Two Things Can Be True: ADHD and Change

Megs Crawford
6 days ago
4 min read

You might remember the mountain. The afternoon our trailer stopped climbing a switchback in northern Georgia and slid backward with almost everything we owned behind it. I wrote about that move once already, when the trailer stopped on the mountain, the whole chaotic middle of it.

If your life is in the middle of a big shift right now, you already know the feeling in your chest. So let me tell you what is actually going on in there, and the one small thing that helps me most.

Why change throws your ADHD brain into fight or flight

One night on that same trip we were soaking in a hot tub when two bears wandered up the driveway toward us. My heart slammed and I wanted to get somewhere safe, immediately. That is fight or flight, and it is easy to name when there is a literal bear in the yard.

Here is what is harder to catch. Your ADHD brain runs the exact same program on the box you have been avoiding. It needs a hundred tiny decisions made all at once, and your nervous system reads that as a threat, so you leave the room. It keeps you safe from the decision for now.

Avoidance feels like relief because it is relief, for a little while.

There is a reason the pile costs so much. An ADHD brain does not get autopilot on decisions the way a lot of brains do. Each little choice pulls from the same tank, so a box of a hundred unmade decisions is not laziness staring back at you.

It is your capacity, honestly reporting what it has left.

You have probably felt this without a name for it. The form you keep not opening. The text you draft and never send. That is not you being difficult. It is a brain scanning an ordinary task for danger and finding just enough to make you flinch.

Change turns that volume all the way up. When your whole life shifts, the alarm gets louder, because suddenly nothing is certain and your brain is desperate to know what happens next.

Name your truth out loud

When my brain says I am overwhelmed and I want to run, that sentence keeps me safe and stuck at the same time. So I say a different one, out loud, where I can actually hear it. What is one tiny thing I could do this minute that counts as forward? Then I go do that one thing.

It can feel silly, talking to yourself in an empty room. Do it anyway. The point is not saying it perfectly. The point is that the loudest voice in the moment becomes yours instead of the one telling you to run. You are giving your nervous system someone to follow, and that someone is you.

Saying it out loud matters more than it should. Your nervous system gets to hear your own voice name what is true and choose which truth to walk toward. You are allowed to feel the uncomfortable thing. It is passing, even when it feels like it will live in your body forever.

You can do this in the next two minutes. Standing in front of the box, or sitting in a house that does not feel like home yet. You do not need a calm life to try it. You need one sentence you can say where you can hear yourself say it.

Two things can be true at the same time

Here is what I actually came to tell you. I can be heartbroken about the home we sold and the whole life I loved there, in a place I still think is genuinely magical. And I can be thankful we chose to go. Both, at once.

That is the permission slip. You are allowed to feel lighter without the stuff and without the pressure of being the person who has every possible event covered, while also missing who you were when you carried all of it. You do not have to pick one feeling and crown it the real one. You get to be chaotic and calm, exhausted and genuinely excited for what is coming.

You are allowed to grieve a choice you would make again.

Your version might not be a move. Maybe you love the new job and quietly grieve the person you were at the old one. Maybe you are relieved a hard season is over and a little undone that it went so fast. Neither one cancels the other. You are not being dramatic or ungrateful. You are being a whole person inside a brain that feels everything at full volume.

Gratitude that isn't pretending

This is not the everything is fine kind of gratitude. I am not asking you to be happy about the hard thing. Real gratitude is noticing what is still good when a lot of things are not. When you train your brain to look for the glimmer, it starts finding more of them, and the heavy stuff gets a little easier to carry. You do not get the clean insight while you are still inside the hard part.

So before this week gets away from you, pause and ask what two truths you are carrying right now. Maybe it is two. Maybe it is ten, because let's be honest about how much you hold. It's all yours. AND it's all allowed.

Think about it...

-Megs

The Perfect Place to Start

is where you and I do that together, one on one.

Megs is a certified ADHD coach, podcast host, and the real, distractible human behind Organizing an ADHD Brain. She helps people stop fighting their brains and start working with them, one small, doable win at a time.