Do You See Me Now?

For most of my life, it looked like I was coping. I also felt like I was coping most of the time.

Was I tired? Absolutely. Did it matter? Absolutely not…

I showed up, I got things done. I smiled, I laughed and I was the one who kept things moving. From the outside it looked like I had my shit together. Exactly as I had planned it.

When I was spinning 47 plates at once people would say, “I don’t know how you do it!” and it was like music to my ears. Be amazed mere mortals for I am here to do everything you do not want to do! Of course no one was going to stop me – why would they? I was picking up everyone else’s slack and buzzing off the praise.

I was literally the embodiment of that Katherine Tate sketch where the woman says “I can do that” even though she clearly couldn’t. The difference was, I actually could do it and if I couldn’t do it you could bet your arse I would learn how to do it in approximately 15 minutes and it would be completed like I had been doing it my entire life.

But things started to go awry.

I can’t remember how it happened but suddenly I wasn’t able to keep all of the plates in the air. My brain never seemed to land on anything long enough to complete it without a fight. My mood started to change, I wasn’t approachable anymore, I was sharp and I was defensive. I was still showing up and I was still getting things done but I wasn’t the same. Not only was I terrified, I was exhausted.

What was wrong with me?

It was then that the panic really set in. If I can see it, what if everyone else can? What if I dropped the ball on something and people suddenly saw that I wasn’t good? What if they found out I was acting the whole time? Then it hit me,

I was acting the whole time…

On the outside I looked like I had my shit together, but what no one saw was the amount of effort it took to appear ‘fine’ – I don’t think I had even considered it myself. I still don’t think I have thought about it fully.

I couldn’t take time off, what would I do? How would my world turn without me being available to meet the needs of others 24/7? Fuck…

The jig was up…and it was my fault… lazy, disorganised, useless – not words anyone had ever said to me but words I had learned to say to myself.

I was so good because I overprepared for things because I didn’t trust myself to remember. I arrived early because I was so scared of being late. I said yes to things I didn’t have capacity for because I didn’t want to let people down. And it was all crashing down, so I blamed myself. If everyone else was able to manage without this level of struggle then the only logical explanation was that I was the problem, right?

I showed up, I got things done. I laughed, I smiled and I kept things moving. But what no one saw was how exhausting it was to live like that. I constantly felt like I was fighting to keep my head above water while everyone else was just swimming.

This became my pattern. I kept going, kept trying. Kept pushing myself to be more organised, more consistent, more like the version of me that I thought everyone wanted. And from the outside, it probably looked like I was still coping. But inside I was exhausted and scared and confused.

I didn’t know that there was a reason my brain worked differently. I just knew at the time that whatever it was, I couldn’t fix it. I had no idea why it seemed so much harder for me than it did for everyone else.

It is only now that I look back I realise that I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t failing. I was wired differently – I just didn’t know it.

I poured so much of myself into how I showed up – into being reliable, capable, someone no one could question.

Home felt harder, life admin was impossible. The small everyday things were slipping through the cracks while I focused all of my energy on holding together the version of me that the world had it’s eye on. And because that part looked okay for so long, no one questioned it. Not even me.