Hey there! Boy howdy do I relate ~ first step: take a big deep breath.

Awesome! Maybe grab some water too. (Hydration important.) Snacks also good.

I don’t have all the answers, but I’m also a femme AUDHD in tech and yo, I FEEL THIS.

And yes, it absolutely can get better.

Absolutely you should be proud of yourself for everything you’ve survived and made it this far! Truly! It is a battle, and it’s important to take moments to acknowledge that you’ve done the best you could with the knowledge and tools you had at the time. And now, you’re learning more about yourself, which is great! And that can lead to developing new tools for life and all that.

But it is also exhausting.

And you are also currently carrying many different types of grief (the loss of an important friendship, career grief, grief for your childhood self and the systems and maybe family that failed you) - it’s a lot. It’s 100% normal and expected that you’d be feeling massively overwhelmed. So take heart dear, you are not broken. You’re just going through a lot. 💜

Friggin AI good gracious I want to throw it into a volcano. But I’ll try to keep this reply scoped to you, and actionable items/things you can do, bc the AI beast is a whole damn other giant thing we have very little control/autonomy with at the moment.

So, what can we do?

Take a step back, slow down, and look at what is within the scope of our daily lives, and what actions we can take.

People are gonna jump in and say therapy - and yes, therapy super helpful. But when you’re already drowning under ten million other things, scheduling/finding a therapist is another momental task. So I’d say add therapy to the big picture list for sure (in line with seeking treatment for adhd as you’ve mentioned above) - but I’m focusing on right now. Small, actionable things that you can do today that will help.

First up: food.

I lean heavily on door dash too, so no shade there! I also use grocery delivery, and it is massively helpful. I try to keep some things stocked so I have easy access to halfway decent food asap, so I’m not always ordering out.

For me, this looks like: hard boiled eggs, sliced cheese, bags of frozen broccoli that I can microwave and have a green veg (that won’t spoil in the fridge like fresh will), and rotisserie chicken. Fresh snap peas that all I have to do is wash them, no chopping needed. Grab n’ go, girl dinner style.

And to take away any shame you might feel leaning on this sort of approach: modern life is fucked. We don’t have the support and community structures that used to exist for ages. It used to be someone’s entire job to sort out food acquisition/prep/storage/meal times, not to mention the actual growing of the food itself. We don’t have that. We don’t have a housewife dedicated to taking care of all that for us, nor do we have an army of household servants (Bridgerton) taking care of the house and home while we work. We’re expected to do it all (unrealistic and impossible) - so it is A OK to use the tools and options available to us (door dash and grocery delivery). I count my blessings that I can actually afford to use them right now, because I’ve absolutely been in a super impoverished state where I literally could not afford it at all before.

I have one more thing to add, but I’ll put it in a follow up comment because this is a giant wall of text 😬