Not every spark deserves a fire.

I had a moment this week.

There were several moments, actually, but the one that comes to mind is the moment in which I lay at the bottom of the shower, the pelting water the only thing capable of quieting my racing mind.

It was a good moment. A healing moment. And I’d like to tell you about it.

But first, you’ll need a little bit of context.

For starters, I have ADHD. I experience many of the well known symptoms of the disorder, like difficulty focusing and hyper-fixation. However, most prominent for me is the lesser known symptom of emotion dysregulation. While not captured in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the “DSM-5”), any clinician worth their salt can tell you that emotion dysregulation is a key symptom of ADHD. The disorder impacts both the neurotransmitter dopamine and the limbic system — two critical components of our experience of emotion. As a result, individuals with ADHD can experience difficulty reining in their emotions. For me, that means I have really big feelings. They fill up my whole heart, my whole mind, and every layer of my consciousness. When I feel joy, I am joy. When I feel grief, it permeates every fiber of my body. These feelings don’t dictate my behavior like they used to, but they’re no less potent. It’s charming, in a way, and plays a huge role in the depth with which I can experience happiness.

And the second bit of context: at this particular moment in the shower, I was in the luteal phase of my hormonal cycle. Alongside the emotional volatility regularly associated with that timeframe, research has shown that ADHD symptoms can worsen during the luteal phase of biologically female bodies.

Now, like I said, all those big feelings can be charming when they’re, say, gratitude or love. If you’ve ever seen me in one of those moods, it’s pretty darn wholesome. But that moment in the shower, unfortunately, was not a time of gratitude. My heart was not overflowing with joy.

I was, in fact, anxious. And pissed. I felt like a two hundred pound weight was pressing on my sternum. Earlier in the day, I had to put away my journal and pull out my computer because I could not write fast enough to capture the speed of my thoughts. I was borderline hypomanic. My brain was fixating on every source of anxiety in my life, which (until that moment) had not even been a source of anxiety. And worse yet, I could not move on from those thoughts until I’d fixed it.

Fixed what, exactly? Fuck if I know. I wasn’t aware there was a problem to begin with.

In other words, I was in it. Bad.

Finding no other source of relief, I turned to my tried-and-true method: I lay down in a very hot shower. I closed my eyes and began to sing the Alto part of an acapella arrangement, knowing that the diaphragmatic breathing of singing would help to calm me down. The steady oohs and ahhs of the harmony gave my mind something to hold onto. I watched the rivers of water run into the drain and drowned my buzzing body in the rhythmic percussion.

Eventually, I finished the eight minute medley. My heartrate finally began to stabilize. Finally. The weight on my chest felt more like a very large cat, rather than a two hundred pound adult.

I sang another few songs before stepping out of the shower into the steamy bathroom. I’d been in there a while. I still felt activated, but less manic. Less pissed. Less inclined to act impulsively.

This is a neurochemical process, I reminded myself. This is not representative of my reality, or how I actually feel. This is a chemical imbalance, and it will pass.

It all seems so simple, writing this out — but that moment stands upon the shoulders of decades of growth and skill development. I was incapable of that level of metacognition fifteen, ten, even three years ago. A mood like that would have genuinely upended me.

I give incredible weight to my feelings. I spent years actively suppressing my internal experience. Many of the harmful decisions I’ve made in my life are the result of ignoring what’s in my heart, and huge part of my healing has been learning to trust how I feel.

But, true as all that is, so is this: not all feelings are “how you feel.” Our brains are constantly firing, thousands of trillions of action potentials per day. And while not every single one of those represents a full thought or feeling, many of them do. In all that chaos, some of those firings we label as “feelings” are bound to be meaningless — like the random urge to do something stupid.

In other words, not every spark deserves a fire. Not every thought represents your reality.

Remember that.

I share this story with you for a couple reasons:

First, one goal of this blog is to allow myself to be more seen — to take moments that could be embarrassing and isolating, and instead transmute them into experiences of connection. It’s small, but every effort counts when it comes to building a more connected world.

And second, it’s taken me years to learn how to manage my big feelings. And that shit was hard work. That moment, in the shower, I called on a whole toolkit of hard-earned strategies. Perhaps you’ll find some of them useful. Perhaps you might add them to your own repertoire. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, my own learnings can help someone else.

Or not. Perhaps you just got a little chuckle out of this. In any case, I’m glad you decided to give it a read :).