Hello everyone,
My name is Elena. I’m not going to say that I’ve had a difficult life, but there have been some up and downs along the way. The up’s have been all kind of fun, interesting and even awesome, but some of the downs have gone really low and deep. Those are your moments of trial, the ones that reassure you in your path… or set you in a whole new direction.
Last year, one of those moments presented itself. I would say it was the last of a chain of events that finally got me standing at a crossroad, lost, blind, trying to figure out the question that has haunted humankind for centuries: Now what?
For two years I had struggled to finish my PhD dissertation. I´d gone through all the turmoil that any doctorate-to-be experiments in this process: confusion, anxiety, desperation, drudgery, dread… Sometimes I got blocked for days, others I was stuck in the same page for hours. I often felt fatigued and drained. When the deadline approached, I understood that I was not going to make it.
I cried, I felt miserable, I couldn’t breathe. It was the first time in my life that I had failed in something that I was determined to do, that I knew I was capable of doing and felt so important.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
The good thing is that I understood that something must have not been going well inside of me for such a thing to happen and, whatever it was, I was not going to let it rob me of any more opportunities. I found counselling and resolved to look ahead and not back. There it was, sprouting from within me. Change.
A.D.D. (Amazingly divine discoveries)
One of the things I discovered in this process is that I have ADD, that is, Attention Deficit Disorder without Hyperactivity. There is a great deal of controversy around this matter and I’m far from being knowledgeable about it, but I can tell you this… The minute I knew, a lot of things made sense. Looking at my CV, you’d think that I’ve always been a model student, but the truth is that I was terrible. My assignments or homework were always late or done in the very last minute, my notes (if any) were messy and disorganized and as a child any of my teachers would’ve told you that I was inattentive, slow and “always in the clouds”. As it turns out, it all formed a pattern coherent with an ADD brain. Go figure.
Yes, some of you will call it laziness or just childhood, but the fact is that I had always being aware of having a brain that seemed to work differently than that of the people around me. That’s exactly what ADD means, a brain that is wired differently.
Let me use an analogy to explain. A car can have a gasoline engine or a diesel engine. They use different fuel, the gear is changed at different revolutions, they perform slightly differently under certain circumstances, for instance a diesel engine is more fuel efficient when driving long distances, but a gasoline engine works wonderfully inside the city. However, any of them will take you where you want to go smoothly as long as you are familiar with the nature of your machine.
So, if an average person’s brain is the gasoline engine and an ADD person’s brain is the diesel, then one could say that my struggles come from trying to run “my machine” with the wrong fuel. The pace was wrong, the performance faulty on occasion. As I was saying, I was going places, but not smoothly. I was bound to crash, and I did.
Smoothing with smoothies
Naturally, I looked for an expert and the first thing my “mechanic” changed was the fuel. I needed more greens on my diet, starting first thing in the morning. So I ditched a whole life of having milk and cereal for breakfast and jumped onto green smoothies.
The very first one was made out of celery, spinach, coriander and coconut milk. Surprisingly, it was delicious. More surprisingly, I was not hungry at all until lunch. Usually, by 1:00 p.m., I’m usually in a state of MUST-HAVE-FOOD-NOW, but that combination of vegetables, seemingly unappealing, curbed my appetite and reduced my cravings like a charm. And the third most surprising fact, I felt lighter and energized.
Over the next weeks, I cut down on diary and white flour and gradually, most of my gluten was gone… And so was the brain fog.
Clear Vision
Have you ever driven through fog? You can’t see where you’re going, shapes are blurred, every sound muffled and the world seems to be in slow motion.
That is what happens in your brain when it’s not nourished with the right food and physical and mental activity.
As I progressed through the changes in my diet, I also made an effort to keep active by taking long walks by the sea and resuming my Pilates practice. This is my way of pumping up and getting my batteries charged.
The final thing to help me dissipate the fog is to have frequently a time for some sort of meditation. I find that those are the perfect moments for gaining clarity, and that has finally brought me here. For I finally understood but my calling, my vision, mission, vocation, my dream. What I want is to write, to communicate..
I am a writer.
You know what? For years I told myself every excuse not to write: “it’s impossible to get published”, “I’m not that good”, “I don’t have ideas”. Thankfully, you never know what lies ahead and where life is going to take you. Last year, it took me to that crossroad where I finally saw that you got to do what your gut tells you to do and nothing else matters. I chose the path of writing and celebrating my creativity. That’s why I’m writing this. My first step of this journey of a thousand miles.
