On ADHD, hot flashes, and why your brain isn’t broken — it just runs on a different kind of fuel.
There is a very particular, teeth-gritting kind of frustration that only hits at a certain stage of life. You’re hovering around fifty. There’s a pile of laundry you’ve re-fluffed in the dryer four times this week. You’re holding a cup of coffee you’ve microwaved twice already, and it’s cold again. And somewhere in the back of your mind, the voice whispers: You should have this figured out by now.
That voice. Oh, that voice.
By this point, the world — and, honestly, our own inner critics — expects us to be the Grand Poobah of Adulting. We’re supposed to have the life hacks, the color-coded calendar that actually gets followed, and the quiet, grounded energy of a woman who knows exactly where her spare house key is. All the time. Without thinking.
But when you have ADHD, “stability” feels like a language you’ve been trying to learn for nearly five decades using only a pocket dictionary and a phone with a dying battery.
One day, you are a force. You wake up clear-headed, you knock out emails before breakfast, you actually call the doctor back, and you might even roast a chicken like some kind of suburban legend. This is it,you think, leaning against the counter feeling genuinely proud. I’ve finally cracked it. I am a New Woman.
Then Wednesday rolls around.
You wake up with the cognitive processing power of a damp slice of toast. You stand in the kitchen holding a spatula, staring at the refrigerator, wondering not just what you came in for — but who, exactly, decided you were qualified to be in charge of a household. The whiplash between those two days doesn’t just annoy you. It makes you feel gaslit by your own biology.
“Our brains aren’t broken. They’re powered by interest and urgency — not by ‘shoulds.’ And at fifty, the shoulds are heavier than they’ve ever been.”
Here’s the thing nobody told us when we were younger, and that most of us are still working to believe: the inconsistency isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t laziness dressed up in excuses. It’s neurology. And neurology doesn’t come with an expiration date just because you’ve reached an age where you’re supposed to have it together.
And then — as if ADHD alone weren’t enough — menopause shows up. That delightful hormonal bonfire. The drop in estrogen is, neurologically speaking, a bit like losing the last bit of structural support in an already-shaky building. If you’ve felt like your symptoms have gone from “charmingly scattered” to “where am I and what is a spreadsheet” in the past few years, you are not imagining it. You are not losing your mind. Your brain chemistry is shifting, and it deserves acknowledgment, not shame.
Low-dopamine days are not moral failures. They are your brain recalibrating — conserving resources for the next surge, the next spark, the next Wednesday when you will absolutely roast that chicken.
So what do we actually do with all of this? We stop trying to fix the inconsistency and start building a life that assumes it’s going to happen.
On the foggy days, instead of flogging yourself up the Mount Everest of your to-do list, you look for what I think of as lateral productivity. You can’t write the report? Fine. Can you match socks for ten minutes while listening to a podcast about Victorian poisoners? Can you water two plants? Can you answer one text you’ve been avoiding? Moving sideways is still moving. A low-power day isn’t a wasted day — it’s a quiet day, and quiet days have their own kind of value.
The other thing that genuinely helps — and I say this as someone who resisted it for years because it felt like admitting defeat — is externalizing everything. If a task isn’t written on a whiteboard, shouted at a smart speaker, or stuck to the bathroom mirror in neon ink, it does not exist in our dimension. Full stop. This isn’t a workaround or a crutch. It’s scaffolding. And scaffolding is what allows buildings to stand while they’re still being worked on.
There’s also something quietly powerful about body doubling — sitting near another person, or even putting on a YouTube video of someone else cleaning their kitchen — to give your brain just enough social presence to start. It sounds strange. It works anyway. Our brains are doing the best they can with the wiring they have, and sometimes that wiring needs a little ambient company to get going.
Ultimately, being your best self at this age isn’t about becoming a linear, predictable, perfectly-scheduled person. That ship, for most of us, sailed sometime around 1994, and honestly — good riddance.
It’s about auditing your actual energy and working with it rather than against it. If you are a powerhouse at 10 PM and a zombie at 9 AM, stop trying to do your hardest thinking first thing in the morning just because that’s what the productivity gurus tell you to do. Those productivity gurus do not live in your nervous system.
It’s about giving yourself the same grace you’d extend, without hesitation, to a best friend who was struggling. You would not call her broken. You would not tell her she should be over this by now. You would make her a cup of tea, sit down next to her, and say: Hey. You’re doing better than you think.
You are a high-performance, vintage engine. You take a little extra time to warm up. You occasionally need a gentle kick to the bumper. But when you find your rhythm — your actual rhythm, not the one you’ve been told to have — you can move.
When you stop fighting the inconsistency and start learning to work with the brain you actually have, the static begins to clear. And you realize you’ve been doing a pretty incredible job all along.
You’ve got this.
