ADHD – A Personal Walkthrough & Guide

The week of 4/8/24 was a remarkable week for me. I went with some friends to witness totality for the “Great American Solar Eclipse!” (Just so happened my one friend’s house was right in the path of totality!) 

The weather was perfect and we all had a great time, hanging out in my friend’s front yard on a picnic blanket, chatting and watching the eclipse (through proper eclipse glasses, of course) as it progressed towards totality that afternoon.

Totality itself was absolutely amazing! I, being very much a science nerd, had learned everything about what was going to happen and what to look out for but I was still NOT prepared for the actual awe-inspiring experience! Those 2 minutes and 45 seconds went by soooo fast, and we all felt a bit weirdly panicked and freaked out during totality which I had not expected! 😄

So yeah, I am so glad I took the chance to go see this mind-blowing celestial event earlier this month! 

The eclipse, however, was not the only natural phenomena to fill me with a simultaneous sense of awe and fear that week! 

The breath-taking sight of totality inspired a response of “ooooh.. aaaahhh! 🤩” from me.

But.. one rainy night later that same week.. I witnessed another incredible scene.. the unexpected new pond in my basement!

 “Ahhhh.. Oooh… 😬”

We must have had a good two, two and a half, inches of standing water down there! While certainly not as.. grand as the eclipse, the sight of the flood was still plenty surreal and fascinating in its own right.. it was just definitely not good. 😆

We’d had a bit of a flooding a couple of times at this place in the past when it rained, but NOTHING like this!

Fortunately, nothing valuable or important was damaged but we did have to throw away a couple of water-damaged pieces of furniture, and water from the flood did disable our water heater for about four days as well as get water INSIDE our dryer somehow. (Seems some water came through the dryer’s exhaust pipe! 🤦🏻‍♀️)

So.. with no hot water for a few days and then no dryer for over a week, we couldn’t really do laundry, shower (unless you like it ice cold! 🥶), or even wash our dishes properly! 

All of this “excitement” also came right after my fiance and I were very busy for the better part of three weeks straight. So, we were both already feeling a tad burnt out even before the flood visited our basement.

In fact, I had hoped to write a blog post that week but.. given all the additional stress, I decided it would be a good time to cut myself some slack instead. So, I gave myself permission to not worry about accomplishing anything extra until we had hot water again. 😄

I am glad to say that, by now, the chaos seems to have settled and life is finally getting back to normal. (Also our landlord had a better drainage system put in last week, so.. fingers crossed.. no more surprise basement ponds! 😆)

I’m proud of how I handled things during the crisis, especially since I know a version of myself from just a few years ago would have handled in differently. Past-Kate would have been expecting herself to still do all sorts of extra things even though she really should have just done what she could do for the problem at hand and then.. taken it easy. 

But more recently, I’ve been learning a valuable lesson: Don’t stress yourself out when life is already doing plenty of that for you. 

Sometimes there’s just too much beyond your control going on at once, and it’s alright to just focus on making it through the stressful situation.

So, whenever the struggles of life are pouring down and starting to flood your life, remember, you don’t have to paint a masterpiece or learn computer programming or solve world hunger while you’re floating in the lifeboat. 😄 

All you gotta do is sit tight and make sure you get to safety. 🧡