Filling in the blanks

It’s been almost five years since I blogged in any serious way. In that time, I wrote the best part of two novels, Covid happened, inflation shot up and I took a dark and difficult corporate job to pay the mortgage. I got diagnosed AuDHD – that’s autistic and ADHD for the uninitiated – the worst, or best of both worlds, depending on whether my mood happens to be more manic or depressed. My mental health drooped, Tom and I struggled to keep the plates constantly spinning at home; I had a misguided affair (sorry, MIL) with the alcoholic shambles of the boy from back home who I thought I’d loved when I was 15.

Reader, he dumped me. I lost my job the same day. I had a nervous breakdown. Tom, naturally, scraped me up from the midlife hellhole I had made for myself. I spent time with my family: Lana, now six and totes adoribubble, though definitely on the ADHD side of the AuDHD spectrum; Jonah, still climbing for the country and Ava doing her GCSEs, seemed barely to have noticed the parental blip except for my tears at the dining table and our occasionally strained conversations in the car.

Eventually, when my adolescent, peri-menopausal tears had dried, I dusted myself off, got a lawyer and went into battle with my organisation, ending up with a not inconsiderable sum that means I probably no longer need to work. At the same time, Tom also got a new job and thus, we ended up back on the road to retirement – if the looming world war three doesn’t blow that off course.

And that’s how I ended up back here, via an impromptu YouTube video that, in shiny new excitement, I decided could be my next career. I’m slightly hesitant to publicise it – I have a cold, and the impulsive decision to switch on my camera means the sniffing in the first two videos, is genuinely awful. That and my lack of hair and makeup aside, I enjoyed making it. And now I’m no longer in thrall to prohibitions of my corporate paymasters, or the shimmering limerance of dopamine addition, I need to find another way to keep my busy brain occupied – I’m now on Adderall, basically, after some expensive pysche consultations. But the pills gives me headaches, and the sort of laser focus that put the AU bit of my auDHD diagnosis front and centre. .

Anyhow, for the first time in maybe a decade, I felt something akin to a spark of excitement, reoccupied as I was in learning something new, and realising I wasn’t actually too bad at it – namely, talking and doing something else – in this case, making Dandelion Liver tonic, a concoction I semi-created by way of an old Martha Stewart recipe, which I have been making religiously to curb the long-terms effects of my own red wine consumption, which definitely took a turn for the worse during Covid.

So, as the video shows, I’m older, fatter, clearly none the wiser, and back to something akin to square-one, career wise. But I’m also, footloose, fancy (and boss from hell) -free and have some precious, precious time to myself. Why not spend it doing something I enjoy?

So, here’s the plan. I will make videos of me doing the things I do to make my life as an anxiety-driven, slightly hypochondriac, OCD and AuDHD mother of three more bearable – this might be: making recipes that I can sling in a pot so I don’t have to worry about burning the house down, organisation tips and tricks (because, though my mind is macro chaos, my clothes and books are hyper organised), makeup coz I’m good at it (yes, I still have skin problems), and, while we’re *still* in East London, lifestyle content about the stuff we get up to in this noisy, conflicted, cool and chaotic little patch of the capital.

Your side of the bargain is this: tell me if you like it; promise not to laugh at my general incapability and be nice (constructive?) in the comments. Subscribe (it’s unlisted, because, hey, I may once more be a corporate wage slave any day now). And I guess I’ll keeping trying to connect with a world that I seem to struggle with IRL.

See my video series on how to make Dandelion Liver Tonic here.

Dandelion Liver Tonic