Blog

It’s back-to-school time here in suburban Philly, and since I’ve been seriously slacking on my writing over the past several months — of late, the phrase “use it or lose it!” has been gnawing menacingly at the back of my mind — I thought maybe a classic “What I Did on my Summer Vacation” essay would help me ease back into it.

Incidentally, one super-fun part of getting to really know myself in sobriety has been discovering, in my late 40s, that I’m pretty textbook ADHD, on top of the old anxiety and depression and the (relatively) new perimenopause. I guess this explains why it’s been so damn hard for me to sit still and/or herd all the cats in my brain. When I’m not performing therapy for clients or rehashing their sessions in progress notes — or, more like thinking about how far behind I am and how I really should be doing progress notes — my head is perpetually purring with thoughts, ideas, random songs, memories, outfit options….

Looks like my essay style is gonna be “stream of consciousness,” so buckle your life jackets and find your center of gravity. Here we go! 🌊

I sat propped up in bed late on a Thursday morning, my heart racing as I stared down at the dentist’s contact card on my phone screen. Deep within my throbbing head, my foggy brain struggled to sort through a swirl of thoughts — or, more like page through a catalog of excuses. Was there some way, any way, out of making this call?

Alas, I was desperate. The pain radiating from the back of my mouth had leveled me in a way I hadn’t felt since…well, since the last time I put off addressing a cracked tooth because it “wasn’t that bad,” only to have it completely blow up my life within a few months. I’d eaten two tubes of Anbesol and drank a bottle of Orajel wash and sat in the shower crying and clawing at my face like a possessed maniac, and now, I was about to ring up my neighborhood dental office and beg a stranger to give me drugs. As if that wasn’t agonizing enough, I’d had to text a slew of therapy clients earlier that morning to late-cancel their sessions, which cost me two days’ pay and forced me to confront my own hypocrisy.

Don’t I preach to them that short-term avoidance always comes back to bite you, big-time, down the road? That it’s actually easier to do the hard thing than it is to run away and hide?

Nearly 7 years sober from alcohol and I’m still guilty of pulling from the old drunk’s playbook when faced with inconvenience and discomfort. I can be in a state of physical agony and still default to the path of least psychological resistance, needing to be trapped in a “trial by combat” and maced to a bloody pulp before I awaken to reality.