I’ll do my best to keep the chronology clear.
I was on the verge of a potential Big Break in early 2020, when I released my fourth album, performed at a national Jewish conference, and was generating some buzz that was getting me inquiries about future work. I felt pretty healthy (for someone with autoimmune issues, anyway), felt secure in who I was and what I was doing and why, I was in a long term, loving and committed relationship and it was a good time in my life.
Then, three weeks after I released my fourth album, the world closed down and I could not tour and promote the new album, could not perform or teach anywhere except my living room, and everything dried up. We were shut up in our very little house, unable to do much of anything.
When things began to inch open a little in early 2021, I took a gig and promptly caught Covid. I did not fully recover. I became dizzy whenever I changed positions or rolled over in bed, had shortness of breath and severe brain fog and fatigue, and could not work at all. Eventually, and only by making a lot of noise, my doctor was able to get me into the city’s only Long Covid clinic, where my Long Covid diagnosis was confirmed and a modicum of “treatment” was offered, coordinated by someone I could only see online because she was working from home while fighting cancer. Haltingly, slowly, my symptoms began to fade after eighteen months, and I was able to return to gigging in earnest in 2022. But the gigs just weren’t there to the same extent as before; Covid had forced a few synagogues to close and others to merge, and far fewer could afford to hire even someone as affordable as me to be visiting artist.
I was tired, depressed and out of shape, and if I caught a mild cold, the Long Covid symptoms would return in a milder form. Things had been difficult for the both of us, but Sweetie was returning to work as an annotator when concert venues reopened and orchestras began welcoming live audiences again.
Meanwhile, I took the few out of town gigs I could, and while I was still recovering from the last vestiges of Long Covid I made a fifth album at home, using the simplest computer program I could find. Friends mixed and mastered it and I released it in January of 2023. But things weren’t progressing very well. I was beginning to struggle emotionally again, in a way hadn’t since I had stared perimenopause in my late 40s.
I was also struggling physically. Recovery from Long Covid was slow and frustrating. I’d begun playing out at local mics in an effort to get my music in front of a new, more local audience and hopefully land some gigs. I was able to land a very part-time job at a local synagogue, playing service music twice a month for an appreciative congregation and working with a very kind, thoughtful rabbi. I was also able to schedule an out of town gig for December and I looked forward to traveling again.
Then, in early September, I returned to Washington State to fulfill my duties as cantorial soloist during the High Holy Days, for a small community I’d been serving for six years. But I was having difficulty with my hands, which began to hurt painfully if played guitar for too long. I muscled through the services, gritting my teeth and popping Tylenol like candy. I went for multiple X-rays, tests and examinations and waited for an answer and possible treatment. I gritted my teeth through the early December Artist residency, came home and got the news that, in addition to advancing arthritis I also had a severe case of tendinitis in both hands, exacerbated by playing guitar. I was advised to stop playing completely for a minimum of four months, and warned that, while it might be possible to return to playing guitar for pleasure on an occasional basis, my days of daily, high-octane practicing and performing were likely at an end.
So I decided, after talking with Sweetie, to file for disability. At my age, with the multiple health issues I was dealing with, I was hard-pressed to find an employer who’d accommodate them all, and I was too old to qualify for subsidized retraining programs available to younger workers. So filing for disability made sense.
While dealing with all the physical issues and waiting for a diagnosis about my hands, I found in my files a discharge letter from a counselor I’d seen in 2018-19. The letter had stated a diagnosis of depression, which I’d been diagnosed with in 2014, and it also stated a diagnosis of ADHD, which I had not noticed at the time.
That’s right.
I’d been diagnosed with ADHD in 2019, but did not know it, nor had it been discussed at all in my sessions with that counselor because Medicaid only covered so many sessions with her and I was running out of paid sessions. (In retrospect, I recall that all I did at our sessions was talk and she responded only occasionally with a question of her own. She was probably a poor fit for me, but what did I know? And what could I hope to accomplish in only fifteen sessions anyway?) So the diagnosis of ADHD didn’t actually reach my brain until 2023, after the Covid lockdown and my failure to restart my music career afterwards.
When I began researching what ADHD was and how it played out in women (differently than in men), it all began to make sense. It rocked my world, causing me to look back and question so much about myself. Who was I really? What was I meant to do with my life, and had a gotten all that wrong? I’ve been reeling since October when the diagnosis finally sank in. My doctor referred me to an ADHD clinic with a nine-month wait list, so I went looking for counseling on my own, and eventually found someone who accepted Medicaid patients. We began working together in November.
There’s a fair amount of overlap to all these things, so as you can imagine, every time I got more information about my health it was mostly bad, and emotionally cumulative.
Here I am in late March 2024. I feel a little bit like a cartoon version of the Book of Job, in that it’s been one thing after another and every time I think I can get up I trip again. I really hope I can stop tripping for awhile.
My rabbi and I have agreed that I can lead services without guitar and everyone would be fine with that. So at least I still have that to look forward to each month.
But unpacking the ADHD diagnosis has been far more difficult. It has invited a host of questions, as I’ve wondered about the path of my life and how much of it was based on choices inappropriate to who I was and how I’ve moved through the world. I am doing this work with some help, as I am in counseling and have started taking medication to help with mood regulation that is a challenge for people with ADHD. I’ve come to understand that my lifelong pursuit of “interestingness” and my decision to work with my hands for most of my adult life were probably extensions of the ADHD search for dopamine. (People with ADHD have brains that are wired differently, and which do not produce nearly as much dopamine as neurotypical brains. So we chase dopamine by doing all sorts of different things, often jumping from one to another because the interestingness is what’s required for our brains to make dopamine.)
Related to this, people with ADHD also take more risks than the average neurotypical human, because they’re chasing dopamine. When we can’t get it by pursuing interestingness actively, we will often do so stupidly by eating crap filled with salt and sugar, shopping (because shopping is simply another form of pursuit). We struggle with math, with money management (bad math and shopping!), and with self-discipline (Risk taking! Interestingness!).
We also struggle with executive function — doing something that needs getting done when it doesn’t interest us will take an agonizingly long time — while at the very same time we can devote ourselves to something of interest indefinitely because if we’re interested we can hyper-focus on it and accomplish all sorts of knowledge and skill.
In hindsight, it’s possible that some of my choices made perfect sense for who I was and would come to be. I got so good at music because I really enjoyed playing musical instruments and playing daily was likely a way to chase dopamine while I was also getting better at them. In fact, I spent a great deal of my life using my hands. I disassembled and rebuilt a mechanical alarm clock when I was a kid, and later graduated to learning how to repair bicycles, which led to a thirty-year career as a professional bicycle mechanic. The bike career overlapped with the music career, and I spent nearly all of my adult life using my hands.
When I was diagnosed with tendinitis and had to stop playing guitar, and could only play drums in moderation, it was like being handcuffed, physically, mentally and emotionally. And it came at a time when my ADHD diagnosis was still new and I didn’t know how to live with it.
So I have been very hard to live with.
I am fortunate that my Sweetie still loves me, and I am sorry for whatever stress I am creating right now.
I hope that my disability claim will be accepted, because it will help make material things easier.
As for trying to figure out what I’m meant to do with my life going forward, I still have no idea. And that unknowing has been incredibly difficult to live with. I find myself in a time when my emotions are all over the map, when I feel intensely vulnerable and uncertain of so many things. And my emotions are swirling every day, sometimes by the hour. This is, I’m sure, making me even harder to live with.
To my beloveds: I am really sorry for this time. I think that under the circumstances it’s unavoidable. So thank you for being patient with me while I go through this. It will take more time while I figure out how to live with my unasked self and what I’ll do going forward.
To everyone else: it’s a very interesting time, even as it’s also really frustrating and scary. My friends will be patient and anyone who can’t be will let me know by their absence. In this moment I’m okay with that possibility.
In a couple of hours I might feel some other way. I just don’t know.
..::sigh::..
No comments:
Post a Comment