, and realized that the answer had been staring me in the face all along.

Because I spent most of my life being an athlete first and everything else second — including “writer.”

Even after I got paid to write, even after a book deal.

I still thought of myself as a skater who wrote, not as a writer who skated.

Pulling those two identities apart, then figuring out how to hold both without one canceling the other out, is something I’ve been dealing with ever since.

I’m also learning that all these years, I’ve been afraid.

Of being judged, rejected, not liked. So I hid my true self. I didn’t write in the way I wanted. I stayed safe, but I wasn’t happy.

This year, I’m finally getting comfortable being seen. Not performing — I’ve done that on the ice and on set for most of my life (did I mention I’m also an actor?).

Actually seen, as a person, with a body that’s changed and a career that doesn’t fit on a business card.

That’s harder for me than any competition or hot set ever was.

At the same time, I’m getting back into shape.

Not back to who I was at 18, or even 30, because those times have passed.

Just currently, honestly, working on losing the 30-40 lbs gained after my injury and binge-eating flare-ups, rebuilding fitness, and figuring out what my body and brain actually need instead of what I assumed they needed for twenty-five years.

This newsletter is the log of all three happening at once. In real time. In public.

I’m not writing this as a sports journalist covering someone else’s comeback story. I’ve done that for over 15 years. I’ve interviewed Olympians in rink hallways, on the phone while they wove through Manhattan traffic, and watched what elite performance looks like when the cameras are off.

That work taught me plenty, and I’m grateful for it. But that’s not what this Substack is about.

It’s about me, doing the thing and bringing you along for the ride.

Telling you exactly what that looks like — the identity confusion, the body stuff, the fear of being visible, the small realizations that show up sideways at the gym, on the rink, or when I’m walking around the block at 10 pm.

If something I figure out along the way is useful to you, good. That’s the hope. But I’m not here to explain how excellence works.

I’m here because I’m building something real out of my own mess, and I’d rather do it where people can watch it in real time than wait to see the finished product.

My mission is to help others — specifically women in their 30s, 40s, and beyond — get comfortable being seen. Figure out what they really want. And find the best, least stressful way to get it.

A few things worth knowing about me going in:

I’m neurodivergent. I was diagnosed with ADHD at eleven, promptly forgot about it, and was re-diagnosed at thirty-one. As one does.

I also identify as autistic — self-identified, not clinically evaluated, because quite frankly I can’t afford it.

That’s part of why “getting back into shape” isn’t a clean before-and-after story for me. My brain doesn’t do moderation well. It doesn’t do consistency the way fitness culture assumes everyone’s brain does. And my relationships with food, exercise, and stress are…interesting, to say the least.

I still live down the street from the Olympic Training Center. I still skate laps on the Oval, occasionally getting unsolicited advice from Olympians who have no idea how loaded that feels some days.

If you’re figuring out who you are when the thing you built your identity around changes — or trying to get back into a body and a life you walked away from — I’m not ahead of you, handing down advice from the finish line. I’m in it.

Come watch, or come do it alongside me.

One more project lives nearby: The ADHD Tarot, where I explore tarot symbolism through a neurodivergent lens.

The ADHD Tarot

Tarot and practical spirituality for neurodivergent minds

By Christie Sausa, MS

Totally different niche, same person behind it.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’m glad you’re here.

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Like most of America, I was shocked when I heard Dolly Parton died yesterday. She was 80. She didn’t suffer long. And she left the world brighter than she found it.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought much about Dolly until she died. I liked her. I even liked her music, and I’m not a country fan. A few months ago, I watched her in 9 to 5 and was surprised she could act almost as well as she could sing.

She was known for her over-the-top style, and my figure skater soul loved her for it. Her rhinestones. Her big hair. Her full face of makeup, no matter what.

Parton was a presence, not just because of how she looked, but how she made people feel. She was captivating, radiating kindness and a sense of humor about herself. Literally everyone loved her—not something you can say about every departed celebrity.

And she gave — she helped fund the COVID vaccine, got countless kids into reading, and donated in ways big and small without ever needing credit for it. She even opened her theme park, Dollywood, in her hometown and became one of the biggest employers in the area.

A friend who worked at Dollywood told me you could feel her spirit in the park.

In yesterday’s tributes, I found a quote of hers I’d seen before and somehow forgotten:

Parton lived like that. She didn’t copy anyone. She wrote her own songs, built her own sound. She didn’t just perform — she channeled.

I heard on a news program that before every concert, she did two things: “peed and prayed”. She wasn’t just putting on a show. She wanted to share what God gave her to share, to heal people. She was a devout Christian, and she lived it.

I’ve started taking her advice myself. Not for singing — for writing.

For years, writing was a side quest. Skating — figure and speed — came first. Writing was something I did for extra money. I liked it. But I never thought it could be a career.

Then COVID changed everything, and I started writing online. I didn’t plan to do it full-time — it just happened. I told myself it was a stopgap. A placeholder until I found a “real job.”

Well, I’m done waiting.

I’m an athlete, but I’m also a writer. A storyteller. A creator. A performer.

That’s been true since I was seven, writing Little House on the Prairie fanfic.

Both of these can coexist.

I’m also neurodivergent — someone who shares her life so other people feel less alone in theirs.

For a long time, I gatekept my best work. I saved it for Medium, where it felt safer behind a paywall. But “doing it on purpose,” as Dolly said, means putting it all out there.

Sharing the light, the stories, the vulnerable stuff, so it can actually help someone.

I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m as talented as Dolly. But I can contribute, in my way.

This morning at spin class, the instructor closed with Dolly’s plaintive “I Will Always Love You.”

As I pedaled through the cooldown, it hit harder than usual. Whitney Houston’s power-ballad version is stunning, but Parton’s — sweet, sad, reverent — hits different.

If any of us learned anything from her life, it should be this:

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I saw a former skating acquaintance a few days ago, just as slim, beautiful, and confident as she was when we shared the ice.

Meanwhile, I was a mess. I was sweaty from a hard workout. I’m heavier than I used to be. I prayed she didn’t see me.

There’s nothing quite as demoralizing as running into someone who seemingly didn’t age or change while you did.

I’m ashamed to say I came home and started spiraling. “How does she STILL look so good after having a kid?!?” I fretted. “Meanwhile, I look like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s daughter.”

The familiar thoughts started their usual track through my mind.

Why is it SO easy for her?!? I’m so fat. So ugly.

“I’ll never look like her, no matter what I do.”

“You’re not supposed to be her. You’re supposed to be you,” my mom replied.

I rolled my eyes. Easy for her to say. Because I didn’t want to be me, never had, especially not now.

But she was right about something she didn’t even mean. Because the weight didn’t just HAPPEN.

I built it for a very good reason. Even if it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Five years ago, my entire life changed.

In 2021, I closed a business I’d spent a decade building. And I lost a friendship I thought would last forever.

I’d felt truly seen by this person. Then they showed me exactly how little I mattered to them. Their ego mattered more than I did. Even though I’d done everything right, I thought.

I had contorted myself into the person I thought they would like and value.

I was fit and could keep up with them. I was a good listener. I was fun to be around. I was vulnerable — really vulnerable — with them.

It wasn’t enough.

Somewhere in that wreckage, my brain drew three conclusions and filed them away as fact:

Being vulnerable isn’t safe.

Being fit isn’t safe.

Being YOU isn’t safe.

I didn’t decide any of that consciously. But my subconscious did.

Our subconscious is powerful. It knows who we are and what we want.

The downside is it also absorbs old stories, limits, anxieties, and scripts from other places. Our parents. Articles we read. Our own spotty experience living this crazy life.

For years, I’d been trying to shrug off my old, limited identity. I was like a character actor who becomes known as a certain “type” and can never move past it. I was Christie the athlete. Christie the skater.

And yet, they had all been quietly burning me out. I got burned out once a year, in business and in skating, usually after the busy winter season ended. I didn’t even like where I lived. Yet I didn’t want to leave, either.

They were the only things I recognized as mine. Who would I be without them?

So even when I was exhausted, I held on. Because letting go of them felt like losing what was left of me on top of everything else.

Until I had no choice.

That’s when I started trying to kill Christie 1.0 off.

The old Christie can’t come to the phone right now. Why?

After I got through the moves and over the friendship disaster, I really went for broke.

I ate more. Cared less. Hated myself more. Lived less.

I went on skating hiatus more times than I could count, then always slinked back in, announcing my return in a flurry of Instagram reels.

It was like I was keeping the old me on life support instead of finally pulling the plug.

The injury that changed everything.

In 2023, I nearly got hit by a car while riding my bike. I slid out and sprained my knee. Couldn’t walk for two weeks.

I responded by inhaling bowls of whipped cream, bags of chips, endless creamy lattes…all the foods I’d avoided when I was training.

Binge eating was a pattern I’d had since I was a kid, and it always came back during my busiest training seasons. I could always work it off with my daily training. But in 2023, still in pain and unable to train, the pounds started to pile on.

The next summer, still recovering, I got hit by a car door…just a block down the street from the site of my first near-accident.

I knew the kid who opened it right in front of me as I sped down the sidewalk. I told her it was fine, no worries, everyone makes mistakes, but I was seriously shaken. I flew over the door and hit the sidewalk hard enough to open up an abrasion on my leg.

As I limped away, the abrasion stinging, I felt like something had to give. And like something was giving me a sign.

I told myself it was because I wasn’t supposed to be an athlete anymore. I felt a perverse relief. I could finally put that down.

I firmly believe these two events, happening just a block apart, WERE a sign to change. I just took it in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, I kept eating. I was dismayed to find that I was getting heavier. My old clothes didn’t fit, so I bought newer ones. Size L, then XL…and on.

As disgusted and out of control as I felt, I also weirdly felt like I was reclaiming something.

Because the fat was insulating—not just physically; it was building me a softer, safer version of myself. One nobody could hurt like that again.

One who didn’t have to be vulnerable, or fit, or fully there, because none of that had kept her safe the last time.

By this July, I was forty pounds over my competitive weight.

Most people didn’t notice. But I did.

My body felt foreign to me. I had a roll of fat under my breasts I’d never had before. A soft belly. A heat sensitivity so bad I needed a fan on me even in winter.

Sports became more difficult, too.

My new skates didn’t fit. My old speed skates didn’t either. Any time I got on the ice, it came with pain, or a loss of control, or both.

My feet had gotten fatter and flatter along with the rest of me. How I stood had shifted. At the store, other people brought in skates to sell for the exact same reason, even ones they’d bought as adults. Mine had been designed to fit me perfectly, back in 2019, when I was a different person — before the wall.

I used to tell myself it wasn’t an accident that I couldn’t skate — that some cosmic timing was at play, that I was being warned off.

That was a nicer story than the truth.

The truth: I’d built a wall to protect myself. My body was that wall. Even my feet.

It kept me off the ice and out of the fullest expression of myself — which kept me safe from being watched, judged, competing. From being seen. The exact thing that had gotten me hurt in the first place.

Years ago, an acupuncturist and energy healer friend told me I had an energy wall around my heart that was millions of miles deep.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I joked. I was cynical even then, in my early twenties.

But even though I don’t buy her particular brand of healing, maybe she was onto something. Maybe I was protecting myself, even then.

Also in July, I cut off most of my hair and got bitten by a bat.

“I sense that you’re done with your hair,” my hairstylist said. “And you’re ready to change.”

Her words were about more than the haircut; I didn’t realize it yet.

Because I had been trying to hack off my hair for YEARS — like Mulan in that Disney movie.

I told myself it was about the sensory discomfort of having hair against my neck (which it is); everyone else told me to “keep it long” because it “looked better,” so I could pull it back for skating and get it styled for my acting gigs.

I didn’t CARE if I could pull it back anymore, because I wasn’t skating or acting.

As the thick chunks of wet hair fell to the floor, I felt like the old me was dropping too.

I joked with friends that I had a new persona: a sassy Connecticut divorcee. “I’m free and living my life,” I texted a friend.

It was meant to be a joke, but I was right. I was divorcing myself from my previous self.

Cutting it off was the first brick I took out of the wall I had built.

Getting bitten by a bat was the second brick.

I got the rabies vaccine and realized how much I’d been taking life for granted. That’s when things really started to change.

The Universe (or whoever) was probably like, ARE YOU LISTENING YET?

Yes, I was. Finally.

My shaman told me the bat symbolized transformation and flexibility — that I’d become a new person through the experience.

He was right.

I had become a new person. I’m evolving. Not back to the athlete. Forward, into the well-rounded person I am.

I crafted an athlete-forward identity for decades. I competed in two sports. I became a CrossFit trainer. I rode up mountains on my bike and did mini-triathlons.

But it wasn’t ALL I was.

I was also a writer. A creative. A storyteller. Someone whose favorite mode of dissociation was constructing whatever story, article, or post was living rent-free in my head at the moment.

And it occurred to me that I wasn’t jealous of that woman because I wanted to be her. I was jealous because she never had to build what I built. She got to walk around without a wall to protect herself.

Meanwhile, I built mine on purpose, even if I didn’t fully realize it.

The weight was never about willpower. It was never about laziness, or my neurodivergence-motivated binge eating, or falling apart, or getting older. It was armor. And armor doesn’t come off because you finally decide to be “good”.

It comes off when you stop needing it.

Since I shed the old me for the new one, I started wanting to be seen.

I began wearing bright colors — fluorescent tangerine, popsicle pink. I got more social. Sharing instead of isolating.

Today I wore hot pink shorts to my HIIT class instead of my usual black. Three people asked me where I got them. I felt good about myself—a foreign feeling.

This isn’t to say I don’t sometimes fall back.

I just bought a boxy bubblegum-pink sweatshirt. It swamped me. I could’ve fit two of me in it.

For a moment, I wanted to keep it. Then I realized I was back in hiding mode.

The loose terrycloth would keep the real me hidden. Hide my flaws. Keep me invisible.

So I returned it.

Without really trying, I’ve lost eight pounds in a few weeks.

It didn’t start coming off because I was desperate, fasted, or started inline skating for three hours again (although the activity and being more conscious of what I’m eating helped).

It started to come off when I no longer needed it so much.

When I realized what it was doing. Where I was going. That I didn’t need it to protect myself anymore.

I’m not saying all weight issues stem from self-preservation, or that it’s “that easy”.

But I still remember what my shaman told me, years ago, when I — deluded as I was — thought I was “fat” because I’d gained five pounds after a brutal binge cycle.

“Fat is fear,” he said. “So what are you afraid of?”

The answer was being seen.

Until now.

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This morning, I REALLY didn’t want to go to spin class.

I’d been lazing the last few days. Not doing NOTHING, exactly, but focusing on writing and catching up after I had to clean my entire house a few days ago, (long story).

I told myself I was taking care of myself. Recovering from a chaotic week. Catching up.

I was lying to myself.

As an athlete, I’ve always been fairly in touch with my body. I knew how it responded best. I knew I do better if I have at least one hard workout a day.

And yet, I was choosing the otherwise. Why?

Because I was “listening to my body”.

And my body said, “let’s take 3 days off training and eat vegan cheesecake”.

Throughout my life, I’ve always been a bit confused when people tell me to “listen to my body”. My body craved pounds of chocolate, resisted exercise, (even when I was training), and felt more comfortable on the couch than the track.

I mean, given those circumstances, should I REALLY be listening to that body?

Because at the end of the day, I wasn’t listening to my body, not really.

I was listening to my brain. And it was telling me to stay comfortable. Stay safe. Stay unchallenged.

All of us do this, to some extent. Humans NEED comfort. But what we need more, especially in our increasingly comfy world, is challenge. To work hard. To do something that makes us uncomfortable.

Most people don’t, by the way.

They stay in comfort zones, avoid the things that will make them better because they are “too hard”, and suffer the trap of failing to see what they can really do.

I did that for years, and trust me, you don’t want that regret.

What makes athletes different is that we SEEK OUT discomfort. Training, after all, is uncomfortable. If it wasn’t, everyone would do it.

Here’s another example. I’m on a diet right now, working to lose 30-40 excess weight.

But for a long time, I wasn’t.

After my injury in 2023, I felt sorry for myself. Unable to walk for nearly 2 weeks, I didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t think I’d ever get back to training and competition. So I started eating.

I ate all the foods I loved but couldn’t eat while I was training. Mounds of whipped cream, straight from the canister. Ice cream. Potato chips. Omelettes with bacon and cheese, even though I was sensitive to dairy.

I went on a nearly three-year bender. Eating what I wanted, doing what I wanted.

That’s how I got here. 30-40 pounds over my peak training weight, struggling to get back in shape and eat better, and regretting the whole thing.

Back then, I chose comfort. Convenience. Fun. And I paid for it.

Now, I’m choosing intentional discomfort. Do I love exercising twice a day and eating cauliflower rice, chicken, and salad every night while avoiding sugar? No, I don’t. But the alternative is worse.

The bottom line? Our brain lies to us to keep us safe.

It tells us to sleep in, eat more, do what we want. Because back in the cave days, being safe meant we survived.

But now, we are safe. Comfy. Well fed. And the impulse to dig in deeper to that comfort zone is exactly what keeps us stuck. We call it “listening to our body” or self care, when really, we’re just avoiding the work we know we should be doing.

Especially us neurodivergent folks. I have ADHD, (probably AuDHD, to be honest), and my impulsivity means I tend to want all the things that are bad for me. I eat the cake, buy the clothes, ask questions later. What my body wants and what my body needs are not always the same thing.

I’m not saying you should avoid your body’s pain signals, or hunger, or thirst. Those are legitimate signs that something is wrong and you need to stop.

What I am saying is that you need to learn to tell the difference between your body’s true needs and your brain’s attempt to swaddle you in a comfort blanket.

Ok, you might be asking, then HOW do I know if I’m legitimately listening to my body or brain?

It’s simpler than you think.

Before you make a choice, ask yourself these questions:

Will this make me feel better or worse?

Does this move me towards my goals or further away from them?

That’s it. And if you answer honestly, you will know what you should do.

This morning, at 5:30 am after 5 hours of sleep, I didn’t really want to go to the gym.

I ran through all my favorite excuses as to why I shouldn’t: I will be tired all day, I’m making myself more likely to get sick by working out without enough sleep, I don’t really like spinning so why should I go?

Then I remembered how I always felt amazing after the workout. How my ADHD brain would work better. How I would be more productive.

And I also thought about my goals. If I want to lose weight and get fit, I have to show up.

So I did.

This applies to more than my body and fitness goals too.

I hate mowing the lawn. But when I ask myself the questions, I realize, yes, I will feel better when it’s done, and yes, one of my goals is to have a clean, well-kept home. So the only solution is to push through the discomfort and mow the lawn.

I realize this sounds an awful lot like choosing your values. And it is.

But for me, running through these questions every time I find resistance helps me more than remembering my nebulous values. Values are easy to ignore when your favorite show is on and the chips are within reach.

Everyone has goals, but if you don’t do the work to achieve them, you’re not going to get there. And that’s just as painful, (if not more so) than doing the work.

You don’t have to be perfect either. I could have kept my streak going. I could have stayed away from the gym and told myself I had too much work to do. But I didn’t. I had a few imperfect days but I got back on it.

Don’t “listen to your body”, (which is usually just your ego in a trenchcoat). Don’t avoid discomfort. Don’t lie to yourself.

Ask yourself those questions. Show up. And watch yourself make progress.

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I was always proud of being fast.

Fast in my speed skating races.

Fast on deadline for the paper, for the blog, for that consulting project where I pulled two weeks of all-nighters (it nearly broke me).

Fast to say yes, even when I’m burned out.

Fast to move on to the next thing before I even finished the first.

I thought this was part of my AuDHD. Impulsivity and restlessness are part of the deal, after all.

Yet, I still accomplished a lot. Competed in two sports. Ran a business. Built a journalism and writing career.

And yet, I was always afraid of being behind.

I was used to being late, missing the context, forgetting, (thanks, AuDHD) so I sped up.

And sacrificed myself in the process.

I wasn’t just fast. I was rushing.

And there’s a big difference.

Fast is a speed, built by skill. Rushing is a symptom of a bigger sickness.

Fast means you’re ahead of the pace. Rushing means some part of you believes you’re behind, and always have been.

I didn’t figure this out in a therapist’s office or on a meditation cushion.

I figured it out mid-sprint, the way I figure out most things — by crashing into it.

The turning point 🦇

A few weeks ago I got my first real glimpse of my own mortality.

Here’s the cliff notes version: I probably got bitten by a bat (can’t be 100 percent sure), googled rabies, thought I would die. Got four courses of vaccine (including two very painful injections in my thighs). Survived.

You can read more about that here, if you want to:

Around the same time, I sat down to catch up on my diary. I’ll go days, sometimes weeks, without writing a word, then frantically try to reconstruct everything I missed in one sitting.

Except this time I couldn’t reconstruct anything.

I genuinely could not remember what I had done the day before. Or the day before that.

I couldn’t even remember the exact day of my bat scare.

I had to pull up my Google Calendar just to figure out where the time had gone. It’s the only thing that reminds me time is passing at all.

Some of that is time blindness, a common neurodivergent experience.

Time has always been slippery for me, something to be bested rather than something to actually inhabit.

But that wasn’t the whole story, and I knew it. The bigger part was that I hadn’t been fully there. For any of it.

A friend said the quiet part out loud

I know you push yourself, but what I really hope for you is that you slow down and find some sort of flow.

That hit me like a ton of bricks.

Because I’d spent so long being driven. Ambitious. Determined.

Burning the midnight oil and calling it a sign of hard work.

Answering emails while half-watching TV so I could tell myself I hadn’t wasted the evening.

Scrolling in bed in the morning, chipping away at a mental to-do list while my cat sat next to me, meowing for the ten minutes of attention I couldn’t seem to give her.

Standing in the gym thinking I can’t wait until this is over so I can get to the next thing, when I should have been focusing on my workout.

I wasn’t living my days. I was just existing through them.

This isn’t just a productivity problem — it’s a mindset problem

I get it. We’re adults.

We live in a world that runs on hurry — one that tells us to speed up or get left behind, and calls it ambition when we do.

Friends, family, culture, the algorithm. Everyone tells us that “the early bird gets the worm” and celebrates when we hustle to get what we want.

But it’s not human to live like that all the time.

It’s not healthy either, no matter how normalized it’s become.

We’re trained to believe the only way we are succeeding in life is if we’re always busy, always striving, always DOING.

Taking a break is often seen as weakness.

I also realized another reason I rushed was to get through things.

But if I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing, why was I doing it?

And yes, I understand some things must be pushed through. Doing our taxes. Keeping up with the laundry. Cleaning the litter boxes.

But when everything feels like something we just have to “get through”, that’s a sign something needs to change.

We need to create space for PRESENCE in our lives. Even if it feels scary to slow down.

Ferris Bueller said it best:

There’s a difference between speed and rushing

On the ice, being fast meant I was in control. I was going to beat my opponent, I was pacing appropriately, I was doing my job as a competitor.

Rushing may look the same, but it’s not.

It’s panic in disguise.

I mixed the two up for thirty years because they are SO SIMILAR. Except for how they feel in the body.

One feels good, like flying. The other feels like constriction, fear, anxiety.

I don’t want any of that, thank you anyway.

Because fast was never the thing making me good at my life. Presence was.

My best figure skating performances were the ones in which it was just me and the music, not thinking about what I’d eat afterwards or how the audience was reacting, but just ME. In the moment.

And professionally, the best writing I ever did came from a flow state at 12 midnight, my fingers flying over the keyboard while classical music played on the radio and my mom caught up on business stuff across the room.

I didn’t do my best work at night because I was a night owl, (although that was part of it). I did it because I had no distraction and could FINALLY put all my time and focus into what I was doing. Finally present.

The irony is, when we can slow down and learn to be present, we can actually get MORE done. Because we’re finally focusing, (as much as an AuDHD person can) and don’t feel as stressed.

Here’s the part I want to be clear about, because I don’t want anyone to hear this as stop trying so hard.

Slowing down doesn’t mean I stop working.

I’m not quitting writing. Nor am I telling my freelance client that I can’t deliver the two articles I promised this week.

I’m not using this as an excuse to avoid my responsibilities. I still have to do laundry, feed the cats, answer emails…the list goes on.

And it doesn’t mean that I lose my athletic edge. Against the clock, at the gym, I can still give it my all in short bursts.

But what it does mean is that in my life, most of the time?

I’m trying to pull myself back into the present instead of living in the future.

I’m not behind. I never was. That was just my time-blind brain lying to me. Self-imposed urgency disguised as ambition.

Deep down, I knew this. I just didn’t feel like I could slow down for long enough to address it, and “slowing down” became yet another to-do list item.

I realize that’s the problem in action. So I’m doing something about it.

What slowing down isn’t

I’m not moving off the grid. I’m not booking a meditation retreat, either.

One — I don’t have that kind of money, (oh, if only I did).

Two — it doesn’t actually help.

You can move to a cabin and still have oodles to do. Chop the wood, haul the water, fix the roof before winter. Often, if you don’t do those things, you suffer the consequences.

And a meditation retreat is its own kind of impermanent “fix”.

Maybe you find something real for the five days you’re there.

But the retreat wasn’t teaching you to permanently slow down, because you still have to go home to a real life with doctor’s appointments and traffic and annoying humans who want things from you.

So no — this isn’t about escaping my life to go find stillness somewhere else.

It’s about learning to find it inside the exact life I already have.

What slowing down actually looks like

For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m learning how to just be.

Not in the performative, crystals-and-singing-bowls way. I mean actually inhabiting my own life instead of watching it fly by.

Mainly, I’m trying to catch myself the second I feel that urgency spike.

It has a specific feeling. Like subway lights streaking past the window of a train car — except the streaking is happening inside my head instead of outside a window.

That’s when I know I’m not here. I’m somewhere in the future.

And underneath it, I’m getting irritated at nothing in particular, because some part of me is convinced I’m running out of time to get to wherever I’m rushing to.

Whenever I catch myself speeding up to “get through something” like laundry, I think,

SLOW DOWN, you’ll get it all done

It’s been my go-to mantra in the last week or so. Except unlike most of the mantras in yoga class, this one actually works.

Most of the time. I still have the urge to SPEED UP, to OPTIMIZE, to fill every waking hour with productivity.

This morning I jumped out of bed to feed the cat and nearly missed a step going down the stairs. That was a message too.

Slow the heck down.

So I did.

Instead of doing what I’d normally do — rushing to start my computer, check my emails, start work — I crawled back into bed with my other cat, put my phone on Do Not Disturb, and just laid there for a bit.

No scrolling. No YouTube playing in the background to keep me company. Nothing but the actual moment I was in.

It felt weird. It also felt free.

It’s a small shift. It doesn’t look Instagrammable, or come with merch or a sense of superiority.

But it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever trained for.

Because there was never actually a finish line. It’s a constant race, between me and my self-manufactured sense of urgency, one that I’m determined to pace.

The cost of not knowing this sooner

Regret is kind of pointless. I get that.

But I do regret that I built a career, a reputation, and a whole identity on being ahead of everyone’s demands…and never once bothered to find out if anyone (other than me) was actually expecting that.

I’d complete things before they were due so no one thought I was “lazy”, pushed off sleep so I could “catch up” on paperwork, and ignored the people and animals I loved in favor of my ever-increasing to-do list.

But the rushing wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was just getting me away — from stillness, from quiet, from having to sit still long enough to notice I was missing my own life while I lived it.

And there was always MORE to do. No matter how much I got done, there was always more writing to do, more laundry to fold, more organizing to complete.

So if those tasks are always going to be there, what am I rushing towards, exactly?

I also want you to know that I’m still not a master at being present and slowing down.

I’m a hyper neurodivergent with a productivity fetish. I’m always going to want to rush.

But I’ve stopped confusing rushing with being efficient, or being ahead.

It just took me nearly three decades on a blade — and one blank diary page — to notice the difference.

And I’m learning to be ok with that, too.

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I first discovered AI in 2023.

I was writing an article for one of my various freelance side-quests, and I was stuck on a headline.

It gave me a handful of suggestions, all of which were bad. But bad in a useful way.

I could suddenly see exactly what NOT to do, which got me unstuck faster than a good suggestion would have.

So for years, I was an AI skeptic. I’d tried to use it in a very limited context. It didn’t work so well. So I moved on.

Flash forward to 2024, when I was getting more involved in writing on Substack. I’d made my home on Medium, where I still publish regularly, but friends kept encouraging me to check out Substack. So I did.

I started two Substacks off the bat — because of course I did — and immediately re-branded the second one when the first name idea stopped being so appealing.

A former top Medium writer, who’d since decamped to Substack, was running a writing cohort. I joined. I still keep in touch with several folks I met in that program. But what I remember most is that the two leaders taught us how to use AI for writing without having it write for you. How to generate ideas. How to bounce things off of it. Even how to re-format Notes to be more engaging.

I was captivated. I’d believed, like so many, that AI sucked for creative work. That it hallucinated (it did, and it still does). That it couldn’t be trusted.

But as I started using the prompts they provided, building my own projects and running my own experiments, I saw that it could be a valuable work partner. Not something that produced work for me — something that helped ME produce.

I strongly believe using AI to help create work shouldn’t be a dirty secret. It shouldn’t be something that gets “outed” here and everywhere else online.

Recently, Substack caused a furor when it introduced an AI detector, built by Pangram, that lets readers scan a post and see an estimate of how much was written by (or with) AI and how much is “human.”

Writers are losing their minds.

The common thread? That such a tool, while possibly well-intentioned, will just cause another witch hunt. Accusing writers of using AI even when they aren’t. Or somehow giving the impression that AI-written (or assisted) text isn’t “real writing.”

As someone who has used AI to varying degrees for the past two years, that’s what I want to address.

Writing that uses AI is not less human. In fact, AI might help us uncover what makes it uniquely so.

It’s the future, especially for chaotic, scattered, neurodivergent minds like mine — the ones that rely on it to untangle our thoughts, organize them, and catch grammar that’s gone aggressively bad.

Here’s how I use it — and why I think every one of these applications is not just fair, but genuinely helpful.

I use AI to generate ideas.

“There are no new ideas.” Every online writing bro has said some version of this.

They are not wrong.

Back when I started writing online, I was determined to write something truly, 100% unique. That determination kept me from actually executing — chasing perfectionism instead of just writing something already.

Here’s something we don’t want to acknowledge: No idea is completely new.

Unless you’re a revolutionary thinker with a 220 IQ sitting on an actual new theorem, you’re sharing ideas that have already been expressed by someone else.

What matters is that you share them in your own words, and through the filter of your own experience.

Think about it. Most content follows predictable patterns.

Something takes off, so the writer spends more time on something similar but slightly different, hoping it takes off again. That’s just human nature.

Everyone has already written about some aspect of the human experience. What matters is style, context, the real, lived experiences behind them. That’s what separates them from each other.

I’m not saying plagiarism is cool. I’m aware of some instances where people used AI to write something and inadvertently copied someone else’s argument, language, whatever. The models are trained on people’s work. It was bound to happen.

I am saying, though, that using AI to help generate ideas is no more “cheating” than seeing what someone else wrote online and writing your own version of it.

Whenever AI suggests a headline or a story idea, I ask myself — does this genuinely excite me, and do I have at least two stories to back it up? If I don’t, I leave it.

AI helps me organize my thoughts and experiences.

I don’t always know where to start. I have the raw material. I have the writing in bits and pieces. I just need help slotting it into a format that makes sense.

Often, I’ll voice-note for up to an hour about my experiences, angles, opinions, thoughts, even full sentences — and then ask AI to help me pull it into a post or article, without trying to rewrite it in robot-syntax.

Usually, it does anyway. That’s where the editing comes in.

The editing is actually the most time-intensive part, because I’m not willing to include anything that doesn’t fit my intentions.

I know there’s been a lot of “here’s how you can tell AI wrote this” content going around. But it’s kind of impossible to detect, honestly. Human writing evolves to mimic whatever style is dominant at the time.

And no punctuation, or a certain word choice, isn’t automatically a tell — plenty of us were doing that decades before any of this existed. I’ve loved semicolons for years. Parentheses, for my extra bonus thoughts, (because there are ALWAYS bonus thoughts). And you can take my em-dash from my cold, dead — still probably typing — hands.

AI text, left alone, isn’t that exciting. It’s flat. No texture, no emotion. People can feel that, the same way they can feel when something’s actually human.

That’s exactly why “detecting AI” is such a mess. Nobody’s actually catching AI. They’re catching things that SEEM like AI based on certain cues which may or may not be accurate.

Human writing, however, relies on stories, experience, specific detail. Even if AI shapes it, it still comes from us.

So when I use AI as a first draft, a thought partner, or an editor, and then do the work of making it mine, it’s actually mine.

AI is my digital editor.

Back when I started my journalism career, I was not a good writer. Especially for journalism. I didn’t understand the rhythm or the syntax. And no matter how many times I skimmed the AP Stylebook, the rules didn’t absorb.

That’s because I can’t focus on boring stuff. AuDHDers have interest-based nervous systems — it’s harder for us to focus on material that doesn’t interest us.

I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought I was lazy. Or stupid. Or careless. Because I usually made the same mistakes over and over again.

Luckily, I had an editor (or several) to clean things up.

Later, my friend John became a kind of pre-editor, giving a still-learning journalist some confidence. He fixed my grammar and structure and often suggested sentences, too.

AI does the same. Yet because it’s not human, we suddenly have an issue with that.

When my human editor changed my sentence, it was editing. When AI does it, it’s “cheating.”

I don’t agree.

Editing is a huge part of writing. For a lot of us, it’s also exhausting.

When I let AI edit for me, I do so with the understanding that it shows me its fixes first. Only then do I approve them. I still edit myself, occasionally. Especially when a piece has lost its spine a little.

But it’s not me, all the time. And it doesn’t need to be.

AI gets me unstuck.

That’s the through line in all of this. I don’t let it think for me. I let it take my thinking and push it in new directions — or stress-test the assertions I’m making.

Best of all? It doesn’t get impatient with me. It allows me to keep chatting, keep exploring. It will even ask questions (if I ask it to) to further clarify my ideas.

It’s like body doubling, except my body double doesn’t have a body. It’s just a large LLM somewhere in the desert, probably.

When I’m on a roll, I’m unstoppable. My brain runs at 5,000 miles an hour and I can’t always slow it down. Caffeine, weirdly, helps.

But when I’m tired, anxious, demand-avoidant, or all three — I get stuck. That’s where AI comes in. By chatting with it, I am gently getting myself unstuck.

AI shows me what NOT to do.

Sometimes the value isn’t the answer. It’s the contrast.

That first headline in 2023 taught me that before I had language for it — a handful of bad suggestions were enough to show me exactly where not to go, faster than staring intently at a blinking cursor would.

AI gets me unstuck by showing me possibilities, which pull better ones out of my brain.

Some people say, “but it’s not fair, they are pumping out several articles a day while I can only do one every five days.”

That’s fine. That’s their process. AI can help us do things faster, but that doesn’t always mean it’s better. Without your touch on it, it’s just randomness.

The people I’d actually worry about aren’t the ones voice-noting for thirty minutes and then spending an hour making sure every sentence still sounds like them.

They’re the ones dumping a prompt straight to publish and calling it a day.

And let’s face it, writing itself is a pleasure. It helps us think. We lose something if we don’t make it our own.

When I get an AI draft, I don’t feel anything. When I clean it up, re-formatting into my own words, I feel proud.

I chase that feeling. Like most creatives, I can’t understand the point of creating something if I’m not proud of it.

So, even though I know many do, I would never take a shortcut and let AI write the whole thing, then push it out into the world.

I read somewhere that Alexandre Dumas (the dude behind The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers) had a bunch of ghost writers working for him in his “print shop.” He’d take the drafts, fix them, and send them out under his name.

At first, I thought that was dishonest. Then I realized I was holding Dumas up to the same “purity test” rationale as people are with AI now.

I realized the concepts were still him. It was probably to keep up with demand. After all, they didn’t have computers then. And Dumas didn’t just let them go out without his approval.

He still fixed the drafts. He still put his name behind them.

Who’s to say the brilliance of such works is rendered less because it wasn’t completely done by one man?

For years before AI, there were writers who didn’t edit. Who rushed. Who maybe didn’t have the greatest grammar and still published.

I had a friend who self-published a sci-fi romance. Friends who read it said it was horrible. She published it anyway.

There will always be writing that touches us and writing that doesn’t move us. For whatever reason.

I’m still going to use AI for my work.

For those of us whose brains run at 5,000 miles an hour, or stall out completely, or both in the same week, AI isn’t cheating. It’s a tool that meets us where we actually are instead of where the writing advice assumes we should be.

So yes. I use AI. In fact, I used it to tighten up this post. And I will keep using it.

And every word, every experience, every detail, will still be mine.

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“OUCH!” I cried.

It was a Monday night, around 9:30 pm, and something had just bit me while I was out on my evening walk.

The bite bled a bit, but it stung. Like getting a bee sting.

Wasn’t it too late for bees at 9:30 pm?

I continued the phone conversation I was having like nothing had happened.

But by the time I got home 15 minutes later, it was still stinging.

I’m an insect magnet. I get bit by mosquitos at least three times a day every time I go outside during the summer, and I once got stung in the ear by a distracted bee. So I was used to being an all-you-can-eat buffet for biting and stinging insects.

Maybe it was a really pissed-off fly, I thought.

Two nights later, I told my mom what happened. The two pinpricks on the inside of my elbow were still visible and still hurt a bit, especially when I flexed my arm.

Her eyes widened.

“Do you think it was a bat?”

I genuinely had no idea. I hadn’t seen anything or felt anything, although I knew they were in the area.

Years ago, I used to run at night and would watch the bats drunkenly flapping up by the street lights, and reflexively run a bit faster. Still, I never thought they’d actually pose a threat.

One of my parent’s acquaintances had been bitten on a Florida golf course and she felt the bat land against her leg with a thump, bite her, and fly off.

But I couldn’t rule it out completely. I was distracted, after all.

After frantically perusing a Reddit thread that asked and answered, “’Is this a bat bite?’ CLICK HERE. It’s probably not” and, I’m ashamed to say, a chat with ChatGPT (which assured me I probably was probably fine), I was freaking out.

When they say your life flashes before your eyes, they weren’t kidding. It did.

I’ve always leaned more toward death than life.

Whenever things got difficult, the thought would flit through my brain.

What if I just…wasn’t here?

I never did anything about it.

I’m ashamed to admit that more than once, I thought it would be easier, though. To just not be alive. Because life felt like a never-ending struggle.

Getting re-diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago explained some of my malaise and overwhelm, but deep down, I still thought something was seriously wrong with me.

“You don’t want to die,” a therapist reassured me through a computer screen in 2021 as the pandemic continued. “You want to live differently than you are right now”.

That reframe was reassuring. You love life, I’d tell myself whenever one of those dark moods hit. That’s exactly why not living the way you want to hurts so much.

But now, with the very real possibility of death-by-rabies, the realization hit me like a thunderbolt.

“I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE,” I sobbed to my mom on the couch that night.

What would happen to my cats? My parents? My writing?

I didn’t want to find out. I wanted to live. More than I ever had before.

I wanted more annoying days where I was worried about money, and trying to lose weight and get back in shape, and organizing my messy house.

In that moment, just being alive was enough.

This wasn’t my first brush with mortality.

Back in 2023, I nearly got hit by a car.

I still remember the moment like it was yesterday.

Riding my sporty red mountain bike down the giant hill near my house, I turned right early. I was distracted, headed towards the outdoor oval where I was going roller skating. Just as I had hundreds of times before.

But this time, another car was coming. At the same moment I was zipping out into the road, swinging wide, she was too. Turning left. For a heart-stopping moment, we almost met in the middle.

Time slowed down as I reflexively jerked my handlebars to the right, avoiding collision by inches, so close I could see the metallic paint on the silver Volkswagen bug.

I lost control and slid out, my left leg wrenching under the bike. I didn’t notice the searing pain until I tried to get up and couldn’t. The driver helped me up.

“Are you sure I can’t call someone?” she asked.

I told her I was fine (I wasn’t), hobbling off to the sidewalk. People pleaser to the end.

Blood poured out of two gashes on my leg, and every step made me wince, sending a jolt of pain up and down my leg.

I called my mom, still walking towards the oval. I still thought I was going to skate.

“No, you’re going to the ER,” she said, picking me up moments later.

My left knee, my jumping knee, was sprained. They gave me crutches and told me to use them for two weeks.

I could barely hobble without them. I went roller skating anyway.

I made it two laps around the quarter-mile track, knee firing with every push, before I gave up.

That was my first mistake.

I’d struggled with binge eating for decades, but didn’t have much opportunity…and I could always train off the results. This time, it was easier than ever. Staying at a friend’s condo and without the training sessions that previously punctuated my days, I had nothing to do but eat, complain, and hate myself.

I ate my way through it — pounds of Swiss cheese, coconut milk ice cream, mounds of whipped cream straight from the cannister, (or spooned into a bowl if I was feeling fancy).

That was my second mistake.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn anything from that injury, (except to avoid that hill). Instead, I used it as an excuse.

I was already burned out from two decades in competitive sports, already looking for a reason to stop training. The crash handed me one on a blood-stained platter.

I didn’t think about how close I’d come to something much worse. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to walk away with only scratches and a sprain.

Instead I thought about how the driver, (one of my neighbors) should have been paying attention. How the bone edema I ended up with — probably from roller skating on a sprain like an idiot — meant I might never jump the same way again. How this was the end of my athletic career.

I nursed the resentment even as I got better and stopped trying.

That was my third mistake. And perhaps the biggest.

But this scare hit different. And I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out why.

First, I thought it was because I’m older. I was 33 when I got injured. I was still learning to be an adult, still figuring out that every action (especially eating like a toddler for years) had consequences.

Now, I’m 36 years old and with the big 4–0 looming in the distance, aging (and death) doesn’t feel that far away anymore.

Then I thought, maybe it was the uncertainty. I’m still not sure it was actually a bat that bit me, although I can’t imagine what else would have served up such perfect little punctures. Not knowing is sometimes worse than being fully aware.

Or maybe — and I think this is actually it — it was because the fear cut deeper. So the effect on me was greater too.

Rabies isn’t like a knee sprain. You can’t just let it work it’s way out. Once the symptoms start, you’re already a goner.

That’s the kind of reality that puts things in perspective fast.

It got me thinking about how sometimes, things happen to make us pay attention and live differently.

Years ago, a shaman I worked with told me that he nearly got in a car accident when it was time for him to switch careers. The universe had tried to tell him, he said, but he wasn’t listening. So it made him listen.

Meanwhile, a former training mate had a cancer scare in her 20s. It inspired her to get in excellent shape. Grab experiences while she still could. Be fearless.

Even while these stories scared me, perversely, I thought I needed a dramatic catalyst to shock me out of my comfort zone.

Now I’m thinking: be careful what you wish for.

Because I got my scare.

And this time, I didn’t spend two weeks eating whipped cream and blaming somebody else for my pain.

This time, I cried in the emergency room, squeezing my mom’s hand, and said I never wanted to leave.

It took a brush with death to remind me to live.

I’m not saying that everyone should go out and try to experience something scary.

But I am saying that it forced me to change my perspective.

Being confronted with the very real possibility that I could die reminded me that nothing was that important.

Struggling financially, while difficult, was not the worst outcome. Neither was being disorganized, not being able to find a job, or having to go up the stairs more than once to get laundry, (yes, literally something I was annoyed about before this).

So last Thursday, despite hating needles (I was that kid who hid under the exam table when the time came for my vaccines), I suffered through two Rabies immunoglobulin (RIG) injections (one in each thigh) and one to the deltoid.

When I left, muscles aching, I couldn’t help but think that it would be a good reminder to be better. And it was. For a day, at least.

I was more caring. Less impatient. I spent that next morning cuddling with my cat, watching YouTube, not trying to hustle for the first time in months.

But of course, nothing lasts.

Mundane stress intruded once again. I was reminded that yes, as long as I was alive, the bills would come due and I’d have to figure out how to pay them.

This time, though, I have a different frame of reference. I can zoom out. Remember how I felt when I thought I was going to die.

And think, hey, it’s annoying to be alive, but it’s not so bad.

I still have two more injections as of this writing. I’m not just suffering through them, though.

As the needle sinks in, I remind myself of everything I have to be grateful for.

Sometimes, scary things happen and we can use them to our advantage. The health scare. That time you nearly got in a car accident. Knowing someone who died unexpectedly.

Shock and fear can often be portals. Potent reminders that we are lucky to be alive.

But by all means, don’t wait for that to happen to you. Trust me, if you thought it was all over, you would want more days.

I certainly did.

A version of this originally ran on Medium.

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Last spring, I was sitting in a University of Vermont hospital waiting room while my mom got her blood drawn, getting hypnotized by a stranger on Zoom.

The workshop was hosted by a GOAT of the online writing space. Someone I’d read for years and always resonated with. I’d never met him, but I felt like I knew him.

His workshop promotion email had found me while I was crossing Lake Champlain, accompanying my mother to one of her many doctor’s appointments, and I put the $100 fee on a credit card — I didn’t have it — and decided now was the time to get more serious about my online writing.

I had done very well on my own for a while. Writing on Medium, I made nearly a full-time salary for about six months. After a summer where I maxed out at nearly $5,000 from writing there alone, fall came, and my earnings dropped steeply.

By winter, it was apparent the days of $3,000 months were over, and I was getting anxious.

I’d been writing on Medium primarily because that’s where I made the most, and I liked its clean platform. But I was also getting more active on Substack, despite not making anywhere near what I did on Medium, (I still write there, btw).

So the timing seemed perfect to learn from one of the greats.

Nearly 100 people were there that first day. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to improve their writing online.

I’m still not sure what happened. All I know is the guy was hypnotic.

You know how Tony Robbins and other self-help dudes captivate their audience? That’s what he did to me.

His words and teachings cracked me open.

I’ve been undervaluing myself, a little voice said as he explained why he no longer offered free workshops — because people would attend to be entertained but weren’t serious about working with him. (I’d attended one myself years ago, and it ended with a pressurized hard sell to buy his course. I did.)

Because I gave EVERYTHING away.

I didn’t paywall my Substack posts (how would anyone see them?). I had a sliding scale subscription on one of my Substacks because another Substacker I admired did the same (because who’s going to spend $50 for my Substack in this economy?).

Apparently this was the OPPOSITE of what I should have done.

He explained how people build influence — the mechanisms, the styles. How having a strong opinion and an “enemy” was essential to build an audience.

No one wanted to read milquetoast writing. They wanted someone who wasn’t afraid to be direct.

As someone who’d been writing about mental health for years, this seemed jarring but also made sense.

The best articles I ever wrote were directed at an “enemy” and had a strong point of view — the psychologists who didn’t understand my neurodivergence, the people in my life who told me I was “weird” and “didn’t fit in,” the endless grinding productivity culture.

When the workshop was over, I felt like my life had been remade. I had a new purpose. I had to revamp my writing to fit his principles.

So I did.

I re-adopted my writing style, my topics, everything, to match the worldview he’d planted in my mind.

I took more workshops, and every one inspired me. Being around other people, even just virtually, who were building online and finding an alternative to a 9-to-5, was invigorating.

I kept putting them on a credit card, telling myself I’d pay them off next month, when I made that money from implementing his suggestions. I did not.

Outside the workshops, I felt like I was on a chocolate-and-caffeine bender ALL THE TIME.

I was PUMPED.

I woke up early to write. I brainstormed product ideas in spin class. I spent hours drafting CTAs (most sounded unhinged), started a Kit newsletter (despite having my Substack and Medium still going), and created two high-ticket coaching tiers that I knew subconsciously were too expensive (never launched them).

My mindset changed too. This teacher preached NO EXCUSES. He’d beat health scares, mental health issues, near-death experiences.

If he did all that, what right did any of us have to complain?

There was no such thing as an excuse, according to him. Not sick family members. Not lack of money, opportunity, or neurodivergence. None of it should keep us from building our business.

I adopted that belief myself. I became more ruthless, towards myself and others.

Every time I told myself I was tired, I told myself no you aren’t. Every time I didn’t write enough or create enough, I beat myself up and told myself I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

In retrospect, I was going through a scary time watching my mother struggle with her health. I was looking for something, anything, to distract me and give me purpose.

And after a few workshops, I was convinced that if I could just implement his system and mindset, I too could make millions without ever leaving my house.

But gradually, the cracks started to appear.

Re-reading one of my pieces a few months ago, I realized something jarring.

It didn’t sound like me.

Was it motivational? Yeah. Did it have the vulnerability and honesty of my other work?

Absolutely not — that was discouraged unless it was to “build rapport” in order to “sell.”

The thing that had built my writing career — my honesty, my willingness to share my most embarrassing moments, my willingness to help — was considered, if not a liability, then less effective than his brand of writing.

At some point I realized the stuff he was teaching us — “cold” and “warm” leads, lead magnets, email sequences — had all been practiced on us.

Those emails from him asking how I was doing? Part of the sequence. Those CTA questions? Part of the strategy. The workshop topics that seemed so on-point? Crowdsourced from our comments, our feedback.

None of it was because he necessarily cared about us, no matter what he said.

It was that we were customers.

I know that’s not a dirty word. I know we all have to make money somehow. But it all felt a bit predatory to me.

I heard somewhere that if you aren’t creating, you’re consuming, and I’ve learned that in real time.

Every time I got into someone’s group, or took a workshop, or bought yet another subscription to a Substack that promised to teach me how to “make a full-time living on Substack,” I was being a consumer.

I became their customer — someone to be peppered with emails, offers, and “special discounts.”

More often than not, I bit. Because my ADHD, impulsive brain didn’t realize that by subscribing to them, I wasn’t going to become like them.

But every time I was writing, coming up with ideas I liked and wanted to pursue, (not because they were “foolproof product ideas” but because I actually wanted to do them), reaching out to people (because I enjoyed their work, not with an ulterior motive), and following my intuition (not overthinking and strategizing it into the ground) I was creating.

It felt good. And I realized something else.

Most advice for neurodivergent folks like me doesn’t work, anyway.

I can’t go 100 percent all the time. It saps my focus faster than math class ever did.

Once writing starts to feel like a business, like a product, something to sell, I lose all love of it. It feels like a grind.

I know, because that’s what happened at Medium. Even while I was making more in a month than I ever had, I was miserable. I was over-strategizing, writing what I thought would “take off” rather than what I actually wanted to write.

The coach I’m talking about said neurodivergence isn’t an excuse to not go all out and build a successful online business. He’s right. But it does require different considerations.

We need to write what we like, when we feel inspired and have the most energy, not because we’re supposed to be writing at 7am before everyone else is alive.

We need time off to doodle, watch the birds, go outside.

We have to accept that some days we’ll have all the energy in the world, and other days it’ll take everything we have to get out of bed and make coffee.

I’m not saying this is an excuse. I’m saying we’re all different, and that’s ok.

Here’s the kicker: I’d intuitively been doing what worked for me already.

I think most of us do this. But we just want someone to validate us or tell us what to do.

Even when we’ve known it the whole time.

Trust yourself. Stop outsourcing your decisions to someone else. You probably already know what to do. You just have to get out of your own way.

And yes — learning from someone can conceivably help you get to the next level. I’m not discounting that. And there are folks out there who teach this because it’s a true calling, not just because they want to make a million dollars from it.

I’m not writing this because I hate the guy or didn’t learn from him. Quite the contrary; I did learn a lot from this person, and still admire his work (and work ethic).

But when you start relying on others to shape your entire strategy and business, chances are you’ll bury your own voice in the process. And disavow the thing that makes you great.

Your authenticity. Your foibles. Your ideas. All of you.

That’s a “product” that no one can replicate.

Here’s the truth: you can read all the posts, buy all the courses, and listen to all the gurus you want.

But what worked for them won’t work for you. Because you aren’t them.

What you have to offer is so specific, so unique, that only you can do it.

The solution? Do what you like because you like it, and trust it all works out.

I’m not saying business knowledge, or strategy, or a product is bad. I’m saying don’t force yourself into things that don’t feel right for you.

I just created a perk for my free and paid subscribers over on The ADHD Tarot, because after thinking about it for months, I finally had the energy to do it. Not because anyone told me to do it. Because I WANTED to do it.

I’ve picked up things from every writing Substacker I admire, and I understand that’s their particular interest and way to make money. But trying to adopt their system exactly, expecting it to make you more like them, is a fool’s errand.

Again: what worked for them won’t work for you.

Be yourself, take what helps, leave what doesn’t, and try to help people.

Now that’s a strategy that actually works.

Today’s the day. 60 Real starts now.

If you missed it, you can read the full post HERE:

My version of 75 Hard, made for people who can’t stand the thought of such an extreme challenge without spiraling into self-loathing. Adaptable but challenging. Accountability with acceptance built in.

This is the Day 1 tool for the Career & Life Direction pillar — a future-cast exercise inspired by and adapted from Dan Koe’s “how to fix your entire life in one day” post.

You don’t have to do 60 Real to use this exercise: it helps either way.

I actually did this one myself last week, and honestly, it’s what inspired me to build this whole challenge.

Dan Koe’s writing has shaped a lot of how I think over the years; his “anti-vision” teaching changed how I think about life and purpose almost as much as a rabies scare did, (that’s a story for another day).

I’m not going to hand you my exact answers — this only works if the truth that comes up is actually yours, not a version of mine.

But I’ll say this much: all of these questions came back to my diet, exercise, and body. I zoomed out and realized that continuing to bake cookies (and eat them) wasn’t going to help me with my future goals of returning to competition, renewing my personal trainer certification, or help me be happier long-term.

And imagining what someone would guess I want based on my actions, not what I said I wanted, hit especially hard.

I said I wanted to get fit again, lose the extra 30 pounds I’d accumulated in the last three years, and feel better about myself and my athletic capabilities. Yet I ate chocolate every day, didn’t train as consistently as I should have, and ended every gym date with a cappuccino.

None of these were getting me closer to my goals, no matter how much I said I wanted them. My actions had to start matching up.

I still think about that whenever I start letting myself off the hook, to be honest.

Seeing yourself as others would see you, through actions alone, is a bit creepy but also really powerful.

So if you’re in, today’s ask is simple: log your first move, hold your one rule, and try the checkpoint below if you want the full Day 1 experience. Comment below for added accountability!

Use the below exercise on Day 1, Day 30, and Day 60 of 60 Real.

A Note Before You Start

The original version of this exercise is designed to hurt a little on purpose — it’s built on discomfort as the mechanism. That works for some people. For a lot of us, that same discomfort tips into shame, and shame doesn’t produce clarity. It produces shutdown, or a shame spiral, or a decision to close the notebook and never come back to it.

So this version keeps the honesty and drops the interrogation.

A few ground rules:

• Type, talk, or write it out — whatever gets it out of your head. Voice memo to yourself counts.

• Skip a question if it’s not landing. Come back to it later, or not at all. This isn’t a test with a passing score.

• If a question makes you spiral instead of think, stop. That’s not weakness, that’s data — it means today isn’t the day for that particular question.

• Set a timer if that helps you start. Not to rush you — to give you a container.

Morning: Naming What’s Actually True

Fifteen to twenty minutes, first thing, before your phone gets its hooks in you.

1. What’s the low-grade dissatisfaction you’ve just learned to live with? Not the big obvious stuff — the thing you’ve stopped noticing because you’re used to it.

2. What do you find yourself complaining about, over and over, without ever actually changing it? Name the one or two you hear yourself say most.

3. If someone watched what you do — not what you say — what would they guess you actually want?

4. Cast five years ahead, if nothing here changes. What does an ordinary Tuesday look like? Where do you wake up, what’s the first thought, how do you feel by the end of the day?

5. Now cast further — is there someone already living further down this same road? What comes up when you think about becoming them?

6. If you did become that person, what would you have quietly given up along the way to get there?

Then flip it:

7. Forget what’s realistic for a second. If you could just be living a different life three years from now, what does that ordinary Tuesday look like instead?

8. What would you need to believe about yourself for that life to feel like yours, not like a performance?

9. What’s one small thing this week that person would just... do?

During the Day: A Few Interruptions, Not a Barrage

The original version schedules random check-ins all day long.

For a lot of us, that many interruptions becomes its own source of overwhelm — so this version is three, not nine. Set them as calendar reminders, spaced out, ideally during a commute, a walk, or downtime — not stacked back-to-back with tasks.

• Midday: What am I avoiding right now by staying busy with something else?

• Late afternoon: Am I moving toward the life I actually want today, or just away from discomfort?

• Evening (before the synthesis below): What did I do today because it felt genuinely mine — and what did I do because it’s just what I always do?

Evening: Bringing It Together

Ten to fifteen minutes, whenever the day’s winding down.

1. What feels most true right now about why you’ve been stuck?

2. Name the actual thing in the way. Not a person, not your circumstances — the pattern or belief that keeps steering.

3. Write one sentence for what you’re done letting your life be. It doesn’t have to be polished. It should feel true when you read it back.

4. Write one sentence for what you’re building toward — knowing it’ll change, and that’s fine.

Then, instead of setting a goal, set a lens:

• One year out: what’s the one concrete thing that would tell you the old pattern actually broke?

• One month out: what would need to be true for that year-mark to still be possible?

• Tomorrow: two or three specific things you’ll actually put on the calendar — the kind of thing the person you’re becoming would just do, without a whole negotiation first.

How This Fits Into 60 Real

This is the Career & Life Direction checkpoint — Day 1, Day 30, Day 60.

You’re not doing all of it three separate times from scratch; Day 30 and Day 60 mostly mean revisiting what you wrote and being honest about what moved and what’s still stuck.

The point isn’t the exercise itself.

It’s the comparison — what Day 1’s answers looked like next to Day 60’s.

That gap is the actual proof you’ve changed.

What came up for you if you did this exercise? Which question hit hardest? Lmk in the comments.

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I always thought the traditional self-help advice — to learn to “love myself” — was impossible.

I’d wager most of us feel that way.

Maybe we “like” ourselves or even “tolerate” ourselves, but true “self love” is a big ask.

Especially when you’re neurodivergent and have spent a lifetime being told something was wrong with you, in myriad tiny and passive-aggressive ways.

When I was a kid, I was told I had “a lot of potential”. Code for: you’re not living up to it.

That I needed to “apply myself more” when I was stuck bored out of my mind in math class, making up stories in my head to stay awake.

That I needed to be “less impulsive” and “grow up” in my 20s. Usually when I bought chocolate truffles and hid them in my bathroom, or when I got hyper-fixated on a guy who didn’t really like me.

And now, in my 30s, I’ve switched to telling MYSELF all those things. Other people still do, sometimes. But I’ve turned the critic’s blade towards myself.

“Stop being flakey”

“Just do the thing”

“Stick to the plan”

I’ve since learned that people with ADHD are more likely to have low self-esteem.

This could be because of stigma around being neurodivergent, or because we spent our lives being told we were “doing it wrong”.

A 2022 survey of 162 people with ADHD found that they were frequently criticized for focus issues, lack of organization, forgetfulness, and time management — all common features of an ADHD brain that we can’t control.

That sticks around.

I still remember my teacher who told me I needed to “pay attention” and singled me out when I didn’t, and the coach who told me that I had “moments of brilliance, if only I could string them all together”.

And I definitely remember the person who told me my dream company would never hire me because I “didn’t belong there…and didn’t read social cues”.

Ouch.

We also have lower self-esteem because we are more sensitive to rejection. The extreme version of that is rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), in which we see EVERYTHING as a sign that we are being rejected.

Other people can hear that they are scatterbrained and get on with their day, rolling their eyes all the way.

Meanwhile, we neurodivergents internalize it. We remember it. We see it as yet another sign something is “wrong with us” even when we know it’s our unique brain creating these differences.

Yet, I was never a fan of those self-help coded suggestions for improving it, either.

Mainly because most of them don’t work for us.

We have a built in “nonsense-detector”. If something is too “woo”, like talking to ourselves in a mirror or affirmations, we refuse to do it.

A therapist gave me a guided meditation once, and despite telling me it was “proven” to improve my self-esteem, I didn’t believe her. I listened to it once, fell asleep, and never listened again.

Self-esteem work requires consistency and emotional regulation as well, two things we don’t often have.

I can get all the workbooks and work with all the psychologists in the world, but if I forget to do the “homework”, or rush through it, or get triggered by something and refuse to do the work, I won’t see improvement.

Masking plays into it too — we tend to make others believe we’re fine, even when we’re not, to avoid “looking bad”.

The truth is, building self esteem isn’t as simple as listening to guided meditations or telling yourself “you are enough”.

It’s more complicated. Often, it hurts. Sometimes, we don’t get there at all.

Since I got re-diagnosed with ADHD at 31, I’ve had to realize that acceptance is more the goal, not LOVING everything I do.

I may never have strong self-esteem, but I can build grudging tolerance for myself and make small changes to improve that tolerance.

Here’s how.

1. Taking care of myself

It’s really hard to have self-esteem if you’re continually letting yourself down.

When I was a kid, I was overweight. Removing food sensitivities helped me lose 30 pounds. By my teens, I was skinny, and most importantly, had improved focus.

The restrictive diet had helped so much I didn’t realize I still had ADHD.

And my self-esteem soared. My skating improved. I started winning competitions again. All because I knew I was doing everything I could to reach my goals.

But throughout the years, I struggled to maintain this diet. As an athlete, I was either training hard-core during my season or becoming one with my chair off-season.

Sleep was equally hard to crack. I spent much of my youth sleep deprived because I couldn’t go to sleep then had to wake up early for school.

In my teens and 20s, I became semi-nocturnal because that’s when I felt most alert. But by my 30s, I couldn’t keep up.

I’d go through phases where I’d go to sleep early, like before 11, and wake up early at 6. Or I’d stay up late (past 12) and sleep in late (past 10).

Neither were restorative.

At my best, I was sleeping a reasonable 9 hours, avoiding sugar or excess snacking, and exercising at least 45 minutes a day.

At my worst, I was sleeping 6 hours, eating my weight in sugar, and not exercising.

It felt like there was no in-between — in my sleeping, in my eating, in my exercise routines.

Understandably, this made me feel worse about myself.

Because it’s almost impossible to have self esteem, or at least accept our foibles, if we know we aren’t doing everything we can to build a positive life for ourselves.

Especially if it involves deception. We know when we’re lying to ourselves.

As an athlete, I was expected to always be training. Always be fit. Always be slim. So it was even worse when I couldn’t fit that ideal.

Accepting ourselves doesn’t always mean giving up.

It can often mean holding ourselves to a set of standards that help us be better, and that in turn helps us build self-esteem.

But the standard I was holding myself to was the problem.

Best-case me and worst-case me were both extremes — and extremes don’t sustain.

What’s worked better — for me, and my clients — is aiming for 75%.

Not perfect. Just — good enough. Sleep that’s mostly consistent. Food that’s mostly not garbage. Movement most days, not all of them.

At first, it felt scary. Like I was “giving up” on optimizing myself.

It didn’t feel as satisfying either, because I wasn’t doing something I could point to and say, “look, I’m doing all this difficult stuff”.

Good enough isn’t as Instagrammable as EXCELLENCE in all caps.

But it’s also what’s been working for me.

Good enough over time beats perfect for one day. Every time.

2. Proving that I can do hard things

A few days ago, I didn’t want to go to a workout class. It was hot, I was tired, and I could have stayed at home camped out next to my air conditioner.

But then I remembered how I felt when I went. I knew I’d be annoyed with myself if I bailed. So I went.

And finally felt good about myself for a few minutes.

The truth is, self-esteem isn’t a feeling we find. It’s a record we build — one kept promise at a time.

Not to others, but to ourselves.

I learned this early. At 13, when I lost 30 pounds and proved to myself I could do it. At 27, when I started doing CrossFit every day, learned how to climb ropes (after years of telling myself I had “no upper body strength”), and became a trainer. At 29, when I came back to competitive figure skating, trained for a few months, and won gold at an international adult competition.

My actions compounded.

Something most of us don’t realize is that nothing comes right away.

Our impulsive brains want that win RIGHT NOW. The body. The money. The happiness.

This is why many ADHDers (myself included) struggle so much with long term goal setting. You want me to work towards something five years away? Right now? Without seeing results? Not gonna do it.

Yet, that’s how things get built. Not all at once. Over time.

And the way to do that is to take tiny steps every day. On purpose. With good intentions.

Stretching ourselves out of our comfort zone without overwhelming ourselves or becoming dysregulated.

It sounds difficult, but only if we try to get too much too fast.

For me, this looks like sending freelance pitches to outlets I respect. Showing up to exercise when my brain wants me to stay home. Avoiding the ice cream place. Doing the boring task that I’ve been quietly avoiding all week.

Every kept commitment adds to my internal “self-esteem tracker”. Every broken one subtracts.

Noticing when I do the work helps the most. I track all I accomplish, wins (like “didn’t have ice cream” or “exercised when I didn’t feel like it”), measurements (like hips, to see when I lose weight), and look back at it. It reminds me that I DID do enough, that I am doing well, and that I’m making progress. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

So I’ve stopped trying to feel good about myself and started trying to give myself evidence as to why I should. And the more I do that, the more my confidence grows.

I can do hard things. And you can, too.

3. I lean into my strengths

I still remember the playdate where I was shouting movie quotes at a friend. “Stop yelling, Christie,” one of the parents said. “You’re being too loud”.

I was 8. I internalized it.

From then on, I tried to be less — less intense, less obsessive, less loud.

I wanted to blend in, especially as I got older and became a target for bullies. If I didn’t exist, they couldn’t make fun of my silly haircut or my hairy legs (both mean, both accurate).

As I got older, I learned to perform a version of myself that was easier for other people to manage. I was trying to become the person I thought I needed to be to be successful.

The reliable one. The decisive one. The mature one.

Meanwhile, I hid my emotionality and let it loose at home, crying on the floor or descending into depressive episodes. Hid my impulsivity at meetings by drinking water, tapping pens, and later, buying sweet treats to binge.

Took on too much, complained about it, but didn’t want to give it up because then I wouldn’t be “useful”.

It was exhausting. And it doesn’t work.

First of all, ADHDers struggle with emotional regulation. Controlling our emotions and how we express ourselves can sometimes feel like a tall order…and make us seem “weird” or “immature” to others.

So we mask. We pretend. And sometimes, we explode.

Second, ADHD brains can’t be forced to focus on the things that “should” matter. They are interest based. It’s why we often make choices that other people wouldn’t.

And we often feel worse because we KNOW, objectively, that it seems like a less responsible choice.

Hyperfocusing on researching obscure history at 3 am instead of getting to sleep early. Learning a skill I would later abandon instead of polishing the resume.

Most of all, I struggle with committing to things, even if I enjoy them. But if they aren’t interesting, engaging, or challenging enough, they get ditched. Often just before I could get good at them.

So I found myself with no choice but to focus on the things I was ALREADY good at.

Not the things I WISHED I could do. The things I actually could do.

Writing. Performing. Event organizing. Sports.

All things that sound like “flakey” interests but actually work for me long-term.

I’ve been writing professionally and organizing for over 15 years; performing and training in sports for 25. The longevity happened because I didn’t hate what I was doing and bail.

Seen this way, all my pesky ADHD “flaws” can actually become skills.

Hyperfocus isn’t a liability if I use it to write 2 articles in an hour.

Fast-moving interest isn’t a flaw if I stop pretending I should care about things that bore me to death.

I’m still not perfect at this. I still sometimes wish I had the type of brain that was good at “valuable” skills like math, engineering, investing, science, or other “high paying” fields.

Maybe I should start focusing on my strengths instead of beating myself up over my weaknesses. Building things that matter, that are interesting, that light me up. Mastering the skills I’ve had since I was a kid and making them my life.

As I do that, I find I can’t help but start to accept myself. Because I’m finally being who I was meant to be all along.

4. I build community

I’m not a natural joiner.

“They hate me, mom,” I said after my first day in 1st grade. The teacher disputed this. I felt it.

Probably RSD, but there’s no disputing that I was slightly too much for whatever room I was in.

Whenever I tried to engage, my classmates found me annoying. I used movie quotes or pretended I had the same experiences they did to seem “cool” and relatable. It didn’t work.

The few friends I had ditched me when better ones came around, usually in embarrassing ways. Like the girl in 2nd grade who wanted another girl in our talent show routine so intentionally didn’t tell me they had changed the choreography…until we were on stage and I was humiliated.

Teenage me isolated. Twenty-something me threw myself at people I admired, not realizing that they didn’t like me as much as I liked them.

That scarred me for a while.

But lately I’ve come to realize that community is a way to build self esteem. Engaging with others, even if they are neurotypical, gets us out of our own heads.

It helps to find community with people you have something in common with, whether that’s special interests or neurodivergence (or both!). Then you already have a shared thing to bond over.

Research has suggested that ADHDers tend to feel more lonely than neurotypicals. We do find social situations overwhelming sometimes, or struggle to pick up on social cues.

Bonding with people who share your interests helps cut through that. Especially if it’s something activity-based.

I love skating outside in the winter because I can chat with my “rink friends”. We share something (ice skating) and can participate in it together, so I’m not thinking about eye contact or if I’m talking too much. We’re too focused on the actual skating to think about social mores.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying my gym friends, mostly retirees. We take classes together, we sweat, we chat.

When we get feedback from people, we find out we aren’t as strange or as unloveable as we thought. And that obviously makes us feel good. We also get valuable “practice” interacting with others.

Find people who you can “unmask” around. The ones you can be yourself with, who you don’t find yourself auditing your natural tendencies around. They exist.

And you don’t need a lot of them either. One or two is enough.

I can count the true friends I have on one hand, but I also know they are there for me. But I also have to be there for them.

Friendship is reciprocal. Finding ways to help friends can help strengthen the bond and also, let’s face it, feels good.

The more we can do for others (without getting taken advantage of, of course), the better we feel about ourselves.

Sometimes, all we need to do to feel better is to get out of our own heads and focus on how we can help others.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me because I couldn’t maintain a wide social circle. I didn’t really need to invite all the kids in my class to my 9th birthday (although I’m sure they enjoyed the pony). I didn’t need to go out to social mixers in my 20s to “make friends”. I didn’t need to chase approval from those who were never going to give it to me.

I needed depth, not breadth. And the people who could match that showed me I wasn’t alone in needing it.

5. I realize barriers are freedom and give myself compassion when I overdo it

Over the last few months, I’ve been running an experiment.

What happens if I eat whatever I want?

Spoiler: it didn’t go well. I didn’t gain too much weight, but my focus suffered. My energy levels plummeted. I was more depressed, more anxious, less confident.

Turns out, discipline is a secret to freedom. And eating ice cream and chocolate every day DOES make me feel worse.

I just needed to figure that out myself.

ADHDers are allergic to discipline. We think it’s something we’re bad at, so we give up.

But the answer is more complicated. We need to give ourselves boundaries, but when we cross them, we need to practice self-compassion.

Not the worksheets version. Not the “write yourself a love letter” version.

The version where I notice I’ve been running on junk food and overpriced cappuccinos for a month and say, “OK, that explains it.”

Then, instead of judging myself, I’m practicing getting curious instead.

What do I actually need right now?

For me, it was realizing that I was eating to give myself something to look forward to…but that was actually pushing that future further away. I was hampering my intellectual capabilities. I was limiting my opportunities. I was putting my body through the wringer.

Sure, I was exercising, but I wasn’t going to be healthy if I was pouring sugar and caffeine on top.

I realized I needed more regulation. More accountability (ie, having my mom accompany me places so I didn’t seek solace in the arms of Ben and Jerry). More care for myself.

Compassion, for me, is a useful exercise. What happened, what state was I in, what do I need to change?

Then I don’t wallow or hate myself (for too long, at least).

I change.

There’s a difference between “I was struggling” and “I’m going to keep struggling.”

I realize I might go back, but I can always choose to go forward again. It’s my choice.

None of this is about giving up.

Sometimes we do need to change. We do need to improve. We do need to stop snapping at people who interrupt our work — that one’s mine, specifically.

But “I need to do better” and “I am fundamentally broken” are not the same sentence. Even though we’ve been running them together our whole lives.

Good enough, repeated, builds something real.

So does proving to myself I can do hard things, one kept promise at a time.

So does working with my brain instead of fighting it.

So does the right two people instead of a crowd of acquaintances.

So does catching myself before I spiral into self-punishment and asking what I actually need.

None of it requires “loving myself” first. It requires showing up for myself the same way I’d show up for someone I care about.

You can hold yourself to high standards and still not hate yourself. Both are possible. They’re not even in conflict.

The self-acceptance is what makes the standards stick.

Self-acceptance isn’t just possible — it’s necessary. And it’s not as out of reach as you may think. It evolves and grows. Just like we do.

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A week ago, I cut my hair off.

But it wasn’t just about the hair. It was about me giving myself permission to change, to become a different version of myself. To not be tied to a past I may never get back to.

For most of my life, I outsourced my decisions — to parents, to coaches, to strangers on the internet. I even needed permission from myself.

To do something different. To make a new decision. To move forward.

It’s weird, because until the pandemic years of 2020, I didn’t think about myself much except to wonder what was wrong with me.

A re-diagnosis of ADHD helped me contextualize why I always felt so weird, so broken, so wrong. But it didn’t explain why I was so afraid of everything.

I grew up with various irrational fears —pool drains, sharp corners, my mind breaking.

It took years of writing online to realize I was gradually eroding my need for permission. Every time I published, I was saying: what I have to say matters. And I found that I wasn’t alone.

One of my favorite movies is Strictly Ballroom.

A champion ballroom dancer breaks the rules — dances his own steps instead of the sanctioned ones. It costs him his title. His coaches want the old steps back. He refuses. He becomes untouchable in the dance world.

A woman at his studio, sidelined for not being good enough, asks him to dance with her. He laughs at her. She talks him into it anyway.

“A life lived in fear is a life half-lived,” she tells him.

I watched that movie dozens of times over the years and never let it sink in. Being true to yourself. Not letting fear run your life. Taking risks.

All things I admired and cheered for but struggled to do myself.

So now I find myself confronting my fears, and realizing how much they’d been steering me the whole time.

I’m both afraid of change and desperate for it.

And the only way I’ve ever found to force it is through drastic bodily transformation — for better or worse.

I thought the only way to start again was to totally destroy myself.

Because my attempts to change my life had, all along, been self-destructive.

The binge eating. The overthinking. The chasing after the next shiny thing that promised to fix everything — the guy, the job, the body.

No matter what I got, it was never enough. I was still struggling.

It was never about the haircut. It was realizing I’d had the power to change all along, and finally choosing to.

Before this most recent cut, I asked my mom what she thought.

“Do whatever you want,” she said.

But I could see disappointment. That I was finally going to do it— cut my hair short, after years of denying myself.

I’m not trying to say my mom was controlling. She wanted what was best for me. She thought I was intentionally trying to destroy myself, the way I’d done so many times before.

Maybe I was. But maybe it wasn’t me I was destroying. It was the me I thought I had to be.

My hair has been part of my athlete identity since I was thirteen.

After a few regrettable years — a Dorothy Hamill bowl cut, then a spiky pixie — I grew it out. I was newly slim. I’d lost thirty pounds in six months after cutting foods I was sensitive to from my diet.

I was suddenly slim and pretty. It didn’t fully sink in. Mentally, I still felt like that chubby kid with the hair that made her look like a middle-aged mom.

Over the years I tried other experiments. A bob in 2008 — “the year of the bob.” A short side-part pixie that never looked right because I kept trying to force a part that didn’t want to happen. A sassy shoulder-length cut.

But it was never enough. Just when I got settled into a cut, the urge to take the rest of it off would start again.

“You look so much nicer with long hair,” a coach told me once in my teens.

“You have beautiful hair, you shouldn’t cut it off,” other adults said, whenever I brought it up — as if having nice hair came with an obligation to the rest of the population to keep it that way.

It made me resentful of skating, and later, acting.

Even as they struggled to coach my fine yet abundant hair into curls, or an updo, or whatever it was supposed to be, hairdressers on sets would tell me, “we like long hair, because we can shape it into what we need.”

So even when I wasn’t skating as much, acting gave me another reason to keep the hair. To keep the look. Even if I hated it.

It wasn’t just the style that bothered me. It was the feel.

My ADHD comes with sensory sensitivities. Always has.

My sleeve got wet once at Niagara Falls and I couldn’t function until I found an overpriced sweatshirt to change into. The seams of my skating tights drove me crazy every time they shifted inside my boot. And hair against my neck — even a little — felt oppressive.

So even when it was long, I kept it pulled back, always.

“What’s the point of keeping it long if you always have it up?” my hairdresser asked. That’s what finally pushed me to cut it. Not that it took much pushing.

I’d been told my long hair was one of my best features. Like my favorite Little Women character Jo March, I cut most of it off. Not for money. For freedom.

I understand Britney Spears shaving her head now — that desperate need to force a break from the self everyone else had built for you.

I think every haircut I’ve ever gotten has been a version of the same impulse: using my body to say what I couldn’t say out loud.

I’m not her anymore.

The figure skater. The athlete. The overachiever.

None of them happened because I tried harder. They happened when I stopped trying to be so controlled. So fearful. So afraid of changing.

I had stories about why I couldn’t change it, validated by others: that cutting it short would make it more annoying when I was skating, whipping into my eyes; that I had a “fat face” that a short cut made look worse; that I would look like a boy.

Underneath all of it was fear. Fear of change. I'd cut it short before, and nothing changed — because I wasn't ready to change. This time, I broke through. I found myself getting bolder.

Choosing brighter clothes instead of my usual drab black or brown. Smiling more. Wearing fun hair-bands and my favorite oversized glasses again.

I used to want people to not notice me — a failed, washed-up version of my former self. Now I want them to see the new one.

For seven years, I’ve been quietly trying to go back. Back to who I was before.

Back to the 139-pound neurotic athlete who trained obsessively yet was never quite good enough.

I’d get frustrated every time I couldn’t get there, like something in me was broken for not being able to return.

I may never be that person again. And that’s okay.

What matters is that I’m happy, healthy, and doing work that matters.

Improving my diet not to punish myself, but to feel better. Exercising not to “burn calories” but to feel better moving my body. Writing and coaching because it’s how I help others (and, inadvertently, myself).

And letting skating and sports slot in where it will — not making them the reason I’m alive.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try to improve myself. What it does mean is I’m not going to hate myself in the progress.

A life lived in fear is a life half-lived. It just took a haircut to realize it.

Of all the ADHD traits we learn about after diagnosis, masking is the one that trips people up the most.

Most of us think we know what it looks like.

Hiding stims in a meeting. Rehearsing small talk before a party. Performing “fine” at work while unraveling underneath. The version that happens in front of other people.

But masking doesn’t always need an audience.

I skated for over two decades. I acted, badly, for a few more. I got very good at becoming whatever a room needed — the athlete, the trainer, the writer, the ambassador.

I could slip into a persona so easily I stopped noticing I was doing it.

I used to tell a fellow ADHD creator I didn’t really mask. I was too blunt, too honest, too willing to say the true thing out loud.

He laughed. “That doesn’t mean you don’t mask,” he said. “It doesn’t always involve other people.”

He was right. And once I started looking, I found it everywhere — in rooms with nobody in them.

We chase the system that will finally fix us.

We find the productivity method. We absorb it completely, certain this is the one. Pomodoro, deep work, the 5am wake-up, the planner system, the app that blocks our phone.

We give it everything we’ve got — for three days, maybe three weeks. Then we quietly stop.

The tools aren’t the problem. They work, if we could just stick with one long enough to let it work. Our brains lose interest before that ever happens.

But here’s the part that’s actually masking: believing that if we just found the right system and forced ourselves to use it consistently, we’d finally think and function like everyone else around us.

It doesn’t work that way. We don’t need one perfect system we ride forever. We need permission to cycle through what works right now, and let it change like the weather when it stops being useful.

We borrow other people’s lives because we’re not sure we trust our own.

This one runs deeper, and it started early for most of us.

I spent my childhood watching biographies, trying to reverse-engineer other people’s success into a blueprint I could copy.

I read the entire Little House on the Prairie series before first grade and started writing stories that were basically fan fiction with different names. Same syntax. Same rhythm. Not mine.

On the ice, I’d skate to other competitors’ programs, trying to become them instead of honing my own style.

My coach once told me to picture myself as an Olympic medalist before I stepped on the ice. I did. I won.

It also taught me that becoming someone else was a viable strategy for getting through my own life.

That instinct doesn’t disappear with age.

A few months ago, a writer I admired ran a workshop that cracked something open in me.

THIS is what I’ve been missing, I thought.

Suddenly, my own writing started sounding more like his. Short, punchy sentences. Brazen. Harsh.

I had inadvertently started copying him —his worldview, his style, his business strategies.

I couldn’t tell anymore what I actually believed versus what I wanted to believe, because believing it had worked out so well for him.

We do this because we were never handed a strong sense of self to begin with.

If every version of you keeps shifting — and half of it is made of other people — how do you ever build one that’s actually yours?

Sometimes we can’t copy the person directly, so we buy our way toward being them instead.

The viral beauty product of the moment because we think it will help us achieve the “look” that other people carry off so effortlessly.

The running shoes we bought because we saw an Instagram reel once and thought it would make us that disciplined.

The paddleboard sitting in a shed, used twice, bought because a friend looked disciplined and tan and happy in her sunglasses, and some part of us thought the board came with the same qualities attached.

It didn’t. It never does. The gear doesn’t make you the person.

It just makes you feel closer to them…until you realize you bought the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

The fix isn’t complicated, even if it’s uncomfortable: ask what you actually want before you spend the time or the money.

Do you want to do the thing — or do you want to be the kind of person who does the thing?

Those are two different questions, and only one of them is worth acting on.

We hide what we actually like before anyone gets the chance to judge it.

I shut off a show the second I heard my mom’s footsteps and pretended to be listening to a focus playlist instead. Not because the show was shameful.

Because I’d learned, over and over, that the things I got excited about — musicals, Pokémon, cults — seemed weird. Or embarrassing. Or too much.

So we get quiet about it. We keep our interests to ourselves because it’s safer than defending them.

This is masking too, and it’s a lonely version of it.

Not pretending to be neurotypical — pretending we don’t like what we like.

The fix isn’t forcing ourselves to announce every interest to a room that hasn’t earned it.

It’s finding the smaller room — a Reddit thread, a group chat, one person — where we don’t have to defend the thing we love before we’re allowed to enjoy it.

We perform competence instead of admitting we’re drowning.

The most dangerous version of masking isn’t hiding who we are. It’s hiding how much trouble we’re actually in.

There was a website that needed rebuilding. I said I’d get to it. I meant it every time.

Then I’d sit down, get overwhelmed, and find something else to do instead — not because I didn’t care, but because admitting I was stuck meant admitting I needed help, and that felt worse than the guilt of another missed deadline.

We get good at this because sometimes it works.

Standing next to journalists twice our age at a press conference, I learned to project confidence I didn’t really feel. That skill saves us in rooms where hesitation would cost us.

But the same instinct that gets us through those situations is the one that keeps us from raising our hand when we’re actually in over our heads.

Asking for help feels like confirming what we’re afraid people already suspect about us. So we don’t ask.

We keep performing “I’ve got this” until the performance becomes the trap — and the less we ask, the more buried we get.

We end up shoveling dirt on our own coffin while telling everyone watching that we’re just fine down here.

Now, I change how I do things.

If I need help, I ask for it. If I can't take on something else, I don't do it. I've learned to get out of things I can't commit to by saying, 'Sorry, I can't right now.

The through-line

None of us started with a strong sense of self.

So we built one out of borrowed parts — systems that promised to fix us, someone else’s voice instead of our own, gear collecting dust in a closet, interests we never said out loud, and a performance of competence covering for the moments we actually needed a hand.

None of it was ever ours to begin with. That’s why none of it worked.

The way out isn’t a bigger system or a better performance. It’s one question, asked in the moment it actually matters: is this coming from me, or from someone else?

That’s the whole unmask. Not a transformation. Just one honest beat, repeated, where we choose ourselves over the performance.

Even when it’s awkward. Even when it’s weird. Even when we’re still figuring out who we are underneath it.

Most of us still catch ourselves doing this. I still do.

The difference now is I notice it — and I do the smaller, truer thing instead. Not because I'm suddenly a different person.

Because as I make choices, I figure out what actually works for me.

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Why I’m Doing This

For most of my life, I’ve struggled with my weight.

Even when I was training full time as a dual sport athlete, I struggled with binge eating. I felt ashamed when I gained weight in the off season. Came back and had to “train it off.”

I lost weight, felt good, messed up again.

Diets didn’t help. I did the Fat Flush. Keto. Everything you can imagine.

It just made me feel deprived and I’d find myself at the bakery, buying croissants that I’d eat later, silently hating myself.

Participating in an image-focused sport (figure skating) gave me a mild sense of body dysphoria. Even when I was at my fittest 40 pounds ago, I thought I was fat.

That my (flat) stomach pooched too much.

That my (muscular) legs were “gross” because I didn’t have a thigh gap.

That my (trim) arms were “too doughy” because I didn’t have visible sculpted muscles like the Olympians I knew.

In 2023, I hit my lowest point. I got injured, and could barely walk for 2 weeks. Miserable, in pain, and feeling sorry for myself, I turned to my best friend.

Food.

I gained 10 pounds. 20 pounds. Before I knew it, it was 3 years later and I was 30 pounds heavier than I used to be.

I’d lost that same amount in 2002, after I found out I had food sensitivities. I was 12. I transformed my body and my life. My skating (and my ADHD-induced inattentiveness) improved. So I knew I could do it.

I just needed the right framework.

75 Hard appealed to me because of its extremity and lack of compromise. It is called a “transformative mental toughness program” after all.

I’m a former Crossfit athlete and trainer. A part of me loves that hard-core vibe. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do hard things.

I thought by being “extreme” I could hack my brain. After all, it had worked when I was a kid.

But I also realized that it had the possibility of making me feel worse about myself if I messed up. I didn’t need that at this point.

So I kept wobbling. Stayed “cold turkey” off sugar, dairy, gluten, all my favorite treats...and found myself back at the coffee shop after a few days.

I lost a few pounds, then gained them back. Despite hours of exercise a day, I was getting nowhere.

I needed something that would hold me accountable without feeling oppressive. Something that would help me stick to a plan without kicking me back to step one, as 75 Hard does if you miss one of the requirements.

But what I took away was the accountability piece. The support. Having someone there to say, no you can’t have that brownie sundae right now (true story — I once cried in a Cracker Barrel because I couldn’t eat the aforementioned dessert).

So recently I decided I needed to do something different. Something that blended structure with support. Something that showed me I was stronger than I thought, but that didn’t punish me if I messed up.

This is what I came up with. A challenge, based on 75 Hard, but for neurodivergents, sensitive folks, and anyone who felt like they would go insane if they tried 75 Hard.

Why This Works Better Than 75 Hard for Neurodivergents

ADHD, autism, AuDHD…we process “challenges” differently than most.

Shame over messing up and going back to Day 1 can feel demoralizing — and make us think, “why even bother, I’ll mess it up anyway.”

And our fear of losing autonomy can make us rebel against “rules” or “challenges.” They make us feel hemmed in, not empowered, even if we were the ones who wanted to do them in the first place.

Every challenge or diet I’ve ever tried has ended badly. I messed up, so I gave up.

So I created my own challenge — built to create accountability without shame, self-esteem through progressive change, not a total overhaul.

I firmly believe self-esteem is a record, not a feeling. It’s created by what we do, not what we think. And I intend to prove it.

The Return Rule still holds: miss a day, come back today — not Day 1.

Shame doesn’t build a record. Showing back up does.

The best part is there’s still autonomy. YOU choose what exercise looks like for you. YOU choose the eating plan you think you can manage, as long as it’s actually challenging (so no, this is not a chance to bust out your “ice cream only” diet). YOU choose who will be there for you.

PS — if you struggle with eating disorders, this may not be for you. Always consult with a doctor before starting a diet or exercise regimen.

The Five Pillars I’m Working With

This isn’t random. It’s built on the same five pillars I’m developing into a formal coaching program — I’m just running them on myself first, before I ever hand them to a client.

When I say "the story is the cage," I mean the narrative you've built about who you are and what you're capable of — the "I'm just someone who can't stick to things" line running in the background. That story isn't neutral. It's the cage. Half of this challenge is catching it in real time, instead of just living inside it.

Two Daily Actions. That’s It.

Not five daily decisions.

I already know that’s too many for me — probably too many for you too. Two — plus a few things I set once and hold, and one thing I only revisit three times in 60 days.

1. Move — once a day One real session. Not two.

Skate, spin, walk, lift, roller skate — I’m picking from a menu, not locking myself into the same thing every day. No movement, no momentum.

One real session a day beats two half-hearted ones.

2. Log — once a day This is where the whole thing lives. One entry, one motion, covering everything:

• Did I hold today’s nutrition rule? (yes/no)

• Did I move?

• One line: a story I caught today, or a line from what I read

Ten minutes, same window every time — reading and catching the story happen right inside the log, not as separate tasks fighting for my attention. That’s the whole record for the day. Nothing else to track.

What I Set Once and Hold

Nutrition & Energy — moderation is how edges disappear One structural rule, set on Day 1, held for all 60 days. Mine’s low-carb — it’s what’s worked for my focus and energy before, and it’s not up for renegotiation every morning. Water’s fixed too — 64 oz a day, no debate, no calculating. Bump it up if you’re very active or it’s hot out. Otherwise, that’s the number. After Day 1 this isn’t a decision anymore. It’s just true or not true, and the log captures which.

Reading — feeds the Mindset pillar I’m keeping this from 75 Hard. Ten minutes, inside the daily log window, of non-fiction reading. Something that makes me better rather than just mildly entertained.

Career & Life Direction — Not Daily. Three Times, On Purpose.

This pillar never belonged in the daily grind — it needs depth, not repetition.

I found that out the hard way with Dan Koe’s “how to change your life in one day” exercise.

It wasn’t a daily habit that shifted things for me. It was sitting still long enough to actually confront where my patterns were headed.

So I built in three future-cast checkpoints:

• Day 1 — Cast ahead 5 years, then 10. If today’s pattern just kept compounding, untouched, where does it actually land me? Thinking in detail, from the moment I wake up, to what I’m doing, to how I’m feeling. (I’m writing it down before I start.)

• Day 30 — Revisit the cast. What’s actually different. What’s still on autopilot.

• Day 60 — Cast ahead again, from where I actually am now. Compare it to Day 1.

This only works because it’s rare and demands real, uninterrupted thought.

Built-In Accountability — Non-Negotiable, Not Optional

I’m picking one before Day 1, and so should you:

• A body-double partner also running their own daily record

• A public tracker — Substack Note, group chat — visible to at least one other person

• A coach or accountability partner with permission to ask “did you do it” and expect a real answer

My partner is going to be my mom, who is doing this with me.

Solo tracking is too easy to quietly edit in your own head — I know, because I’ve done it.

The Arc — 60 Days, Five Phases

I know myself well enough to know this won’t feel the same on Day 48 as it does on Day 1. So I’m not pretending it will.

1. Days 1–12: The Record Starts — I just need to prove to myself I can keep it. No perfection required.

2. Days 13–24: The Story Fights Back — this is where “I can’t sustain this” shows up loudest. I expect it. I’m not quitting when it does.

3. Days 25–36: The Body Catches Up — movement and the nutrition rule stop feeling like effort and start feeling like just what I do.

4. Days 37–48: The Direction Clarifies — the gap between my Day 1 and Day 30 future-casts starts showing up in the actual decisions I’m making.

5. Days 49–60: The Record Speaks for Itself — less negotiating with myself, more just doing it.

Join me if you’d like

Starting July 10, I’m posting a check-in at the end of every phase — every 12 days or so, not daily.

Real updates, not a highlight reel.

In between, I’ll drop the small stuff into Notes.

If you want to run it alongside me, drop a comment: “I’m in.”

Pick your movement menu, pick your one non-negotiable rule, pick who’s holding you accountable — and start the same day I do.

If this isn’t for you right now, no hard feelings. You can unsubscribe from just this section (called “60 Real”) in your subscription settings if you’d like.

I will continue my regularly (unscheduled, somewhat random) NYAA posts during this process.

And I’ll be back in 12 days with the first real update.

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In 2023, I started writing on Medium.com.

By 2024, I was going viral. Making thousands of dollars a month doing it.

“I didn’t even know that was possible,” an older friend replied when I told her. I didn’t either.

What no one realizes is how long it took me to start.

Years. At least three. Maybe more.

I read everyone else’s work first. I studied what they did right.

I told myself I needed a plan — the right angle, the right strategy, enough certainty before I put my work out there.

I had been a working journalist for nearly 15 years at that point. Yet the thought of writing about myself scared me.

So I “planned”. I ran my brain in circles while other people wrote the pieces I could have written.

I still wonder what would’ve happened if I’d started sooner.

If I hadn’t played it safe with anodyne self-help content for a year and gone straight to where the real vulnerability lived — my recent ADHD diagnosis, the thing I was scared to talk about.

I wish I hadn’t spent so much of that time in my head — researching, thinking, preparing instead of doing. I might have figured out my path sooner. I might have built real confidence in myself along the way.

Instead, I stayed paralyzed by fear and the need for information.

I’ll never get those years back. But I learned something from losing them.

Here’s something you probably don’t want to hear: you don’t need more information.

You don’t need to “think about it.” You don’t need to ask AI about it. You don’t need to ask everyone you know what they’d do in your situation.

You need to take action. Imperfectly. Treat it like an experiment instead of a final project.

At one time, knowledge was power. Sir Francis Bacon said it — back in the late 1500s, when they didn’t have computers and barely had books. Knowing how the world worked could keep you alive. Information was the advantage.

Now it’s the trap.

As Tim Denning has pointed out:

Access to information used to be an advantage. Information was a scarce resource, then it became a commodity. Now, more information does more harm than good.

It’s not that the information itself is the problem — though some of it is straight-up mis-and-disinformation.

It’s the volume.

Scroll Substack for five minutes. Open Instagram. Ask ChatGPT or Claude anything and watch it hand you an answer you didn’t have to work for.

We’re drowning in a firehose of news, hot takes, AI slop, and — occasionally — something real. Somewhere in the flood, most of us stopped creating and started only consuming.

Information can feel powerful for a reason — it gives your brain almost the same dopamine charge as actually DOING the thing. That’s why infotainment is its own industry now.

People consume information to be entertained by it. To pass the time. To feel productive while they actually procrastinate.

What they rarely do is actually implement that information. Even while they tell themselves they will.

There’s more than one way to do something —you just have to figure out what works.

I was 18, heading to a competition in New York City, squeezing in one last practice. Overthinking my axel — usually the easiest jump in my program, the one I did in my sleep.

That day, I swooped around, jumped — and popped it. Bailed in the middle of the air.

I tried again. Failed again. Tried again. Failed again. On and on.

Olympic champions and skating legends Oleg and Ludmila Protopopov were on the other side of the rink. Unlike most coaches, they gave a lot of free advice.

Seeing my frustration, Mr. Protopopov skated over.

“Try it like this,” he said.

He showed me a new setup. Walked me through it once. Told me to go.

I did. I landed it.

If I’d stood there thinking about the axel instead of attempting it, he’d have had nothing to correct. I needed to actually try the thing and risk falling.

I skated back over, brain scrambled but relieved.

Then he said something that undid that relief.

“There are 10 different ways to do an axel,” he told me, in his thick Russian accent. “If one way doesn’t work, try another.”

I thanked him. But secretly, I felt even worse.

I was about to compete. He’d just changed jump technique I’d had for five years.

Who does that?

I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. Not then.

It took me a long time to get it: there is no ONE right way.

It’s like jumping under spotlights. Every time you do it, it feels different. Proprioception suffers. You kind of have to throw yourself into the air and hope your muscle memory and luck carries you through.

There’s no secret, no answer, no piece of information that’s going to magically make you successful.

The only secret is taking action — even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even if you’re afraid. Even if you have no idea what’ll happen.

That’s how we learn.

Most of all, we have to get comfortable with uncertainty.

Too many of us — especially us neurodivergents — want a step-by-step guide before we’ll move. We want our hands held.

That’s normal. I get it, because that was me for at least 20 years.

But the only way to do things is to…actually do things.

Not read about doing them. Not watch someone else do them. Actually do them yourself.

My first serious coach was Russian too. When he came to the US, he couldn’t understand why skaters took so many lessons.

He could’ve cashed in on that. Plenty of American coaches did — milking parents for lesson money, babysitting unmotivated kids who showed up for an hour and left exactly as unskilled as they arrived.

He did the opposite. He pushed us to practice more than we took lessons.

“For every one-hour lesson, you should practice at least five hours,” he told me.

Five hours of doing for every hour of being told what to do.

In America, that was revolutionary. In Russia and plenty of other countries, that was just how you did things.

Your coaches didn’t hold your hand. They gave you the knowledge and expected you to go implement it yourself.

He was onto something. He knew it was easier for skaters to listen to him, to be supervised, to be told what to do.

But he also knew that’s not how you get better.

You get better by implementing what you learned — figuring it out, practicing until it’s muscle memory. Only then are you ready to learn more.

He was right. It took me 20 years to realize it.

Here’s how to take action imperfectly and differently.

Try something you’ve done a thousand times — and do it differently.

Do that jump differently. Take a different route home. Write in a style you don’t normally use.

Then deprive yourself on purpose. Instead of reading more, read less. Be selective about what you let in. Unsubscribe from the stuff you just keep deleting.

Build time into your day with no input at all. Walk. Ride a bike. Sit in your room and stare at a wall. Let your brain relax.

I spent three years researching how to write before I wrote anything. I spent 15 minutes failing an axel before someone showed me a way to adjust.

You don’t need to know exactly what you’re doing before you do it. You need to do it badly enough that someone — even just future you — can see what to fix.

Stop reading. Stop asking. Stop researching the perfect entry point.

Jump. Pop it if you have to. Try it a different way. Then jump again.

I used to think I needed to make big changes to stop hating myself.

I was successful on paper — writing career, a book at 21, competitions, a business. And I was still miserable.

It wasn’t just depression, though that’s a common ADHD comorbidity. It was that I wasn’t living in a way that made my brain feel safe or regulated.

Either overstimulated and chasing dopamine just to stay afloat, or understimulated and ready to throw myself into the lake to feel something.

Neither was working.

What I’ve learned since my re-diagnosis at 31 is that we don’t need a complete overhaul. We need the right things — consistently.

These are the five that actually moved the needle. None of them cost anything. None of them required a new system or a better planner.

They just required me to finally pay attention to what my brain actually needed.

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1. Taking care of my body — not just for appearances

When I was 29, I was competing in figure skating and speed skating, medaling in both, and coaching CrossFit.

I still thought I was fat.

I also had a binge eating issue — something I later learned is common in ADHDers. My diet at home was bland and predictable because sameness felt safe.

But I’d seek excitement with chocolate truffles, cookies, and once, a tiny flourless chocolate cake I ate in my bathroom.

Then I’d train it off. Until I couldn’t.

I got injured in 2023 and couldn’t walk for two weeks. I medicated with late-night Netflix and chip binges. I gained 5 pounds, then 15, then 25.

I’m still losing it.

What changed wasn’t a diet plan. It was understanding that food and movement aren’t about appearances — they’re about how our brains function.

Dr. John Ratey and Dr. Ned Hallowell consider healthy diet and daily exercise to be possible, powerful alternatives to ADHD medication. I know that firsthand.

When I was 11 and first got diagnosed, I removed foods I was sensitive to (dairy, gluten) and lost 30 pounds. My focus rebounded so completely that I forgot I had ADHD.

That didn’t last.

I went back to junk food, days without exercise, and zero attention to sugar. Or I was completely off sugar, exercising for hours, and tracking everything obsessively.

All or nothing. As usual.

What actually helped was the middle — balanced meals, cutting most processed food and sugar, moving every day in ways I don’t hate. A different workout each day. Classes when I need accountability. Music or audiobooks when I’m solo.

Sleep belongs here too. I spent years semi-nocturnal and prided myself on it. Last year, I finally got on a schedule.

In bed by midnight, up between 8 and 9. I’ve never felt better.

We need more sleep than we think — not less. We already struggle with executive function. We can’t afford to lose more to exhaustion.

Diet, exercise, and sleep aren’t a luxury. They are infrastructure.

2. I accepted that my productivity will never look neurotypical — and stopped apologizing for it

If anyone watched me write one of these pieces, they’d be surprised it gets done at all.

I open the tab. Start writing. End up on YouTube watching a video about roller coaster disasters. Remember an email I never answered. Get lost in the inbox. Back to writing.

Rinse, repeat.

I used to be embarrassed by this. I’d watch productivity guys talk about deep work and three-hour focus blocks and feel like I was failing.

Then I realized: neurodivergent brains aren’t built to work linearly. We make connections in unorthodox ways — and that’s actually where the good stuff comes from. It was when I wandered into another tab that I found the idea for this piece.

Forcing it doesn’t work. Stepping away does.

My best ideas have come in yoga class, roller skating outside at night, lying in bed with the cat.

I’ve also learned to trust my changes in direction.

I’d been working on a different article for a week before this one practically wrote itself — because I was more interested in it.

ADHD brains are powered by interest, not importance.

So I follow mine, even when my inner self-critic rolls her eyes at my latest task switch.

Now I take real breaks. Follow my curiosity without guilt. And choose one thing per day — the task taking up the most space in my head.

If I do that one thing, it’s a win. If not, it rolls to tomorrow.

No elaborate system. Just me, my interests, my random afternoon breaks, and one daily priority.

3. I stopped forcing myself to do things I genuinely don’t want to do

“No” was my favorite word growing up.

I was accused of being obstinate. Diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder alongside my first ADHD diagnosis.

I forgot both, and spent years wondering what was wrong with me.

Spoiler: not much. I just had an unacknowledged neurodivergent brain, and needed to do things differently.

Demand avoidance is a real part of the ADHD experience — a protective mechanism where we resist demands to preserve what little autonomy we feel we have.

When my mom asked me to clean the living room while I was finally, actually focused on my Nancy Drew book at age 8, shouting NO from my bedroom felt completely reasonable.

The irony is that as defiant as I was at home, I was a people pleaser everywhere else.

I said yes to things I didn’t want to do because I wanted people to like me. I went to networking mixers in my 20s even though I hated them. I just kept pushing through.

It never worked. I just burned out once a year.

(As for the networking: I spent most of it standing in a corner, stuffing cheese into my mouth to ease my discomfort.)

The real skill was learning to tell the difference between not wanting to do something because it’s hard, and not wanting to do it because it’s genuinely wrong for you right now.

Those are not the same thing. We just don’t always trust ourselves to know which is which.

I’m still figuring it out. But I’ve started asking one question before committing to anything: Do I actually want this, or do I think I should want it?

The resistance usually knows before I do. So I listen.

4. I started making small commitments — and keeping them

This past winter, I promised myself I’d go to the gym at least three times a week.

Then a 7-degree morning rolled around. Snowing. Dark. My cat meowing, hey, don’t leave.

I went anyway. Bundled up, threw my backpack on, trudged the two blocks through the snow. Did the workout.

And felt a flush of pride I hadn’t expected.

That small moment mattered more than I thought it would. It showed me I could commit to something and follow through.

Because for years, I did the opposite.

Said I’d write the article by the deadline and ended up begging for more time. Told myself I’d do two run-throughs in practice and barely did one. Promised I’d clean the room. Got overwhelmed. Did nothing.

The commitments were too big. I needed to make them small enough that there was no way to avoid them.

Self-esteem isn’t something you think your way into. It’s not affirmations or finally understanding your patterns.

It’s built from kept promises — small ones, daily.

The gym in the snowstorm. The project you finish even when it’s not perfect. The thing you said you’d do that you actually did.

We struggle with this because we want things fiercely and then lose interest. We get overwhelmed, distracted, bored.

We’ve broken enough promises to ourselves that we’ve stopped trusting ourselves entirely.

The way back isn’t more goals and shame. It’s making the ones we’re already breaking smaller. So small, that it’s impossible NOT to do them.

A full article becomes five minutes of writing with focus music in my earphones. A full workout becomes a few minutes on the rower. A cleaned room becomes organizing one specific tiny part of my space.

I also make my non-negotiables flexible.

It doesn’t matter if I do CrossFit, a spin class, or a 20-mile bike ride. Movement counts. The container stays the same; the contents can change.

Disappoint yourself enough times and it compounds. Keep your word to yourself — even once, even something small — and that compounds too.

5. I stopped researching my ADHD and started living my life

When I got re-diagnosed, the first thing I did was research.

Read all the books. Listened to all the podcasts. Watched all the YouTubes.

Don’t get me wrong — it helped. I’m a journalist. I’ve always loved researching, and it gave me language for experiences I hadn’t been able to name.

But after a year or two, I noticed my understanding of my ADHD was actually holding me back.

I was using it as an excuse for why I couldn’t do certain things. I told myself my ADHD meant I couldn’t work a traditional job. I called it social anxiety to explain why I avoided gatherings — when actually, I’m pretty good with people when I want to be. And when I snapped at my family, I’d blame the ADHD.

“We’re all overwhelmed sometimes,” my mom said. “That’s not an excuse.”

I was annoyed. But she was right.

ADHD is how my brain works. It’s not my identity. I don't consider it a core part of who I am any more than my preference for Mac over PC is a fundamental part of my personality.

When I stopped using it as a justification and started just living, things shifted.

I became more productive when I stopped convincing myself I couldn’t be. Less tired when I stopped telling myself I was running out of spoons. Less forgetful when I stopped treating forgetfulness as a fixed personality trait.

I just got on with things.

That made the biggest difference.

None of this required a complete overhaul.

Small changes, over time, not afraid to switch them up when needed. Paying attention to what actually worked and doing more of that.

We’re tempted to overcomplicate things — a lot of us ADHD brains are intelligent and love to create problems to solve. We think we need to overhaul our entire lives to see results.

We don’t. We need the right small things, done consistently.

That’s it.

If you’re doing all of this and still feel like you’re getting in your own way — not just organizationally, but in terms of what you actually want and why you keep stopping yourself — that’s exactly what I coach.

Learn more here

A version of this post appeared on Medium.

When I was 15, I skated in my first speed skating marathon. I had only been speed skating for two winter seasons, but my coach thought I was ready.

I had never skated a 5k, never mind a 10k, before. But that’s what I’d signed up for.

I skated those 25 laps in the tucked skater position. My back seized. My legs were on fire.

I did the whole marathon on my own, instead of drafting off other skaters.

When I finished, I shakily glided over to my coach. He was ecstatic.

Good job! You didn’t stand up once!

I looked at him. I didn’t know that was an option.

But I’m still glad I didn’t.

Through most of my career, I’d find myself in over my head, doing things that were uncomfortable.

Like the time I rode my bike up Whiteface Mountain (again, my coach was proud I never got off the bike—I just didn’t want to have to walk it up). Or the mini-triathlon I did with a friend without training.

Or the CrossFit Open that I signed up for every year I was a CrossFit coach and dreaded.

At the time, I genuinely didn’t think I’d make it. But I kept working… if for no other reason than to get it over with.

An Olympian friend said he thought of cookies while racing in high-profile meets. I just thought of being finished.

Every time I entered a competition or meet, interviewed an Olympic legend despite social anxiety, or threw myself into challenges like simultaneously directing, producing, and skating in ice shows, I thought I would die. I thought I couldn’t make it. Yet, every time, I did.

I was unwittingly practicing a skill that is an underrated superpower.

That skill is tolerating discomfort. And most people avoid it.

When I chatted with Olympians, one thing that became apparent was that they were comfortable being uncomfortable.

They were willing to train earlier than everyone else, do more reps, or make greater sacrifices.

My first serious coaches, Russian Olympic bronze medalists, modeled this every day.

Oleg had us run laps around the rink parking lot. Larisa skated behind us, tapping our free feet with a skate guard to make our spirals higher.

They exemplified excellence and didn’t tolerate complaining or crying. Anyone who did would be relegated to the penalty box.

This sounds tough, but it worked.

Especially for us spoiled suburban skating princesses.

From them, I learned that one way to predict success was how people handled discomfort.

Successful people tolerated it. Champions learned to welcome it.

I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.

2026 Olympic champion Alysa Liu said this, and it changed my perspective. I used to think struggling was something to suffer through. But what if I could learn to appreciate it?

A few months ago, I climbed two mountains in two days. I was not in the best shape. My legs were extremely sore at the end of day 1.

Yet, I still climbed on day 2.

The pain brought me back to my body. It reminded me that I could do more than I thought.

Most people, though, do the opposite.

They don’t seek out pain. They avoid it.

But if everything stays the same, it stays easy; we don’t learn. We don’t change. We don’t evolve.

Ok, but what if I’m neurodivergent?

I understand, because I have ADHD. I probably have autism, too.

Since I got diagnosed with the former, I kept myself safe. I told myself I needed to conserve energy. I needed to be careful not to overstimulate myself. I needed to be CAREFUL.

I metaphorically wrapped myself in bubble wrap and stored myself on a shelf, safe from any discomfort.

The result? I gained weight, lost interest in my life, and spent a lot of time chasing dopamine (sweets, impulse buys) to give myself something to look forward to.

The thing is, ADHDers actually CRAVE discomfort, in a way.

We want something to challenge us. We want that novelty, interest, and competition to make us feel alive.

We often avoid those things because we can’t motivate ourselves to chase them.

The good news? It gets easier the more you practice.

We don’t have to go after BIG things at first.

We can focus on the little things that hold us back.

Things that are still just as uncomfortable as a hard workout or building a business.

Every day, practice realizing what thing you keep thinking about that you put off because it’s uncomfortable. Then do it.

Start that project. Send that email. Do those loads of laundry.

Small steps are better than nothing.

These days, I actually enjoy discomfort in a weird way.

I’m training myself to.

The other day, I went on a bike ride. It was only supposed to be a few miles. It was near dusk. The bugs were out. It was drizzling.

But I decided I would keep riding. So I did.

20 miles and 2 personal best times later, I came back home, tired but happy.

We can choose discomfort in various little ways and strengthen our tolerance for it, like we would a muscle.

Here’s how I do that:

• Intentionally pushing past my limits — for the last few months, I’ve been doing push-ups on my knees (humbling, since I used to bang them out in CrossFit). Now I do full ones. They are harder, but I know I won’t get stronger unless I challenge myself.

• Putting myself in uncomfortable situations — When I went out on the rail trail the other day, the wind was whipping. It threatened to rain. I knew I might get caught in a storm, but I decided to pedal anyway—through the wind. I got home just in time. The only way to build that discomfort muscle is to practice.

• Remembering I’m more capable than I think — I used to stop just when my training got interesting. “You have to push harder,” my CrossFit trainer once said. At the time, I got offended. Now, I realize she was right. I usually stopped at 75% effort. Now, I push beyond. I tell myself, “Just a few more seconds,” and surprise myself.

Let’s face it, most of us engineer our lives to be comfortable. Our snacks, our Netflix, our self-care.

What we should actually be doing is practicing discomfort.

Because comfortable doesn’t make you feel alive — discomfort does.

I’ve had a shameful addiction for the past several years. It took my time, money, and self-worth. And you can buy it pretty much everywhere.

I’m talking about coffee. Specifically, espresso drinks like lattes and lately, cappuchinos.

And since I first discovered them a few years ago, I’ve been unable to escape their rich, creamy grip.

Some of my earliest memories are of stealing sips of coffee from my dad’s giant coffee mug (he’s also a coffee aficionado).

It wasn’t the coffee I liked; it was the sweetness, the creaminess. The half-and-half and sugar made it taste a lot more palatable to my child self than straight coffee would have.

From then on, I convinced my mom to let me get a coffee at the Burger King drive-through on the way to school. Not every day. Just the days I had a harder-than-usual time waking up.

Then I found out I was sensitive to dairy, gluten, and sugar. Bye-bye coffee with cream and sugar.

Years later, I had my first latte at Starbucks when our small town finally got one.

And I was like:

From then on, I’d sneak out to Starbucks whenever I could (because much like Kenneth the Page and RFK Jr, my mom disapproved of the high-sugar beverages).

It wasn’t often, but it was enough to help me put on 15 pounds over time.

I lost the weight, largely due to a CrossFit addiction, and by 2020, I was at my fittest.

Then I rediscovered espresso drinks again. And the weight gain began again.

After I got injured in 2023, my binge eating came back. And just when I managed to wrestle out of its grip, I found coffee again.

I told myself that giving myself this accommodation would help me avoid worse things. And for a while, it did. Until it didn’t.

I’m not trying to demonize coffee or espresso drinks. Most people can drink them with no problem.

I’m not sure if my issue with it is the milk I use (usually almond or coconut, but sometimes oat or soy depending on what the coffee shop has) or something else.

And I can’t deny that sometimes the coffee was accompanied by a scone, croissant, or something equally unhealthy (for me, at least).

All I know is over the last few months, I started relying on it to function.

Every morning, I’d grab my cappuccino (it’s healthier because there’s less milk! I told myself) and crash by the evening.

I told myself I was just tired. But deep down, I knew.

Even though literally no one else has this problem, coffee was my kryptonite.

I realized this a few days ago, on my 36th birthday. I sat at my favorite coffee shop, steaming mug in my hand.

I should be happy, I thought. I’ve got my cappuchino, it’s sunny, it’s my birthday.

But it didn’t fill the void.

That’s when I realized. All these years, I was desperately seeking happiness in chocolate, in coffee, in buying imported pens from my local bookshop. But none of them made me feel better.

Because deep down, I knew I was just adding stuff but not addressing the problem. I wasn’t living up to my own expectations.

I was disappointing myself daily. And nothing could make up for that.

It wasn’t that I needed a croissant or a cappuccino to be happier — I needed to start working towards my goals instead of holding myself back. And the coffee was a big part of that.

Since I got diagnosed with ADHD, I realized that I tend to get hung up on things that aren’t healthy for me. A person, a hobby, staying up late, certain kinds of candies or snacks, and coffee.

Normal people could have a croissant and coffee and not think about it for weeks. People like me then decide that we have to have that EVERY. DAY. Until we inevitably get sick of it and move on to the next.

This is dopamine seeking in action. A certain stimulus provides it, but over time, our tolerance builds. Then we need bigger and bigger hits (and more diverse ones) to get the same feeling.

That’s also why ADHDers are more likely to struggle with addiction, btw.

I knew all this. But I kept doing it.

I gained 25 pounds over the last several years. It wasn’t just the coffee, but the coffee was the gateway that made everything else more difficult.

So I gave it up.

Sometimes, instead of adding, we need to remove the one thing that keeps us stuck.

So many of us, especially high achievers, athletes, successful folks, neurodivergents, or all of the above, tend to overcomplicate things.

We think to do more, be more successful, get in better shape, and make more money, we need to ADD more.

More courses, more apps, more planners, more exercise classes, more advice, more information.

But in reality, we often need to do something far simpler that feels less satisfying.

We need to remove the one thing that’s causing the biggest problem in our lives.

Let’s put it another way.

You can’t be more successful if you’re not feeling well. You can’t feel better about yourself if you know you’re not doing everything you can to get better. You can’t be more productive if you’re always tired and cranky.

It all starts from foundations —diet, exercise, sleep—and if those aren’t working, it’s tough to perform well.

I have increased my exercise for the last several months.

And although I lost a bit of weight and my body became more defined, I still felt stuck. I didn’t feel like I was seeing enough results, especially considering the volume of training (I sometimes exercised up to three hours a day).

But I was unwittingly keeping an anchor tied around my neck.

So the first thing I needed to do was remove the espresso drinks.

And the results were pretty darn quick:

• I slept better—I didn’t wake up coughing (something that happens when my histamine levels are up), and my sleep was more restful.

• I had more time—Instead of spending my morning prioritizing my trip to the coffee shop, I could focus on things that mattered, like my exercise and writing.

• My energy, moods, and blood sugar were more stable—These are all connected. Instead of snapping at people, I had more patience. I didn’t experience energy “crashes” during the day and at night (which usually felt like someone yanked out my power cord), and I felt better overall.

• My bloating reduced—Maybe I’m sensitive to something, who knows (I will know more in a few days, when I get allergy testing for the first time in 20 years) but I noticed the difference. My face wasn’t pale and bloated, and my bras fit better (don’t ask me why).

• I spent less — each coffee was about $6- $7. That’s a LOT of money for someone who doesn’t make a reliable income.

• I was more productive — this is the most surprising one. You would think more caffeine = more energy, right? But for me, it was the opposite. Not just because of the energy crashes, but because I wasn’t as focused on my work. I was more focused on how I would get coffee to make me happy (I know, kind of sad).

And this was after only a FEW DAYS. Imagine how good I’ll feel when it’s been weeks or months!

I’m not saying this to condemn coffee. I love my local coffee shops and the people who work there.

And I’m not saying I’ll never go back (provided, of course, I don’t test as allergic to coffee like my mom did). But for now, I need to remove this to help me reach my goals.

I want to lose the 25 pounds I put on over the last 3 years. I want to focus on my work. And I want to have enough energy to manage the increased responsibilities I’ve had since my mom had mobility and health issues.

So I’m giving up the thing that’s keeping me from that. And maybe I’ll have to give up more. Who knows.

But for the first time, I’m not trying to overcomplicate. I’m not trying to add.

Instead, I’m subtracting the thing that’s keeping me stuck.

I feel like I’ve grown more in the last year than I have in the last 10.

No joke.

I wish I could say it was because I had startling, rainbow-colored epiphanies about my place in the universe.

I REALLY wish I could say my life and my family’s were effortless and improving, that I started earning thousands a month from my writing, and that I traveled and broadened my horizons.

Actually, the opposite happened.

• My mom, previously super-healthy for a 70-year-old woman, had a weird reaction to a routine procedure. She was left with a “mystery rash”, lymphedema, and resulting mobility issues over 9 months later.

• My writing income, previously netting up to 5k a month, dropped to less than 1k (darn, algo changes).

• The furthest I’ve been is Burlington, VT (for my mom’s doctor’s appointments).

To add to that, our car required costly repairs; I experienced health issues myself, which I’m still unraveling (suddenly becoming heat sensitive); and I find myself scrambling to find other sources of income.

But as difficult as things have been, good things also happened:

• I started my ADHD coaching practice because people asked me to coach them.

• I write more about what I want to write about, not what “performs well”.

• I have become more mature, self-reliant, and empathetic (seeing a parent going through a health issue will do that).

• I started to realize that how my life went was up to me.

That last line is huge because I have to admit, up until this year, I had a somewhat immature view of life. An only child, I was used to my parents shielding me from difficult realities.

This year, they can’t.

I had to become an adult (a real one) REALLY fast.

Growth doesn’t happen in the “easy times”; it happens when we are being challenged.

So here’s what I learned over the last year, especially:

The older you get, the fewer people will care that it’s your birthday. That’s normal.

You’re not 9 years old anymore. Hopefully, you have family and friends who celebrate with you, but don’t expect the whole world to.

It’s ok to change.

Your mind. Your career. Your trajectory. Staying the same is worse than death because you’re not growing.

You are more than what you do.

I’m a figure skater, speed skater, writer, official, hiker, biker, and neurodivergent… the list goes on. I used to cling tightly to what I did as proof of what I had to offer. But when I got injured a few years ago and couldn’t do those athletic things, I went through an identity crisis. And lately, dealing with boot issues, I can’t figure skate. I had to realize I’m still a person with talents, gifts, and unique qualities—outside the rink.

Stop comparing yourself to others twice your age.

I did this too much. Most of my friends are at least twice my age, so I felt jealous that they were going on cruises, traveling to Europe, and had more money than I do. Then I realized — they’d also had 30+ years on me and had worked darn hard for what they had. Judging yourself against people who are at a different stage in life is like an amoeba comparing itself to a frog. Totally different life cycle.

Don’t copy people just because you admire them.

I fell into this trap with a writer I admire. I was determined to follow his strategies, yet beat myself up when they didn’t work for me. Then I realized I was trying to be more like him instead of more like me. Be your own best version of yourself. What worked for them might not work for you anyway. There’s more than one way to do things.

Be good to your parents. They won’t be here forever.

I got this wake-up call this year. Between my mom’s health scare and my dad’s slowing walk, I realized that I wouldn’t always have this time with them. So I started being more of a friend to my mom and repaired my relationship with my dad.

Neuroplasticity is real. Use it.

We can rewire our brains. We just have to consistently practice thinking and behaving differently. Try it.

A solid life is built on doing boring stuff no one else wants to do.

The most successful writers, authors, actors, and athletes know this. Success happens when you do the same boring stuff over and over again to build competence, rather than excellence. There is no shortcut.

Do something new every day. It doesn’t have to be crazy.

The other day, I tried a “rhythmic dance” class that was essentially off-brand Zumba. I quit Zumba 15 years ago because I felt like an idiot swiveling my hips. I still did, but I had a blast anyway. The point isn’t to be good at it — it’s to stay in motion. Not just physically. Mentally. Novelty is a form of training.

Don’t take life too seriously.

This directly ties to the Zumba thing. I used to think everyone was watching and judging me when I didn’t do something perfectly. Now, I realize they are too focused on their own lives to care. Life is short. I don’t want to waste it worrying.

That’s the year. Not the version I planned for. And I’m probably better for it.

Which one hit you? Drop it in the comments.

Worrying about the future is kind of my thing. It always has been, since I was old enough to read the Worst Case Scenario Handbooks. Even though it was highly unlikely I’d need to fight an alligator, it felt worth planning ahead.

I thought worry was a preventative measure. The more I worried, the more I protected myself. Somehow, by envisioning the worst thing happening, I prevented it.

This really ramped up during COVID. I went into every situation fully expecting to get sick. And somehow, I didn’t. I was too afraid to stop the anxiety — because I thought I’d be allowing the plague to catch me. That’s not wisdom. That’s magical thinking. But I wore it like yet another mask to protect myself.

The inability to stay present hurt me more than I’d like to admit. In competition, my ADHD mind would bound ahead into the program, and I’d make a silly mistake. By anticipating future moves, I was sabotaging present ones.

In life, I became more negative. More cynical. It felt safer to expect the worst than to dream. This way, I won’t be disappointed, I’d tell myself. But that wasn’t wisdom either. It was fear — dressed up as intelligence.

The other night, I was spiraling. Less than $300 in my checking account. My career. My article views. My mom’s health. Everything.

Then I put in a load of laundry, and something my mom always says hit me.

Right now, you’re ok.

It was obvious. Right in front of me. Right now, I am fine. Maybe I wouldn’t be tomorrow, but I couldn’t see that far, and I didn’t have ultimate control over it anyway. I had a place to live, people who loved me, food, and a town that people pay thousands to visit. As I ran through the list, the spiral loosened.

I thought of that scene in Wayne’s World — Wayne staring at the guitar he can’t afford, saying one day it will be mine. And Garth, already back in the car, yelling: Live in the now.

Garth was onto something.

The future will ask something of you when it gets here. Right now, it’s just laundry.