When things get difficult, we tend to look back, tend to see how things could have been different. Unfortunately, the life analogy of the “fork in the road” is misused. To use that analogy as a realism, the road behind the fork must turn to quicksand once we remove our foot from the place in which we stood. That is, we can’t go back.
This is more real to me than ever in New York City, a city which moves at such a rapid speed. It never stops.
My year has been full of choices. These choices have caused me to hurt others, hurt my back account, and gain 7 pounds. These same choices have caused me to make new friends, learn more about myself, and embark on a new adventure.
My temp job is ending in a week. I am terrified, but also not. My job search so far has been futile but this puts a fire under me and I am strong under pressure.
I am tempted at this moment to look back at the negative choices I made to get me here, specifically the heart I broke, but if I look back, I wallow in it, it ceases to have a purpose.
My only option is to find motivation, push forward, and to turn my mistakes into a catalyst for a better future for everyone involved.
I look at where I am.
“If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere” -Frank Sinatra
I am making it in an expensive city, getting interviews daily and at the very least, keeping my head above water.
How do you stay motivated when your past mistakes keep knocking at your back door?
Author: Room to Regulate
Room to Regulate started as an emotional release – I was tired of giving space to all the heaviness that comes with being your family epicenter – when I'm not regulated, no one is regulated. I wrote it all down. Every overwhelming, anxious thought. I sat with it. Then I built around it – because my story isn't unique.
I have ADHD – late diagnosed, of course, the Millennial Mom special. Our anxiety manifested in different ways. We were unlabeled, mislabeled, re-labeled. We held it together through our 20s. Many of us excelled in our careers, and then came motherhood.
For a long time I thought the exhaustion, the mental load, the constant recalibrating was just what motherhood felt like for everyone. Don't get me wrong. Whether you are neurodivergent, raising a neurodivergent child, a house full of neurotypicals (do those exist?!), married, unmarried, working, or not – parenthood knocks the wind out of you. And when you're an information seeker, the "why" rabbit hole is endless. It took a while to understand that a lot of what I was carrying wasn't a personal failing — it was a structural one. The systems around us — schools, workplaces, insurance, policy — were never built as an ecosystem. They were built as individual systems. The byproduct of that puts families with the most structural need at the highest risk for falling through the cracks. The hardest parts of my days were the predictable result of that gap, not evidence that I was doing it wrong.
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