Theme Song: “Little Girl Gone” by CHINCHILLA1
Yesterday marked three of my dad’s birthdays, when he wasn’t here.
Well, I mean, his body’s here. It’s in a tin-can-urn-thing on my bookshelf in my family room (don’t get me started on how weird that is.) I already know it’s weird. I don’t know where to put him. I figured this way he gets a “view” of the grandkids he never really got to meet2. I can’t decide on an urn. What if he doesn’t like it? I can’t decide on a memorial. What if he’d hate it? I thought of at least 329483949827 ways to distribute his ashes, or make memorial glass or whatever, but the idea of separating his ashes… from his ashes… also freaks me out. There is no rational reason for this. It just is.
Sometimes, I feel like my dad thinks I’m an incompetent failure. A lot of the time, really. He made me executor of his estate, and I feel like I’m stuck in the mud and overwhelmed every time I think about just doing the next thing. I’m thankful for the lawyers helping… but to be frank and honest, I have no clue what I’m doing, I have ADHD, and every time I look at the paperwork, I cry because I just want my dad back.
Grief Sucks. COVID stole so much.
It’s been 3 birthdays. It will be 3 Halloweens where I don’t get to anticipate him commenting on the kids’ costumes in pictures. It’s been more Halloweens that my inlaws haven’t celebrated with us and the kids. They used to come over, I’d make pumpkin white chicken chili in the slow cooker, and we’d have a good evening together. COVID killed that. We had to social distance. All of our traditions got turned up on their heads.
I keep thinking of life as before COVID and after COVID. Before, we were an active family, who regularly left the house to go to classes, museums, kid events, heck, we’d even spend a day stocking up on the groceries we’d need for a couple weeks or go peruse thrift stores or bookstores or the mall. We’d go to see baseball or basketball. We’d go on dates.
Now, after COVID, just leaving the house is exhausting. We have no sitter. My father-in-law passed away February 2023, and my mother-in-law entered memory care shortly after… then passed away herself on Christmas morning 2023. It was a bad year. 2024 was also bad. Most of it involved me making decisions about my younger brother’s healthcare and being terrified that not only would I be an adult orphan, but I’d also have gone from having two brothers to being an only child3.
My brother is stable now, my dad is in a box, and my in-laws are in their final resting place. I am lost. Possibly because instead of moving forward, I keep trying to figure out how to go back to before. Before Cipro killed my joints and tendons. Before COVID. Before big losses. Or maybe it’s because the map has changed altogether, and I lack the map key to be able to read it. In any case, I feel like the world is continually marching on while I’m stuck trying to figure out how it’s Saturday when it was just Monday.
I feel like I’m behind on life.
A Chronic State of Overwhelm
Did I mention that I’m convinced my dad is thoroughly pissed that I’m struggling and that I can’t just “act right”4 or “get it together” or my personal favorite, “just get it done.” All of which are the phrases I’m constantly repeating in my head, along with my mom’s “Why can’t you just be normal,” “It’s not that hard,” or my personal favorite – because big emotions send me into a panic attack – “You’re being overly dramatic right now. Get over it.”
I wish I had some sort of pithy advice I could share with you, right now, dear reader. I take Wellbutrin and Adderall and drink enough coffee to kill a horse. My house is a mess. The kind of mess brought on by 4 kids and 2 adults processing deep grief. I have to sell the house I grew up in – and despite having many mixed memories there, particularly as an adult, writing that sentence just caused me to sob. I hate that I have no choice but to sell it5, but here we are. I weigh more than I ever have, including when I was pregnant. My knees are really unhappy with that fact. So is my back. Throw in the fact that our county is… well… let me just gesture around. It all feels so heavy.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that from 2024-2025, I was sick in August for 3 weeks with COVID, then at the end of September it was 2 weeks with COVID again. I had just recovered from that when I got the pleasure of catching RSV. That really knocked me down, and my lungs remained quite unhappy with me for weeks afterward. I finally started to feel better, but then I caught Flu A. Thankfully, I had my flu shot, because I think I’d have been hospitalized had I not had it. It was BAD. I finally recovered from it – after nearly a month, but was still wheezing badly and had a nasty cough – and promptly caught COVID… AGAIN. Following that… I had until this August before I had the worst bout of COVID I’ve had yet. I’m still not 100%.
Just Keep Swimming… I guess…
Which way, though? How fast? Maybe instead of being like Dory (who I relate to far too much these days), I should be like Ana and just do the next right thing. But what is that? That feels so close to being told to “act right.” At the same time, it’s different. What is the next right thing? That’s where my squirrel brain kicks in. It either feels like everything is the next right thing and thus leads me to inaction, or it feels like questioning what is “right” and leads me to inaction. How can you pick the right fire to put out when it’s all. on. fire? “Just pick something and aim.” Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. Thanks. And now, I’m out of water, or at best, there’s a trickle. How the hell do you unfuck everything when you can’t do anything without having to catch your breath? It’s like trying to “just keep swimming” with lead weights chained to your fins.
Emotional Regulation Starts Small. Really Small – With One Big Step
It starts with nuking the old to-do list. I had stuff on there that was from before the world shut down that I was holding onto like some sort of security blanket. So… I deleted not just the app, but my account on the app. I deleted all the moldy goals, projects, next actions, and tasks. It was painful. I had an emotional attachment to my backlog. I switched back to the last task/project manager that worked well (ClickUp), even though it costs $. I’m phasing out Notion by putting all those databases into ClickUp or making Excel spreadsheets. I went back to a paper planner. Even if I forget it exists, I remember things better and track time better with it.
Getting rid of the backlog made it so I could see the important stuff that I need to catch up on. I took time off from my businesses so I could do the administrative work of fixing my digital files. If it’s not in Clickup or Obsidian, then it’s in Dropbox. And technically speaking, all my Obsidian pages are in Dropbox. I got rid of OneNote (as much as I love it, I cannot afford to have a week’s worth of work poof in one failed sync), I got rid of Evernote. I scrapped PARA and GTD. I spend more time organizing those systems and maintaining them than I do working in them. I’ve been ruthlessly decluttering, organizing, and renaming files so I know exactly where they are. Thanks to my ADHD meds, I’m able to actually follow through with those rote tasks.
I decided that, for the way my brain works and how easily I get decision fatigue, I needed to make it as easy as possible to get files where they go. This meant actually expanding the 18 possible categories I was using to 42 categories. And yes. I know. My “life system” is “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.”6 I finally was able to sort my downloaded recipes in Paprika. The key? Using as many categories as needed without making so many categories that there’s possible overlap.
Yeah, That’s All Well and Good But…
Look. I don’t need my knees to delete files, sort through emails, and create a database of all my half-written posts (as well as the published ones). I was able to get so much done because I decided to be nice to myself. I said, “Self, you are sick. You cannot clean. You will faint. So while you can’t do that, this is something you can do and make it as easy as possible to do so you can do it while your kid does their math next to you and you can pick up after teaching the 4-year-old phonics and still know what’s going on.
For the rest of it? The weight. The messy house. The badges need to be sewn onto vests and patches onto camp blankets. Organizing troop supplies so I’m not in squirrel mode every Friday trying to remember where I put that box. Settling my dad’s estate. Existing in a world that’s increasingly scary. Getting back to getting out of the house regularly & not just for scouting. The tasks and projects that actually have to be done and not ignored. For all of that, I’m working on creating a “grand unfuckening challenge.” And it involves going back to the things I know worked for me for years and years and years – before I read all the “best practices” and “this is the best routine” stuff.
One Last Word on Unnecessary Drama
This post is sponsored by unnecessary drama and people dumping on m7e in a week I was already feeling emotional because yesterday would have been my dad’s 85th birthday. I’m tired, folks. Chances are if you’re responsible for something and you ignore it for so long that it falls onto my already-stretched-too-thin plate, I’m going to be pretty pissed off. I’ve never had the luxury of being irresponsible. I’ve been taking care of other people for as long as I can remember.
On top of that, the “no participation trophies” crowd, who really do want participation trophies, are really getting to me lately. I get tired of defending rules and the integrity of achievements to people. I’m feeling it especially deeply at the moment because everything I have in my present life is because of my own hard work or the hard work of those closest to me. I’m feeling some kind of way about folks who put in the bare minimum (or 95% but skipped the most important 5%) and want the same benefits or rewards as someone who puts in 110%8. It’s exhausting to be dumped on for things that could have been handled months ago in a more timely manner when I’m already stretched thinner than dental floss. Anyway…
Thank you for reading my meandering and moody post. Feel free to leave a comment if anything resonated with you.
- I’ve been going through all my old posts and making a to-do list for updates. When I started this blog, when it was “Not Quite Ally McBeal,” I began each post with a theme song that reflected the mood I felt when writing the post. So, I decided to bring that practice back. ↩︎
- Technically, my dad got to meet Princess Boogie when she was 1 1/2, but that was 10 years ago. We kept trying to get home for a visit, but the world kept worlding and life kept life-ing. ↩︎
- I lost my older brother, Rick, in 2015. While on the topic, I lost my mom in June 2022 (well, physically lost her. We’d been no-contact/low contact for several years before that.) ↩︎
- My dad LOVED to tell me all the time that I just needed to “act right,” when my then-undiagnosed ADHD was at work. The irony is, I strongly suspect that my family’s neurodivergence all comes from him, and his unkind words (though my mom’s were worse), were part of his masking and him regurgitating the words he got from his parents. ↩︎
- Reverse mortgages are the devil. ↩︎
- Once I saw that I was close to 42, I gave up my original commitment to the number being divisible by 3, 7, or 9 in exchange for nerdity. And hey, 42 is divisible by 3. And that number is divisible by 7. ↩︎
- A story for another time. And I’m not just talking about becoming a single mom at 20. The whole being responsible for others thing goes back further than that, and further than you’d guess. ↩︎
- I’m not talking about people who have 50% and give 50%. That’s giving their all. I’m talking about those with 100% who make choices that leave them at 50, 70, 95% and want to reap the same things as those who gave 100%. Entitlement culture. It gets to me. I’m not talking about helping folks eat who cannot work or whose jobs just don’t pay enough, or who have hit rough times. I’m not talking about folks with visible or invisible disabilities. I’m talking about a particular subset of folks who appear to believe the world owes them everything, just for existing. ↩︎
