Living Two Truths: Gratitude and Change in an ADHD Life

In this Thanksgiving-week episode of Organizing an ADHD Brain, I’m inviting you into a very real season of my life — the messy middle of moving across the country with my husband, and everything that stirred up inside me.

If you’re someone who feels every life transition deep in your nervous system — the overwhelm, the freeze, the “this is too much and also I’m glad I’m doing it” duality — this episode is for you.
 You’re going to hear stories, yes… but also practical grounding, gentle reframes, and reminders that you’re not behind. You’re just human. And your ADHD brain is allowed to have a tender response to big change.

We explore:
 🌱 how growth often feels chaotic before it feels good
 🌗 the power of holding two truths at once
💛 the hidden emotional labor of transitions
🧠 ADHD responses that show up during change
🙏 gratitude that doesn’t ignore the hard
🌬️ and simple ways to regulate when life gets loud

Megs Getting out of debt journey: The Messy Middle of Getting out of Debt

01:30 — Introduction + Thanksgiving Greetings
A warm, grounding check-in… and a reminder you’re not expected to hold it all together during the holidays.

01:36 — The Journey Across the Country
How a cross-country move cracked me open, stretched my capacity, and exposed all my ADHD “under stress” patterns.

03:08 — Insights from the Journey
What big change teaches us about identity, self-trust, and nervous-system safety.

03:34 — Organizing and Personal Growth
Why your home often mirrors your emotional landscape — and how change shakes both up.

04:31 — Embracing Dual Emotions
Holding joy + grief, excitement + overwhelm at the same time. (ADHD brains feel all the things, sometimes all at once.)

05:28 — The Move to Nashville
The messy middle, the tears in the car, and why transitions don’t follow a clean timeline.

09:49 — Adventures in Georgia
Finding grounding in small moments, even when everything else feels like a lot.

10:44 — Facing Challenges + Building Resilience
How to navigate hard seasons with compassion, not pressure. And what to do when your ADHD brain freezes.

15:40 — Regulation + Self-Trust
Tiny nervous-system resets you can use when your environment (or emotions) feel too big.

23:44 — The Importance of Gratitude
Not the forced kind — the gentle, “I’m finding one small good thing today” kind.

27:37 — Final Thoughts + Coaching Invitation
A soft invitation into support if you’re craving co-regulation, momentum, and systems that don’t collapse in three days.

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Transcript

Megs: 0:39

Hey, happy Thanksgiving week and welcome back to another episode of organizing an A DHD Brain. This week I wanna share a little bit more about the journey that myself and my husband have taken across the country this year. It's been full of insights, but at the same time, I don't know that I have a ton to share with you yet about how it has allowed me to grow as a person. I wanted it to be full of these aha moments along the way that I could see in the moment and say, wow, I'm really growing and I don't know that life is that easy. I don't know that you can really have that understanding in the moment. That's probably why there's so many self-help books out there, so that these people who have been through the messy middle and have now come up with frameworks and understandings and the aha moments after the fact can share them with you so that as you're experiencing your own messy life moments, you can understand them and respect them in a different way, but you're not necessarily going to understand a framework for your own life until you can really. Get beyond it a little bit more, and right now we're still in the messy middle As of this show date, my husband will be in his second week of a new job and he hasn't had a job. He left his job back in July and we've been traveling, he's been job hunting, and we've been trying to figure out what it looks like to build a foundation in Massachusetts versus Colorado. It has been super interesting. I'm reading a book right now called How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend. It's written by Rachel Barr. She's a neuroscientist and oh my gosh, if you get the audible version, she is the most beautiful voice to listen to. Holy smokes. And there's a quote in the book. When we skip the journey and jump straight to the curated endpoint, we miss out on all the unexpected detours and discoveries along the way, so good. I talk about the before and after all the time because on Instagram, on social media, we see these beautiful before and afters, and sometimes we see a little bit of the process. But when it comes to organizing, so often we see these bins that have replaced this chaos of life and we think, oh my. I could do that in a weekend and get something like that to last. Not really truly understanding that there's change that needs to happen. Inwardly understanding our beliefs, truly understanding the actions we've been taking and the reasons why we do things for so long. That's why often we do fail when it comes to organizing, because we don't have beliefs and actions that truly match the lifestyle that we desire. And when we're guided through understanding the new beliefs that we want and the new actions we wanna dig to get there, we can truly start to understand where we're going. This year, I will tell you the gift that I have been given, the aha moment I've had is that two things can be true at the same time. That I can be so incredibly frustrated and sad about letting go about selling my home and leaving my friends and leaving a life. I thought that I would continue to build in a place that I had moved to in a place that I still believe is truly magical in Colorado, and I can be grateful for the decision I made to move forward. I can still be excited about what's still to come. Both of those things can be true. At the same time, when you're thinking about letting go, you can be sad to let go of your stuff, of the person. Who has everything for every possible event covered because you are the hero in all of these stories, and you can also be so grateful to have less pressure on you, less decisions to make because there's less stuff in your home. Both of those things can be true. Five months ago. We woke up really early in the morning, said goodbye to our home. Went and picked up our girls who had a sleepover in a tent with one of their best friends at our neighbor's house and said goodbye to our house. And as we started driving across the country, there was a lot of tears, there was a lot of sadness, and at the same time, there was a lot of hope. We drove for a couple days, and when we landed in Nashville, I remember getting to the house and we had booked an Airbnb for about a week. It was pet friendly, and I was so excited to have a fenced in backyard, and as I walked into the backyard, it was less than remarkable. It wasn't very exciting to look at The seats didn't look very comfortable, and I was slightly disappointed while also trying to hold on to every bit of hope that I could. My girls decided that they wanted to go outside and play with the dogs, so it took all my might and I decided to run around with them. And I remember running around the yard and seeing the dogs run because they had been so exhausted from sitting in the back of the car for so long and it felt so good and it was impossible not to smile. That same night our girls saw fireflies for the first time, and that was so cool. There weren't very many, but it was so neat to be able to sit in the backyard and just notice. I was really grateful for that little glimmer in that moment. I was grateful for the laughter of running around for the dogs, and my body still felt fully tight. My stomach was in knots. My chest felt like it was really heavy and overwhelming, and I was grateful. Fast forward a couple nights later. It was our last night in Nashville, and we knew we wanted to do something, but we were also so tired. We found this incredible pizza place that had wood-fired pizza, and we decided to get the girls McDonald's. And as we were about to drive back to the Airbnb, I said to my husband, you know what? Let's drive downtown Nashville and just look at the lights. Wouldn't that be so cool? And initially we were both kind of hemming and hawing over it and deciding all do we actually wanna do this? We're so tired. And we did it. We drove down into Nashville, and down in Nashville there's actually a replica of the Parthenon from Greece. I don't know if you knew that, but it's pretty fascinating. It is huge. It's awe inspiring, and we drove down there and we sat and ate right next to it. As we looked at the colored lights that illuminated the Parthenon right next to the city lights of Nashville. After we ate, we decided to get out of the car and walk around and just enjoy being. We were in no rush. We had nowhere to be. We had. Nothing else to do, but look forward to another trip the next day, and we walked around. I remember hearing in the distance music. Then as if someone was speaking and I saw these lights coming from a field over across the way and we walked down from the Parthenon steps over hills, and I remember Cora fell and poor thing hurt herself. And that was a bit of a mess'cause we could hardly see it was super dark, there was lights and we were using our phones as flashlights, but we were trying to find our way and We walked over to people performing. There was a performance outside on the city lawn and it was so cool. We couldn't quite see and likely you had to buy tickets. So we were standing a bit further away. Because we weren't ready to sit and watch this performance. It lit me up inside. It just reminded me that there was so much more that I had been missing out on in my life in Colorado, and that night I still missed Colorado with my whole entire heart. Before we left that night, underneath the Parthenon, there is a statue and a tribute to the women's suffrage movement. And I didn't realize they had that in Nashville. And that was really cool because I was able to teach a little bit of history to my girls and we took a picture in front of these big bronze statues of women fighting for the right to vote. And I was talking to the girls about what that looked like. When I look back on our time in Nashville, I think about these little moments, these little glimmers that gave me hope for our future. it didn't drown out all the hard. All the yuck, all the ridiculousness that we went through as well as we left our home behind. But it did make it just a little bit easier to face the future. So then we drove to Georgia, and this is where we decided to live for about a month. Now people are like, why did you live in northern Georgia for a month? And really it came down to who has a place for us to live for at least a month? Is it realistic? And within the budget, does it have a pool that we can swim in? And did it look cool on the inside? I really wanted to stay someplace. That was actually cool. And there was a slide that started in the upstairs and came down into the living room. Who wouldn't wanna slide in their room? Perhaps not forever, because gosh, is it loud? And my goodness, did it cause some dysregulation in my heart. But also it was a really cool house. It was shaped like an octagon. We saw no less than 15 bears on this adventure that we had this summer. In that house, it was so uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable because we had to drive up these ridiculous hills, and at the very top of the hill we almost lost our trailer and by almost lost, our car had been driving all day long. We were towing a trailer with our stuff. It was probably about 2,500 pounds. And at this last switchback on the mountain, getting up to this place that we were staying in, the car stopped moving forward. My husband had his foot on the gas going straight down. And the car started moving backwards. So something happened in that moment that the car was like, Nope, I give up now. we had to make some decisions pretty quickly in the moment. I looked at my husband and I remember trembling. My whole body was shaking, and he looked at me. I looked at him and we were very present in that moment. I wanted to run away. I wanted to cry. I wanted to figure out how we were gonna get out of the situation, but we had no choice but to face it head on. Truly uncomfortable. So hilariously, I brought up chat. GPT Adam's looking on the internet, trying to figure out how we can get our car to move. We're literally on a slant and the trailer is now curving into the mountain, thank goodness, not out of the mountain. So we got out, we emptied half of the contents of what we had on the side of the road, and Adam was able to get the car to go up the rest of the mountain without us in it. And the girls were so incredible. They started helping me move all of our stuff up to just another part of the switchback that would be easier for us to get our car back down there and load later on. And then we started walking up to this house we had never been to on a hill with whatever we could carry in our hands. we had barely any service at that point in time, so I had no idea how my husband was doing, but he ended up passing the driveway when he got up to the top of the hill, which then goes down another hill, and he had to turn the car all the way around in order to get it back up into the driveway. And when he got to the driveway, the car just stopped working. There was no going forward. There was no going backwards. He had to just park it and let it cool down and luckily letting it cool down was everything. That is what allowed us to continue to use our car that we had just bought this last summer. So it all worked out, but we also walked into the house. We were so excited to be there. And we let the dogs inside because there was no fence. And of course, one of the dogs poops all over the floor. So that is something we have to take care of. Cleaning up right away. We can't find anything to clean it up as far as cleaning solution or anything like that. So we have to try to find it in the trailer. Meanwhile, the rest of our stuff is still down on this switchback in this private community that we've rented. And we are frazzled. We are so overwhelmed and we don't know what to do next. That was an adjustment. We figured it out and it was okay. We got all our stuff back to the top of the mountain and the person who hosted the Airbnb offered us to park the trailer that we had down at the bottom of the hill, when we ended up leaving that house. We did round trips down to bring all of our stuff that we had unloaded into the house now, back outta the house to reload the trailer all over again. That was hell. And it was really cool to stay in that house. And there were a lot of spiders and that was awful. And we learned a lot about spiders and that was really cool. And it was hard to focus or get into a routine or to even understand what our new comforts were because we didn't have our comforts of home. And this was a strange place that we couldn't have anything delivered to. And it was 20 minutes, to the nearest store, and it was really private and allowed us to spend more time as a family. And enjoy one another and really get to understand each other as a family. All of these things were true at the same time, while feeling so completely uncomfortable and excited. Some of the glimmers here that I really loved were the fireflies again. Oh my God, there were so many fireflies. There were nights that we would just sit and stare at the fireflies in awe. There were so many, I hadn't seen so many since I was a kid.. Other cool things we saw were the mama and her baby dear. time while we were there, my husband and I were in the hot tub and the girls were upstairs and two bears decided to walk up the driveway and started to approach us. In the hot tub. Holy smokes. Talk about regulation. We were in true fight or flight'cause we were like, holy smokes. There's literally a bear right there. Now, he wasn't in attack mode, but also, I don't know if you've ever been approached by a bear or not, but my heart was beating. I wanted to run. I wanted to yell. I wanted to scream, and I wanted to just feel safe again. And eventually we did. But it was interesting because as we talk about regulation. With a DHD, we're so often in fight or flight mode, we are scanning our environment for threats and then we react based on that. And so much of what we do is to keep ourselves safe. It's not as if we're thinking about that consciously. It's not as if we see a doom pile and we run in the other direction and say, I'm gonna keep myself safe right now. You're not consciously saying that, but you have a belief. That you can't be organized and you haven't been organized. So why would I start? Now? You look at the clutter, it makes you freak out because holy smokes, that looks scary. That whole entire box that you'd need to make a decision on all at once at the same time, which is not possible by the way, and you run in the other direction. It does keep you safe in that moment. It keeps you safe to avoid the inevitable decision that you have to make on the stuff that's. Inside that box, but you don't have a deadline, so you don't need to make it right away. So while it is a threat, you can run in the other direction for now and avoid it because it feels better in the short term. One of the things that we learned by making these decisions of selling our home, of moving across the country and deciding what we want, is that. We're not in it for the immediate gratification anymore, although we want it. We do really want it. We're in it for the journey of learning and growing and understanding. Understanding who we are based on these new experiences that we've had. I recently was interviewed on a podcast about finances, and I shared some of our financial journey from the beginning of the year until now, and it's been fascinating to see how far we've come. I'm so happy to link that in the show notes below so you can hear a little bit more about getting out of our own messy middle. But two things can be true at the same time. While I'm still very grateful for the decision that we've made to move across the country, I am frustrated with some of the decisions that we've made in the past, and I also know that I don't have time to go back in the past and redo those things. I can accept them and I can now say what? Now? What can I now do with my life that will allow me to make better decisions? That will allow me to believe that I can trust myself to make new and encouraging decisions for my family, for our future. And through this podcast, through letting go in my home, through quitting drinking, through losing weight, I have built that self trust in myself. And because this is a new journey. It's that continuing to build self-trust that I continue to do so while I keep talking about two things can be true at the same time. There are so many things that can be true At the same time, it is not about being all happy or all sad or all excited and all in. All of you can be in while parts of you still have doubts. And that's why it's so important to have people around you that support you, that aren't doubting you. Because guess what? You are going to be the person that is always going to doubt you the most, and that's because we've seen it happen all around us. I'm really grateful for a chance to start fresh, but I'm also scared and I'm untethered and I feel very dysregulated. So often I think about how could I keep myself safe and I think about running into a closet and hiding for just a little bit. And if I do that, sometimes that is okay. Our brains crave certainty. We want to have control over what's happening next, and our nervous system is very supported through honesty, but honesty in a way that helps us grow forward. And it's okay to have both of these things be true while you know you want something certain, it is also okay to be honest and say, I can't have that right now. I can work toward it. Something that helps me to regulate myself when I do tend to go into fight or flight mode is speaking my truth out loud and speaking what I want to believe into existence. For example, when my brain says I'm overwhelmed when I look at everything I have to do, instead of saying I'm overwhelmed and I wanna run away, which keeps me safe in the moment because I'm able to avoid it, and avoidance actually keeps us safe, but only for the short term. If I want long-term success, I have to think in terms of long-term doing or taking action. So instead of saying I'm overwhelmed and running away, I say out loud, what is the smallest thing I can do right now that lets me take a tiny action forward? And that allows me to start taking steps in the right direction. Name your truths out loud. When you start to notice yourself feeling overwhelmed from where you're at, and you are being pulled in multiple directions from multiple things that are true, what is the thing you want and speak that into existence, you are safe. You are safe to feel through the uncomfortable, to feel all the feelings that come up and you're not stuck in that space. It feels so overwhelming when we're stuck in our emotions, but they are passing, they are fleeting, and it's okay to feel uncomfortable in those moments. Other things you can do to keep yourself grounded and regulated Through the dysregulation because anytime you make a change, guess what? Your fight or flight brain is actually going to act up even more because there are so many changes going on, so many things that are unexpected and so many things that are uncertain. So think about what could keep you steady. What are the things that kept you steady when it didn't feel as hard? Was it a yoga practice? Was it a morning ritual? Was it, just taking time to stretch or walk outside and take a deep breath. We often lose ourselves first. Lose these things that help us ground ourselves into the present because we start to say, I don't have time for this. Or we say, I'll get back to that when life slows down a little bit, except that you're practicing those things when life feels easier. So that. You can do it when it gets hard because you might say you don't have time to, but you actually don't have time not to. You don't actually know when life is gonna slow down again in your body, your soul, your heart, your mind all still need time to rest and repair and to revitalize in a way that allows you. To go about the day a little bit differently. In fact, when you get rest, when you hydrate, when you eat these basic things, then your A DHD symptoms will not show up as much because your brain has all the things that it needs to survive. But when you are feeling overwhelmed and feel like you don't have time in the world. Ultimately you don't have time not to pause and to enjoy your life for what it is in this moment. I was thinking yesterday about the movie Click with Adam Sandler, where he gets a remote control and he tries to fast forward through. He tries and it succeeds because it's a movie. He has this remote control that he realized controls his family. So his wife starts yelling at him and he realizes that he can actually fast forward through it, and he fast forward through the whole thing until they get to the makeup part, which is the best part, right? And then it's over. And he's fast forwarding through all of the hardships to get to the good stuff. And then life just keeps fast forwarding. He can't stop it. There's no good parts. There's no bad parts. We don't pause to enjoy any of it, and life just gets away from him. But what a beautiful way of thinking about it in our own lives. I know our brains work so fast. I know that there's so much on our to-do list that's never ending, and if we don't make a conscious decision to pause to really feel what we're going through in the moment. We're never gonna have time to later. We're just putting off the inevitable. Or we get to the point where we get so burnt out and we're like, holy smokes. How did I get here? But it's okay to take care of yourself. In fact, it's encouraged. Don't control your life by trying to fast forward through everything. I know that's not what you want, but that's what we think we should do because of the world. now, this last thing I wanna talk to you about is gratitude. I'm such a practicer of gratitude. I love gratitude, and. Don't feel like it should ever be forced. Forced in that gratitude doesn't mean I'm so happy about all of these things. That's not what it means. It means that you can still find the glimmers in life when life does not feel as supportive as you want it to. Maybe it's because you're making a change, but maybe it's because bigger things are happening out there. You can still find gratitude in life. To help remind you that you are not alone out there, and I don't mean this to be in an everything's fine kind of energy, more like it's not pretending that everything is good. It's about noticing what's still good when things everywhere else seem like they're not. Because when you train yourself to notice these things, your brain starts to look for the good instead of really dwelling on all of the bad, and we all know. Our brains can dwell on the bad. One of the things that I do when I'm dysregulated is I ruminate and I'm constantly playing this mental litigation battle in my head. And I'm not only the lawyer, but I am also the defendant. I'm also the prosecution, and I'm also the judge. And it's exhausting because no one wins in that mental litigation battle inside my head. And when I sit and I look for the good. I start to see it more and more around me, and that makes all of the yuck, all of the bad, all of the things that are a little too overwhelming, feel that much easier to deal with. I'm not skipping the messy middle. I'm not skipping this season. I'm not skipping my human experience because this will all add up to so much more. One day you'll read about this in my book, I'm sure. Also, I'm in this really cool group called Dream Lifting, and my friend Mare does these dream lifting classes where we have specific intentions, things in ways we want to live our life. What's incredible about it is not only does she speak her truth, but she also talks about having her own human experience along the way. Just because I speak about these things and I know about these things, it actually means that I also struggle with them or have struggled with them, and I am at this different point to be able to speak about them. And now I'm going through this whole new journey that will allow me to be able to speak on it from a place of additional expertise some day in the future. Because I'm allowing myself to go through this lived experience and have my human experience of living through all these emotions and these hardships and these perceived failures. It allows me to have this life to live my life. To enjoy it for what it's worth, and to figure out what's next. When I left my old home, I thought we were leaving to find a new place. I honestly thought it would be a little bit easier than it is, but that's okay. I'm learning, and I don't know that people can truly explain to you the emotion and the exhaustion that can come from change, which is why I am trying to somewhat put it into words, but as I left, I'm finding more and more permission to hold to truth. At the same time, I can feel both chaotic and calm. That's my truth. I can feel both exhausted and I can feel excited for what's to come and I can feel grief while at the same time feeling gratitude. All of these things can be true. So when you think about this upcoming week and Thanksgiving, slowing down, maybe pausing for just a moment. Ask yourself, what two truths am I holding right now? Both of those truths are yours. Both of them can be honored, and if you're holding five truths or 10 truths, because let's be honest, we hold a lot of truths. It's okay to accept all of those truths as your own in this moment, in this day, because each day is going to bring new truths that allow you to see your life for what it is and what it is becoming. Maybe even what it has been because all of those versions of yourself make up who you are today. for the month of December. I have two coaching spots open I would love to invite two people to join me in understanding what their beliefs are. Understanding what they're holding onto and why they continue to take the actions they take in their home with A DHD. And when it comes to organizing, I am an A DHD coach and I'm a professional organizer, and I lead you through a 12 week journey on what it looks like to find more peace and calm in your home, and really build the self-trust you need to continue doing it. Another truth that I have for you is that this podcast now ranks in the top 2.5% worldwide, and I'd be honored if you could share that with someone you love at Thanksgiving. This year, if you could share my podcast, ask them to enjoy it or to share it with a friend as well, I would be so grateful. Also as an additional tool this year, I would encourage you to use the episode from November 10th as something that you continuously come back to on a regular basis. The episode title is Before You Add To Cart, how to Avoid Holiday Clutter with A DHD. If you've listened to it once, awesome. But if you are trying to add less to your home this year and to buy less and potentially even have a budget, unless that word scares you, and even if it does, that's okay. You don't have to keep yourself comfortable anymore. It's okay to be uncomfortable because there's peace on the other side of it. I would really encourage you to listen to it a couple times. Listen to it before you go shopping each time. Not to make you avoid shopping at all, but just to make more intentional, realistic decisions for yourself so that the holidays don't add as much to your back. When it comes to January, be kind to your future self. All right, I'll see you next week.