Published: January 2nd 2020, 3:42:26 pm
Time is hard to keep track of for me. ADHD makes lots of things hard to keep track of. It's hard to recap a year or a decade when you often forget what happened five minutes ago.
In school there were built in year markers, and after that I kept track of years mostly by who I was dating or how close it was to a marker significant enough to stick in my memory. 2006 was the year I started Original Cyn. 2008 was the year the recession hit and I lost both my jobs in quick succession. 2013 was, appropriately, the worst year of my life. 2014 was the year I moved a million times. You get the idea.
But as people started their recaps and I realized that 2009/2010 was the year that.... what the hell happened that year? Who was I? How have I changed?
My livejournal no longer exists so I only have hazy memories and an itunes playlist to go off of. I *think* it was ther NYE where I drank till I puked and was so trashed that my boyfriend and his friend had to put my shoes on me so I could go home. (But I was conscious enough to make a joke about "being shod by two men at once.")
I *think* it was that year, but I'm not sure.
Things must have happened. I'm sure I did things. But mostly it was a year where my trauma (abusive relationship, sudden uneployment followed by two soul sucking jobs) finally caught up with me and I finally started seeing a therapist.
I've definitely made some accomplishments this decade but the improvement in my mental health is probably the biggest. It's been an uphill journey, with plenty of backslides, but it gets easier the more I do it. Taking care of myself helped me make good relationships and build a better career, which have helped me take better care of myself.
So that's my big lesson of the decade. Take care of yourself. You are worth the work and the time and the money.
I don't know if any of you need to hear this but, just in case: You matter. Right now. You deserve care. It doesn't matter who your friends are, or who you're dating, or what you've accomplished. Worth isn't something you earn. It's something you have.
That's so easy to forget. I forget it a lot. And not *just* because I often forget what happened five minutes ago.