168: Little Jolt of Joy – The Enemy Isn’t Failure

Failure Isn’t the Enemy, Apathy Is

I have a wonderful free community, well over 750 people now, kind and supportive, sometimes chatty and sometimes just quietly along for the ride. When people join, I ask where their biggest frustration lies with their home, mostly so I know what to talk about here. The answers are what you’d expect: trouble planning, trouble organizing, trouble keeping things clean, losing things, struggling to keep it all functioning for their families. None of that concerns me. Executive function, order, prioritization, time, execution, of course those are the areas where ADHD brains struggle. That’s not a surprise, and it’s not a failure.

I keep pushing this podcast toward techniques that lean into our creativity, our ingenuity, our ability to try new and different approaches simply because they’re novel and interesting enough to hold our attention, techniques that work with urgency instead of against it. But I want to caution against something else entirely: seeing failure, or mess, or disorganization, or chaos as the actual enemy.

When you look around and see all of that, most of the time what you’re really looking at is evidence that you tried something. Things in different stages. Attempts that fizzled out partway through. None of that is bad. It means you’re still in the fight.

The real enemy is apathy, the moment you decide you’re never going to get it right and stop trying altogether. That’s when the real stress sets in, or worse, the absence of stress because you’ve stopped caring enough to feel it. I’m not a mental health professional, and if you’re finding yourself genuinely apathetic about your life as a whole, please reach out to someone for real support. But if what you’re looking at right now is simply the visible result of effort that went sideways, or got interrupted, or didn’t quite land the way you hoped, that’s not failure. That’s still you, in the game.

If you want some company on this journey, some encouragement, some proof you’re not the only one who can’t quite figure out how to keep it all together, I’d love to have you in the free group. It’s completely free, and knowing others are in the same boat tends to make all the difference.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.