36: Part 2
Observations and pontifications from my ADHD brain
Here’s Part 1 if you haven’t read it yet and want to catch up.
Part 3 coming soon!
5. Healthy/communicative adults can navigate most hard things
My ex (married 10 years) is still one of my best friends, despite a hard and destabilizing divorce (I just had a lovely trip visiting her in Portland). It took a lot of self-reflection and therapy, but we had hard, honest, and emotional discussions that allowed us to process things with each other. I’ve had more of these kinds of conversations in the last several years than in most periods of my life. And nearly every time, the relationship ended up stronger for it — even when the conversations were difficult, awkward, or painful. But it takes hard work, effort, and empathy. For me, it’s been more than worth it.
6. Advocate for yourself — your wants and needs matter
I put this as #5 on purpose (because I think it’s intimately connected with #4). I believe that to be healthy in any relationship, you have to learn to value yourself, believe that your wants and needs matter, and advocate for them.
Advocating for yourself enables your friends and/or partner(s) to show up authentically in the relationship, instead of being worried that they’re fucking up. They can be themselves — knowing you’ll simply tell them if you aren’t receiving enough support/consideration or if their words/actions hurt you.
If the people in your life truly care about you, then they want to hear about how they can love and support you better (even if it means owning their shit and apologizing). And if they’re not doing that . . . maybe it’s time to find folks who will.
7. Surround yourself with people who are excited to be around you
Y’all, life is short — too short to be spending time and mental energy on people that aren’t excited to be in your life and commit to fully supporting you as much as they can. Of course, we all have coworkers, relatives, friends of a friend, etc. that we see occasionally and just make small talk with. That’s just normal life shit.
I’m talking about close friends, confidants, partners, bosom friends . . . I’ve had stretches of my life where I made myself smaller to better fit into the lives of those closest to me, and I lost myself in the process.
The world is expansive, and there are people in it who are your biggest fans, even if they don’t know it yet. People who will write you notes and drop off little treats when you’ve had a hard day. People who pay close attention when you talk to them. People who follow up. People who initiate because they want to be with you. People who care about the people around them and do their work to be kind not just to you, but also to your friends and others close to you. People who admit when they’re wrong/have hurt you and actually follow through on trying to do better.
Find THOSE people and hold onto them, with rugged hands and a soft heart.
8. You can’t make someone like/love you
I was partnered for 12 years and after a separation, found myself as a single 35-year-old with a lot of questions and too much time on my hands. I had a lot of identity invested in being someone to someone else, and then suddenly that was gone, which left me feeling insecure and adrift.
And in the early days post-separation, my tendency was to deflect these hard emotions by hyper-focusing on other people. I met a few folks who I desperately wanted to like me. So, when I was with them, I edited myself and created a version of me that I thought would appeal to them. In the end, I just felt more insecure and exhausted — trying to act out a “Jason” that didn’t even end up producing the “desired result” anyway.
You can’t make someone like/love you. In fact, in my experience, the harder you try, the poorer it goes (because I think it often comes from a place of insecurity/unhealthy neediness). Regardless of the nature of the relationship, true chemistry, attraction, connection, and trust cannot be forced.
Do the work to figure out who you are, what you like, what’s important to you, what attracts you, and then try to show up in spaces confident in who you are. Humans are constantly changing, and for me, this is always a bit of a moving target.
But I’ve done a lot of work to like myself. If somebody is into that, right on. If not, I’m not going to try to convince them otherwise.
9. Pleasure is worth pursuing/celebrating
Pleasure is beautiful and comes in so many different forms. For me, that could be a robust and umami-packed bowl of ramen, a procrastinated task finally tackled and accomplished, sitting on the porch in the summer when a storm rolls in, mine and a lover’s body intimately intertwined and indistinguishable from each other, a cat fully committing to lay on my chest, long late-night walks around town, playing music with people I care about . . . Chase it. Celebrate it. And when you find it for yourself, revel in it.