coffee for the apocalypse

Hi. I’m Jenn.

How do I condense forty years of chaos into a few short paragraphs? I mean. I guess I could try but it would inevitably end up a mishmash of circle backs and trains of thought gone massively off the rails… exactly like having a conversation with me in real life.

I guess we’ll start like this:

I am a creative. A disjointed and distractive creative but that’s neither here nor there. I have written stories since I was a child. I play several instruments (and not half badly), I create art, I sew, I crochet because it’s faster than knitting though I am okay at both.

I am a parent. I can be strict but I can also be lax in ways that I think help my kids to become better people or to see the world how it is earlier while still protecting them. I am a teach kindness type of parent. I explain the whys most of the time with the occasional harried “please do it because I asked you to” sprinkled in there.

I am a wife. Not the best, but my husband of 18 years, partner for 24, seems to see that I am worth having in his corner. I’m an okay cook, a hit or miss house keeper, and a bit of a crow when it comes to little shit that makes me happy when it is displayed around the house. My style is Lisa Frank in a graveyard while my husband would be happy to have a home that looks like the inside of a Cabela’s. We make it work.

I am a mess…
I have never been as consistent with things as I would like. I function with at least 13 tabs open at once in my noggin. I carry on conversations in my head. I make weird faces while people are talking to me not because of what they are saying but because there are two other things I am thinking about at the same time and I can still repeat whatever they are telling me word for word. I always need something to do with my hands. If I am forced to sit down and focus on something that I am not completely interested in, my mind wanders, or in the case of movies my husband picks, I fall asleep. I procrastinate on things that I want to do and even worse on shit I don’t want to do and and then freeze up because there is so much to get done.

Then a family member of mine was diagnosed with ADHD…

What the actual fuck?! Is that what this is? Forty years of wondering why my brain didn’t seem to work like people around me. Forty years of wondering why I was lazy (spoiler: I’m not). Forty years of being the weird kid even as an adult. Forty years of wondering why everything looked so god damned easy for everyone else…

I am working toward a diagnosis and I am just now getting hints at how to untangle this mess of a life that I have been stumbling through like a newborn deer this whole time. When my family member got the diagnosis I cried. Not because I feel like there is anything wrong with them but because they know now, while they are young, how to navigate with their brain when I didn’t. They won’t have the wondering, the self-loathing, the frustration, and the repeated feeling of being an utter failure that I had.

So, long story longer… this blog is a mix of things. One of them is a kind of journal as I figure out a new normal. Another part of it is showing off my creations. And the third part is sharing weird shit that makes me happy.

But Jenn! Blogs are supposed to be focused. They are supposed to be consistently about one thing so that people looking for that thing can stick with it! Honey, look, I am the queen of quitting shit. If I have this space to talk about different things, ie whatever the hell floats my boat at the moment, then there is a much better chance of me sticking with this.

So let’s do this. I don’t claim to know shit about ADHD but I’m gonna let you know the things I do figure out and hopefully some of what I share is relatable. I dig things like that.