Back to Breath - Lucine Setian

Understanding your ADHD can quietly become a way of not changing anything.

I should say straight up that I’m talking about myself here.

After my diagnosis I went at it properly. The books, the podcasts, the accounts, the research papers I didn’t fully understand but read anyway. I could explain my own brain to anyone who’d sit still long enough.

And it genuinely helped. It reorganised thirty seven years into something that made sense and I stopped calling myself lazy in my own head.

But somewhere in there it stopped being learning and started being somewhere to hide.

Because reading about your nervous system feels like progress. It’s active. You’re doing something. You can point at it. And it costs you absolutely nothing, because nothing in your actual life has to change while you’re doing it.

Meanwhile it was still four in the afternoon and my jaw was still clenched and I was still snapping at the person who least deserved it.

At some point the understanding stops being the work and starts being the thing you do instead of the work.

I don’t think that’s a character flaw. I think it’s what happens when everything on offer is information, and nobody tells you that your body was never going to be reached that way.

So. Are you ready to actually feel different, or are you still collecting?

Two nights, 90 minutes from Sydney, 12 people. Every meal cooked. Nothing to plan, nobody needing a single thing from you, and enough time for your body to work out that it’s allowed to stop.

Half the places have gone. 16 to 18 October, comment RETREAT and I’ll tell you everything 💛

The most exhausting part of having ADHD isn’t the ADHD.

It’s the second job.

The one that runs underneath everything else, all day, every day, that nobody can see and nobody is paying you for.

Watching your own face to check it’s doing the right thing. Rehearsing the sentence before you say it. Scanning the room for whether you’ve been too much yet. Building the systems, the alarms, the lists, the backup lists. Managing the gap between how you’re actually going and how you’re presenting.

That’s the tiring bit. Not the brain. The performance of not having the brain.

And it’s invisible, which is why people say things like you seem to be coping so well, and you have to smile at them while running eleven background processes.

Here’s what nobody tells you. That second job doesn’t clock off at 5pm. It doesn’t stop on a Saturday. It doesn’t stop on the first day of a holiday, or the second, because your body has been doing it so long it doesn’t know how to be off duty.

It stops when nothing is being asked of you, for long enough that your body actually believes it.

That takes about two days. It’s very hard to arrange at home.

So that’s what October is. Two nights, 90 minutes from Sydney, 12 people. Every meal cooked. Nothing to plan, nothing to organise, nobody needing a single thing from you.

Half the places have gone. 16 to 18 October, comment RETREAT and I’ll tell you everything 💛

There’s a version of you underneath the ADHD exhaustion. Are you ready to meet them?

I don’t mean a better version. I’m not about to tell you there’s a calm, organised person in there waiting to be unlocked, because there isn’t, and I wouldn’t want to meet her anyway.

I mean the one who existed before all of this became so expensive.

The one who was interested in things for no reason. Who said what she actually thought instead of the version that would land well. Who wasn’t running a background process the entire time she was in a room, checking how she was coming across.

She’s not gone. She’s just underneath about fifteen years of holding it together, and you can’t get to her while your nervous system is still at capacity, because there’s no room down there for anything except getting through the day.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after running these. People arrive still doing it. Still helpful, still capable, still asking if there’s anything they can do. And then somewhere on the second day it goes quiet, and something else turns up. Usually funnier than they’ve been in years.

That’s not a technique. That’s just what happens when nothing is being asked of your body for long enough that it believes you.

Two nights, 90 minutes from Sydney, 12 people. Every meal cooked. Nothing to organise, nobody needing a single thing from you.

Half the places have gone. 16 to 18 October, comment RETREAT and I’ll tell you everything 💛

—

Nobody talks about how frustrating it is to go from high achiever to literally not being able to function normally because turns out you were in survival mode.

You built a whole identity on being capable.

The one who got it done. The one people relied on. The one who never dropped the ball, even when everything underneath was falling apart.

And it worked. For a while.

Because what looked like drive was actually your nervous system running on adrenaline, not energy.

Survival mode can look a lot like ambition from the outside.

But you can’t run on adrenaline forever.

At some point the tank runs out, and the same brain that used to power through everything can’t get through a Tuesday.

That’s not you becoming lazy.

That’s not you losing your edge.

That’s your body finally asking for something different than pushing harder.

You don’t need to earn your way back to functioning.

You need your nervous system to feel safe enough to stop bracing.

I made a free burnout and nervous system audit to see where you’re at.
Comment audit and I’ll send you the link 💛