Not wanting to admit failure to follow through

Maybe I'm the only one who has done this...BUT maybe I'm not, so I'm going to wear my underpants on the outside and admit this so you'll know you're not alone. There's a lot of shame behind this, as I believe there is a lot of shame behind the actions of many of us who had challenging childhoods and coincidentally or not coincidentally have now been diagnosed with ADHD.

First I have to explain that my financial picture changed in a drastic way after my brain surgeries took me out of the workforce. Yep. Those painful words to some: Fixed income. So both of these situations were a hit on a limited budget, and yet my failure to follow through had them continuing for not just months and months but years in one case, money I couldn't afford stupidly wasted because I didn't want to admit I was never going to get to why I was paying for the services in the first place. Pride at first, stubbornness all along the way, and later forgetfulness, selective memory, however you want to look at it. If you're cringing reading this, join the crowd. :-)

When I realized a few years ago that I had lost interest in life pretty much, I knew I had to somehow turn things around and decided I deserved to have fun, and so I signed up for a Microsoft game membership. I was determined to make the time to just sit and relax and hopefully get some pleasure out of it. Months went by, and I never sat down to relax. More months and more months and -- well, you get the picture. Finally my daughter, who I lived with, kind of pressured me into seeing that I was never going to get around to it and I was just throwing money at Microsoft for the hell of it and to my own detriment. Got that one finally canceled, but at the same time I had another subscription going for a different reason.

I wanted to learn some cool special effects using Adobe After Effects and found a class for 10 bucks on Udemy. I signed up for the Adobe subscription, and that allowed me to use all the programs covered under their Creative Cloud program. Maybe I'd learn how to use Illustrator also on the drawing tablet I had purchased with the hopes of figuring out how to use it but never made the effort to learn either because I was cowed by the idea of not being an artist and foolishly thinking I actually could manage it. This is the one -- of course the more expensive one -- that went for years and years not only because I never opened up the course once I purchased it but because I couldn't seem to remember when the year subscription expired, and I would get roped into another year because, if you missed that cancellation date, you were stuck again for an entire year. For some reason, this year I finally thought to put a reminder on my phone calendar. Probably no surprise that, when it came up a week ago, I didn't attend to it because I am the Queen of Procrastination, and I extended it on the calendar for another week. That was yesterday when it popped up again, and I probably would have ignored it again but for the fact that I'm a bit worried that I may be having symptoms that women have prior to a heart attack, and I thought that I would not get it canceled again for another year if I ended up in the hospital. Yesterday I actually signed into my account and canceled it despite the fact that I had never gotten to that $10 class. I finally won over my pride. It would have renewed today, and I am considering it a win that they didn't get to rope me in for another year. It would have been my own fault of course, but still...

This is all because I didn't want to admit that I let things go so long without using them, and the irony is that I let them go longer, still unused, because of my shame. I paid the price literally. So if you ever have done something similar and have felt shame, you're not alone. You can explain it however you want to...childhood trauma, ADHD, child of narcissist. It really doesn't matter. But the thing about shame is that you kind of take away its power when you call it out like this. For some reason it doesn't have as much of a hold on you when you get brave like that. We are who we are, shitty at some things, brilliant at others, and it's okay to be perfectly imperfect human beings.

Sending you love today. Have a good weekend.

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