Daily Prompt 2026-04-13

2026-04-13

Ha! I usually don’t participate in these daily prompts, but this one is screaming my name. I spent today ruminating about the fact that my life is currently NOTHING like I expected it to be. Setbacks, one after another, have my fifties stretching out ahead of me with great uncertainty.

I have ADHD. I was diagnosed at age 40, ten years ago, and it really helped me to sort of figure myself out… I thought that I would be more successful at setting and sticking with long term goals once the diagnosis happened and that maybe the meds would help me to get organized and on track in a life that often felt like it was just happening TO me. I have since discovered that I will never, ever, EVER, be in control of my life. That’s just not how it works.

At age 40, I was training for a triathlon, I was the mom of a ten year old boy, and I was a teacher in a special education program. That year, I had to move because the house we were renting was broken into and my son had such a terrible anxiety disorder that he couldn’t live there anymore. A year and a bit later, I was rear ended by a sizeable truck and sustained my fifth concussion along with a terrible case of whiplash and damage to my shoulder. Goodbye triathlon. Goodbye special education program.

I had to leave the special education program because my ability to cope with the repetitive, noisy, and sometimes explosive student behaviours became nonexistent. Concussion number five at age 42 did not resolve itself the same way my previous concussions had. I was having visual and auditory sensitivities and my tolerance for the bureaucratic BS was ZILCH. I told my direct superiors that they were violating the human rights of my students (which they were) and threatened to go to the Minister of Education with a complaint against them. I had zero emotional regulation and major sensory dysregulation from the concussion, so I left.

It has been more than eight years since that accident derailed my life. I FINALLY had shoulder surgery six months ago to fix something that should have been caught initially but wasn’t. I went through eight years of physio and different procedures and injections to fix something that was NOT FIXABLE without surgery. I finally paid for an MRI out of pocket because they refused to do one, telling me repeatedly that I was just in the unfortunate 1% that would never get better and that I would not ever work full time again.

Now, I am fifty, my 72 year old mom and I live together (which I never thought would happen, but that’s another story), our multi-generational home is completed by my now my young adult daughter, and I am back on medical leave because the shoulder surgery fixed the shoulder but my neck and back now have shortened muscles which are unhappy with my shoulder being back where it should be so I can’t do the required strengthening program to get myself back to work and due to the neck crap my migraines are worse than ever. Run on sentence intentional. Life just runs on and on, out of control, and I have come to the conclusion that attempting to foresee anything about life is just an exercise in futility. My ADHD brain is all messed up from dealing with post-concussion stuff as well as eight years worth of chronic pain. Just the phrase “chronic pain” is infuriating, it should be called “constant mindfucking brain frying interrobanging nonsensical agony” or something like that. Anyways, I do have a point, which I promise I am coming to presently.

In ten years, I see myself stuck in the year 1965 because that is where I time travelled to and then my time machine broke and I couldn’t fix it. I went back to the year the Grateful Dead formed so that I could be an original Deadhead and start following them around from day one. I figure if I am going to conjecture about my life ten years from now, I may as well make it a terrific mindfuck, in direct contrast to the terrible one I have lived for this past decade. Strangely enough, I am happier than I think I have ever been, and none of this is written with bitterness or vitriol. I may just finally be coming to a place of acceptance – lately it occurs to me…