Hi old friend.
I started this letter to you as I sat in the Salt Lake City airport last summer ago, waiting for a flight home to Tacoma that had been delayed busy typing away there in the terminal, but as I sat looking out the window at the familiar terrain of arid desert and foothills (did not have a view of the mountains), the letter I started then turned into a letter to Utah, which has morphed into a poetic effort that I can neither define nor explain, but that I have really, really enjoyed and will share in some way or another in the future.
So thank you.
I mean it, old friend. Thank you. I know I’m hard on you at times (because I feel that you are hard on me at times) but whatever that is? That fast-paced connectivity that leaps from one thing to the next to the next in exciting expansion as ideas grow and culminate in truly satisfying and surprising ways? That is seriously fucking cool, and I can sense that you are the one that helps me do that. I can tell it’s you because of the intensity of thought, and the lightning-speed comprehension and cohesion of disparate yet patterned ideas which only you allow for. That feeling is so familiar—either concentrating on ideas by myself, or having rich, expansive, exploratory conversations with others. It’s true excitement. It’s electric. It’s the acme of profound interest and connection within the brain. To me, it feels like a mounting crescendo of stimulus commanding my attention, maybe something like a thrilling roller coaster inside my head. And it’s one of the coolest things I think this planet has to offer me. And I get to experience that feeling a lot because of you. Which means I’m really, really lucky, all the disability bullshit and ADHD taxes I have to regularly pay notwithstanding. So again, thanks.
And while all of that is true, I’ve been hungry to write you this letter because a very special thing happened in my relationship with the other darker part of you while I was in Utah. I need to tell you about it because I’m not sure you quite comprehended what was happening. You were probably very confused, and at times I could tell you were a bit angry with me. I see your anger, accept it, but also… well, you’ll see.
So, dear life-companion—you know how, as part of a generalized brain-based system, you are, like, a total dick to me sometimes? How you use my limbic system to bully the shit out of me over tasks both minute and large—from getting the dog food to compiling documents for an entire year of taxes—dropkicking my spirit in the face repeatedly until you feel as though I have sufficiently done said thing? Waking me up at night to warn me of the impending doom of my appointment at 3pm the next day, which I then miss or am late to because your terrorizing makes the rest of our brain avoid thinking about it by escaping to other tasks? How you take things I love, things I’m in the middle of—like music or writing or making a Tiktok or playing with my kids or… anything basically—and contaminate them, and use them to beat the incessant drum of “you’re failing, you’re losing time, you’re such a pathetic, lazy loser, the grade-school teachers that called you ‘the laziest student’ were right, nobody loves you, you aren’t worth the oxygen you suck from this dying planet, you are the runt of the litter and you will be cast out to die by society unless you get X THING dooooooone?
That type of being a dick to me?
It turns out, that’s not working for me (or my clients—or anyone, really) anymore.
And because of this, I have been working very, very hard to not listen to you anytime you start trying to pipe up with the “do this or you’re a piece of garbage that needs to be expended” nonsense (often so subtle and in the background of my life that only recently have I been able to see its quieter manifestations for what they are.)
About a year ago, so Feb/March of 2023, I was invited by the Mormon Mental Health Association to give a two hour keynote on ADHD.
Yes that’s right, they contacted me, the gay former Mormon (this organization is not affiliated with the actual church, mind you, they primarily help people who describe themselves as recovering from Mormonism)—the guy who has profound social phobia and whose voice sounds like a strange, soft-spoken, vocab-bot that favors overly-winding sentences (like this one) that, when verbalized, could lull the most exhausted, colicky infant to peaceful sleep, and who in stressful situations experiences brain fog so severe he once had to get a full-ass beta-blocker prescription to a play violin solo at his graduation ceremony—that ME. They contacted me and they asked me to somehow not pass away while giving a two hour keynote in front of fellow mental health professionals for continuing education credit.
Cue amygdala! Cue the limbic system! Cue . . . .well, you, old friend!
[LOUDSPEAKER] Imminent threat detected! We are on RED ALERT! We must quickly stuff this life-threatening event into the deep recesses of our cognition for the next four months! We will then allow it it re-emerge like a ravenous Kraken when the event is days away, and then we will to cluster-panic our way into an all-nighter our 43-year-old-earthly-vessel can no longer sustain, which will likely result in, if not an aneurism, then a really, really shitty presentation that will make us wish we could have a quick aneurism for the road! [/LOUDSPEAKER]
BUT, as I said above (as well as in my last letter to you here) I’ve been practicing not listening to you lately. In moments great or small, I’ve been noticing. I’ve been meditating and doing body-work and getting really good at feeling your limbic presence. I’ve been getting conscious and I’ve been learning how to remain in the para-sympathetic-nervous-system space, the ventral vagal sweet-spot, and noticing whenever I’m not there, and allowing myself to get back to that calmed, soothed, balm-of-a-state-of-being (which healthy, non-traumatized people call “normal”— those weirdos!) as my baseline.
So, when you came clattering in in response to this invitation, I knew what to do. I stopped you in your tracks. I did the things I’ve been practicing. I didn’t listen to your voice. I saw it for what it was immediately. And I remained calm.
I was very proud of myself for this!
And then time passed, mercurial entity that it is—March to April, April to May, May to June—in what seemed like one instant. and I found myself on a phone call with my friend Aimee Heffernan and my other contact in the organization (Dr. LaShawn Williams) two weeks before the event. And boy-oh-boy did you try to take over before that call. I felt you so strongly!
You called me lazy. You told me I was just being “work avoidant”—that old label from my youth that I was called time and time again. You told me I just needed to buckle down and get it done. Get something ON PAPER so I wasn’t showing up empty handed for something so important.
Both those two, Aimee and LaShawn, they were so perfect. I was able to let them know what was going on—I let them know how desperately you wanted me to listen to the alarm bells and sirens, to buckle and painfully beat my will into submission, and finally at one point I simply told them: “I keep feeling my fear center want to MAKE me work on this talk. But I can’t. This is a talk ABOUT how neurodivergent healing requires one to stop using internal terror as a motivator. So I just . . . can’t allow that to happen. Which means I might show up completely unprepared, and I need us all to be okay with that.”
And they were so perfect in their response. They really held me as I tried to prepare this talk about you without letting you—or the scarier parts of you—damage my mind and my body in order to mask, and “do it right” and “get it done” and “be impressive” and whatever else your limbic-based signals insist that I do in order to be acceptable. Those two assured me that they had me. That they totally got what my plan was and why it had to be that way: that I was gonna be walking into this thing blind, and that I might have literally nothing prepared. They said “it’s no problem, we have a panel as well, and we can flex, and we can make this thing work no matter how you end up showing up. We trust you and we trust your heart, and we trust that you are doing this in a way that is important. We are confident in you, and know you have important things to share, regardless of what this process looks like for you. You can rest easy knowing it will be successful no matter what.”
I can’t tell you how soothing their voices of truth and kindness and knowing were. As I felt the anxiety fall away, I could suddenly see that even though I hadn’t given you permission to be there, per se, you were still there with me. I could see that I’d gone into the conversation with the feeling that I was talking to the Responsible Party or The Big Scary Organization about how, as always, I was a fuck-up who was very busily engaged in the upping of fucks—like the kid talking to the teacher about missing work hoping for clemency, or the employee talking to the boss about why they are failing to meet this or that expectation and pleading for help, or the child talking to the parent about why-oh-why the room wasn’t clean again even after all this time, even after three hours of “working” on it, even after this scenario having repeated on rotation a thousand times.
I could see, as it all shuffled off like a molt, that I’d walked into that meeting holding onto a subconscious level of shame and deep-rooted self-loathing that you, my dear companion, have buried so deeply into my psyche that I scarcely recognized it. But I ended that meeting—thanks to those two amazing women—feeling… heard. Feeling truly seen. Feeling totally and completely understood, 1,000% validated in the uniqueness of my neurodivergence and its particular and very personal expression, and completely free to ignore you, my dear ADHD mechanisms—(or at least the mechanisms accustomed to taking over in moments like this). Instead of all that, this allowed me to lean into the parts of you (and me) that make life wonderful, the parts of you that sense the flow of the Universe so easily and that allow curiosity, inspiration, interest, intrigue, and real, genuine desire. (Kind of like the stuff I was feeling when I wrote that Utah poetry stuff at the airport. The good juice, if you will.)
At one point in that conversation I said “thank you two so much for holding me up as I dare to walk this personal tight-rope” and LaShawn said “you’re welcome, but I don’t think that’s accurate at all. You’re not walking a tight-rope, Josh. You are walking into the ocean.” And then Aimee said “And you are that ocean.” And those two sentences landed so deftly. I wasn’t doing some scary thing that I needed to be sustained through. I was being given permission to walk into the ocean, into the waters that would sustain and usher me along—waters deep and true and life-giving—and in fact, into the waters of self, into the truth of my own personhood.
And to be clear, the two of them weren’t giving me support to do the impossible. They were giving me permission to be my truest self, which is something that, for me (as you well know, old buddy old pal) has been very hard to allow myself to do in times like these. To have that liberty was such a powerful gift.
That is what true accommodation looks like.
That is what neurodivergent people need more of.
That is what will heal our bodies and minds and traumas.
That is what we deserve in every job, in every task, in every relationship and in every human space.
It was truly delicious. A watershed moment. A coup. A moment of glorious, lived understanding that I hope will help me transform you, oh dear life-companion, into the loving and guiding friend I know you to be in our most in-touch and healthy moments.
You might be wondering how we fared once I felt this complete permission to ignore your pit-in-stomach terror and your hyper-fixated fantasies of failure and your deafening fear of embarrassment and Shame with a capital S.
Well, I’m happy to say: it was kind of… amazing? But this letter is getting very long, and I have to go to sleepy town. So I will finish the next part tomorrow, because I learned a lot—about you, about me, about us as a team, and about flow itself—as I allowed myself to lean into this experience.
Until next time, my old, life-long compañero.
Joshua