Embracing My Mess

For most of my 20’s, I was stuck in a dating cycle. Trying to navigate life, let alone dating, with multiple chronic pain conditions, undiagnosed ADHD and undertreated depression and anxiety left me a strange mix of both hyper independent and also incredibly vulnerable. My friends will tell you I’m the queen of the long and intimate first date, an expert at asking deflecting questions so women would pour their souls out to me, while I would mete out carefully curated details about the me I wanted them to see. I know now this behavior is called masking, but for much of my adult life I was at a loss as to why I found meeting new people and dating exhausting and other people didn’t.

 I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 25 and my therapist at the time mentioned it casually. My schooling took place in the aughts and 2010s and, despite being evaluated for it as a child, despite my propensity for daydreaming and rejection sensitivity and horrible internal sense of time and even worse memory, I was told I didn’t have it. I liked school way too much to have ADHD (if you just ignored the crying jags and intense frustration I often felt in math class).

So I spent my formative years feeling flakey and unorganized, my lateness the butt of many jokes with my friends. Tell Sarah to meet us 15 minutes early so she’ll only be 20 minutes late. I’d laugh along too because the alternative was to reveal how horrible it made me feel to be thought so irresponsible, so unreliable. 

 This is just who I am, I thought. I would zone out in the middle of conversations and have to mentally jerk myself back to the present over and over, becoming so exhausted with social interactions, I’d oftentimes need to power down my brain for hours after, staring off blankly into space or at the walls of my bedroom or screen of my phone.

And all the while I was attempting to date like any other 20 something in New York City, a minefield to even the most healthy and well adjusted among us. I tried to energetically push through my perception of being a mess, to impress women with my love of books, my deep vault of random facts I’d picked up and squirreled away throughout my life, my dedication to my job as a high school English teacher. The perfect, polished, resume version of myself.  

I think, subconsciously, because I wanted to prove I wasn’t as all over the place as I felt I was, I chose to date messy people. Not literally messy, or messy in that they were married or already partnered. But people that were finding their way out of their own mental messes: coming to terms with their sexuality, tense relationships with family and friends, unemployed, dealing with their own anxiety. I suspect that I, who spent hours writing in my journal introspecting, who had gone to therapy (briefly, before deciding I “wasn’t that bad” and stopping), who was confident in my sexuality, felt that I could be the straight edges that held in their chaos. To prove to them I could help them, to prove to myself I wasn’t lazy or disorganized because look how much I had figured out compared to this person. I had a job! A car! My own apartment who’s rent I paid (mostly) on time! No credit card debt! 

Heap your issues on me, I subconsciously told them, let me hold you up while you flounder, try to fish you out of the deep end because I stood on such sturdy ground.

 I could take care of them because I didn’t need anyone to take care of me, I could do that on my own. Let me be your pack mule, carrying your burdens and give you none of my own. 

Of course, eventually I’d grow tired and then resentful of having to carry that weight, weight I had invited through getting caught up in the adrenaline rush of a new connection, a shiny new obsession. Of the dopamine surge my starving brain would gorge on when a text popped up on my phone. 

Then, one day, as if out of the blue, I’d get a paragraphs long text from whoever I happened to be seeing at the time, the same as all of the days and weeks before, and be filled with nothing but tired. And a little annoyance. Who were they to feel like they had a right to my time and energy? Why did they feel this intimacy with me when they barely knew anything about me, really? And then I’d make an excuse, like they wanted to get serious too quickly, or I’d realized I just wasn’t feeling romantic about them, but I still wanted to be friends, and I’d end it. 

And of course they didn’t know me, no matter how many little nuggets of myself I had dolled out to them so it seemed like they did. I was shut up behind this facade, locked up in the person I was trying to be. A drawer neatly labeled “office supplies” on the outside, but on the inside crammed with random bits of paper and dry pens and receipts from five years ago and bits of string all jumbled in a ragged mess.

 No one asked me for perfection, to shut away my flaws and wandering thoughts and fidgeting fingers and days I felt so sad and hopeless I wondered if anyone would miss me if I disappeared. But because I didn’t know why my brain was this way, because I had felt secretly, deeply wrong for years, believed and was told I was lazy and disorganized, I overcompensated. Because I thought that I was failing at being that polished adult woman I should be, I overperformed being her. And I felt if I were to ease my grasp on this reality, it would all fall apart. 

I know I hurt people in this cycle, know there are some women out there who use me as their bad date story, the woman who dumped them out of the blue when they thought it was going so well. But I was so firmly locked into this idea of myself that I couldn’t see what I was doing to them, sealed off to the possibility of genuine intimacy rather than just the illusion of it. 

They can take some comfort in knowing that I hurt myself, too. 

Then, during the Pandemic, like so many of my peers, I went back to therapy. And as I spent more time talking with my therapist, something funny happened. I stopped dating for about 6 months. I stopped swiping on the apps to find someone to be obsessed with and, lame and trite as it sounds, became obsessed with getting to know myself. Each realization I had about this type of behavior made me reflect on my past and draw connections where I had never seen them before. Therapy works, you guys!

I realized how ADHD affected so much of my life beyond time distortion and executive functioning. It’s not just that I sometimes felt like my mind was moving so fast I couldn’t grab hold of my thoughts or that I was a bit dreamy. I approached dating as a form of hyperfixation, getting so caught up in the thrill of the person, the possibility until all the thrill drained out and I lost interest. That in order to connect, really connect, with someone I had to let them see beyond the masking.  

And then, I met my current partner. We met in the usual way (Hinge match) and we hit it off right away. She was everything I didn’t usually date- a grown up woman with a grown up job who seemed to have herself figured out. She was in therapy! She had a 401k! She lived in her own one bedroom! She thought my opening message about butternut squash was charming and not weird!

The greatest gift she gave me was the space to open up slowly. Our first date was only 3 hours long. Because of travel and sickness, we went on 4 dates in 6 weeks, a practical snail’s pace compared to my usual breakneck speed. Because she didn’t need me to figure out her mess, I had time to sort through mine. To understand how I felt past that rush of initial contact. 

 Of course, I was terrified. All of my instincts were screaming out to run, to build more walls. She was too put together, too outgoing, she’d grow bored with my introversion, my love of staying in. 

But something strange happened- I resisted all of my instincts. I knew now not to always trust them, not to jump at every impulse. I didn’t text her 24/7 right away. I didn’t schedule 4 dates in one week and get sick of her. I didn’t try to force anything or get wrapped up in the fantasy. Instead of shouldering all of her burdens right away without giving anything in return, I let her carry some of mine. I stopped trying to prove how together I was and let the ragged seams and messy stitches show through. 

Eventually, I realized I cared about her so much I was almost never late to a date (with the exception of the two times I was 45 minutes late, but I blame that on transit from Queens (sorry, Jam)). 

In allowing myself to become the mess I had feared to be, in learning why I was this way, that it wasn’t laziness or failure to be normal but a different wiring, in showing J what she now lovingly calls my chaos brain, I didn’t scare her away. If anything it brought us closer. 

Over a year on and just past my two year anniversary with my therapist, we live together. I’m reading books and studies on the way ADHD presents differently in women and can affect their relationships and share my findings with J. I’ve learned that communicating my needs and thoughts is easier for me through writing, and sometimes I’ll text her from work about a conversation we were having the night previously.

I now recognize my first instinct is often a defense mechanism and that my brain needs time and space to filter through information like ground water through soil, purifying and refining as it goes. Every day is an experiment in how to run a household with one neurodivergent brain and one brain geared towards order. 

So far, I’ve only gotten us locked out of the twice (our solution was to just remove the chain lock from the door), and J still thinks it’s cute how often I misplace my phone in our apartment and harmonizes with the weird little songs that burst out of me. My messy little brain feels free to wiggle and groove however it needs to while J helps to make sure it doesn’t fall completely off the tracks.