TLDR: I’ve been working hard throughout my life to do well. I am skilled at what I do and I’m actually very intelligent, but my mental health has been holding me back. I recently discovered just how badly it was affecting me and that many of my struggles getting my life together are a direct result of unmanaged ADHD. I’m now seeking help from care providers who can help me overcome my issues, but my debt is holding me back from getting real help. I need help to clear it, so I can take the proper steps to move forward in life, live up to my potential, and give back to the world and thrive.
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I’m really struggling and my mental health is getting worse, I really need help getting out of this messI’m a 32 year old woman with ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression. I’ve struggled with ADHD my whole life, but I never understood that was what my problem was until I got fired from a job I’d only had for a month.I wasn’t always this bad. When I first started my career, I was excited and eager and passionate about my work. I actually did really well early on. I was recruited by a former client of mine to work at their marketing agency, basically working to help transform some of their marketing expertise, because she saw my passion, my drive, and she trusted me, based on her experience with me.I thrived there. I was learning more about how to be a strong professional, how to grow into a leadership role, and how to take on the skills I’d need throughout my career. I had a great manager and mentor, but the company stopped doing so well, and I got moved to a different team in the restructuring. Right up until the owners decided to put us out of business, I kept being told “I see value in you. You deserve to be here and we need you”, thinking I was safe. And then I wasn’t. I lost my job.While I was “thriving” in my career, I also wanted to “thrive” in my lifestyle and personal life. I bought a car for the first time during this time. I was so proud of it. I had negotiated my payment to a very manageable $275 month and I got all the features. It was perfect. A great financial decision at the time.But I was also a stupid twenty something with ADHD, handed my first high balance ($10K each) credit cards and living it up. I put those payments on autodraft and told myself I would never go over the autograft cost I’d set and if I did, I’d remember to go in and pay it myself. Only I would often forget about purchases I had made when I would think about what my balances were and I would put more money on my card than I meant to.And I would stretch myself and when the 15th came and my bills were due, I’d check my balance and realize I didn’t have enough money left to pay the full balance, so I would just pay what I could afford and try to do better the next month. At first it was manageable. A couple bucks here and there, maybe a hundred or two. Eventually I got it together and with my moms help, I created a budget and I pretty much stuck to it. This time, a few dollars here and there was the worst of it.This went on for a few months and I was getting things back to normal (again, still employed at this time). But when my car got stolen, that all changed. I didn’t have any savings for a new car, only like $1,500 or so in my savings. I had to use every penny of that to put a down payment on a lease. This time I was stressed and I didn’t understand leases and I negotiated poorly. My payments were $225 a month. It sucked and I was sure I was getting ripped off, but I couldn’t get my head around an argument and I was so stressed out. I couldn’t make my brain work enough to stand up for myself. And at the end of the day it was doable and less than the ownership payment and it would only be 3 years. That would give me time to save for another car.That horrible experience and slight change in budget was enough to throw me off again. I set another budget with the change, but for some reason this time I couldn’t find a routine I could stick to. But I had work to worry about and I kept telling myself I had plenty of money coming in, so it would all work out fine. I had time to figure it out. I really don’t know how I mental gymnastics-ed my way into that, but I know now impulsivity control and object permanence issues played a huge part it in and by the time I lost my job, I was stuck.It took me 2 years to find another full time job at that level. I was working full time making just $13/hr and when my savings ran out and I couldn’t afford my rent anymore, I moved in with my parents to save money. I still couldn’t always afford to make my minimum payments, so my debt kept piling during that time.I didn’t want to ask my parents for money to help me and moving in with them was humiliating and so demoralizing. I waited as long as I could, until I went through every penny I had, every bit of the severance, every bit of my savings, I even put some on my credit cards trying to hold out just a little longer before finally doing it..I should have moved in with them sooner, I get that now.But I was in denial and I was stuck in a lease. I had somehow convinced myself ending the lease early would destroy my already declining credit – it was still in the mid 700s, but I wasn’t sure for how much longer.At first I convinced myself I’d get a job really soon. I was so skilled! I was great at what I did and I thrived with the right manager. Sure I made small mistakes like typos a lot, but I was so much better about it when I wasn’t stressed out all the time, I could totally tackle that when it came up again. I was totally worth it.But as time went on and I kept getting rejection email over rejection email over rejection email. I was too young to realize that my youth was the real barrier there. I had advanced in my career too quickly and it looked like I was job hopping. In retrospect I was. I had been at each company prior to SF for only about a year. I had learned what I felt I could at each, all I was empowered to, and I felt stagnant. So when an opportunity to advance presented itself each time, I took it. At the time the career moves were great and I was doing so well.I did better in roles where I was more responsible for deep thinking and strategy, where high level perspective was most important. I could reason through problems, see all sides and think critically about the best solutions. I was constantly thinking outside the box and came up with creative experiential marketing programs that clients loved. I was an excellent high level thinker. But I hated and struggled with the menial things, like creating detailed presentations, pulling and submitting reports, managing detailed budgets.In a structured environment like SF, under the guidance of my awesome manager, I was doing well with it. We had tools that helped compensate for my poor math and excel skills and I had a coordinator under me that handled the paperwork.That was the best I ever did in a job and I know that the level I was at was what was helping me most and that’s where I knew I needed to be to thrive.But the months went on and I started applying for jobs closer to the level I was supposed to be at at my age. I got a few interviews that way, but I still wasn’t willing to take the $20K pay cut because I always seemed to have it in my head that me being under employed would only go on a little longer and I’d find something, but that I needed to stay in that job at least 3 years to make up for the time I’d lost and rebuild my credibility and I shamed myself out of taking it. Because if I was really worth anything, I could get a job and salary closer to my old one and who can live in Dallas on just $42K a year with debt? Again, I know object permanence played a part in those mental gymnastics. I lament how irrational I was about it early on.As time went on I realized I had to stop being picky, but I had started exhausting my resources, so I started applying for all kinds of event marketing roles at any reasonable pay level and I decided to try switching industries.Slowly, through all this, my mental health was unwinding. Between the humility of having to devalue myself repeatedly, the constant stream of rejection letters, the mental and emotional overwhelm of tailoring my resume (I struggled with executive dysfunction so bad with this), listening to my family “helpfully” suggesting I devalue myself further and solidifying my negative opinions of myself, listening to my dad openly mock my situation to his friends when he had people over, listening to my siblings celebrate their successes and high salaries with my parents at every family occasion (no seriously, the discussions always turned to their work and things they were working on and doing well with), and just feeling like a complete loser, I was a ball of depression and anxiety by the time I finally got a new job.It was one of the worlds top executive research companies and I felt so validated to finally get another chance and from such a great company. But I didn’t do great there. There was a weird cross manager situation and I was working for a team that wasn’t mine, so neither manager wanted to the responsibility of overseeing me. They were overworked as is. They had no onboarding program at the time. Literally none. They just gave me access to all the documents and emailed me the key ones and and had a coworker check in with me once a week. I crashed and burned without structure. I was increasingly alienated from my peers for my poor performance and I would ask for help understanding how to perform better, but my stand-in manager said it was my official manager’s responsibility and my official manager had no view on what I was doing because he wasn’t overseeing the project I was working on, so he said I was doing fine.Eventually, when the drowning got to a place where I was just trying to not lose my job, I stopped asking for help. They weren’t helping and weren’t listening, so what was the point?They kept me through the major event we worked, but ended my contract early.I went back to my hourly job after that. Defeated, and reinforcing all the terrible beliefs I was taking on about myself.It was another 6 months before I found another job. One I had to move to Austin for. By that time I had what felt like a mountain of debt to overcome. Emotionally driven impulse spending and poor budgeting while I worked for the executive research company kept me from really making progress paying off my debt. And I was even more ashamed and feeling even more useless and worthless and struggling even more.Repeat the cycle all over again. I finally got a new job, but it required me moving to Austin in January 2020. A place where I knew no one.I was making good money. The most I ever made and I felt like I was finally going to get on top of my debt. I was finally going to break the cycle. My mom helped cosign so I was able to get a consolidated loan to help with me get it under control. My lease was up, so I got a sensible car within my budget. And I found a great place in Austin, close to work and perfect for me and my dog.I was living a dream. But again I had little structure. At first, it was fine because we were all together and I could ask questions. The VP was my supervisor, which was cool, but it also adding some issues. I needed to get her approvals on things and I needed to ask questions pertaining to our event strategy and how she wanted me to execute things. Questions my coworkers couldn’t answer. I would stop by her office, she would be in meetings or just not there. I would ping her on messenger or send her an email. She wouldn’t respond. I’d only get an answer if I brought it up in our weekly meetings or if I managed to catch her in the hall. Even then, I was often brushed off or she said she’d get back to me.On top of that neither of my predecessors took good notes and the team members that took over the role for the while before I started had no idea how to organize information or what needed to be kept to create a trail for me to follow.It was okay though, because it was a good team. I like the work, and I felt like I was figuring it out. I was also traveling for our conferences and loving being on site at events again. But a few months in, the pandemic hit. We were forced stop all events and reassess our budgets. I was of course responsible for figuring out the events budget. Me, a woman who had never been responsible for a full departmental budget of that scale before. I was now responsible for becoming a forensic accountant. No one had really kept records of expenses for the last years events. No one had kept official budgets for them. I had to go through receipts and expense reports for the events, and even into event attendees expense reports to find the costs associated with each event. Problem was, there were no records on who went to the events. People on the team had to guess, based on the usual suspects. Oh, and most people didn’t keep good notes on their expenses or tie them to the events appropriately, so I had no idea if certain expenses aligned or not.That project was doomed from the beginning. I asked the VP repeatedly what we were trying to accomplish with the report and how she wanted me to set it up. She always gave me vague responses, because I don’t think she had any idea what she wanted to show with it. She just knew the ELT wanted to see some numbers and she figured when she got to see the final report, she’d know how to present it.I put together a report for each event on a different tab in an excel sheet, complete with expenditures and any pipeline tied to the events. I create pivot charts to show how each vertical was affected by the events and which events were most profitable.There was one big problem, through the business research company, I was taught to see pipeline as money left on the table or deals closed. Deals lost, were not considered of value when it came to discussing pipeline. I included those costs in my charts, but kept those numbers out of my presentation.When the VP asked to see the presentation and reports for the first the day before we were to present to the ELT, she was appalled at the pipeline discrepancies. She immediately requested a one day extension to fix it.But none of us could figure out where they were coming from. I kept going back to the report, trying to go through each and every single excruciating number, to figure out what I had done wrong. I looked over and over again. The numbers blurred together, I couldn’t keep the sheet from getting completely jumbled in my mind. I had no idea what I was doing wrong and I finally went to our excel whiz to help. She figured out the problem. After, the VP lost faith in me and they took the project completely away from me. I lost my job “due to COVID-19” a few weeks after that. The VP never said a word to me after that meeting. I made her look too bad in front of the VPs and she couldn’t trust me anymore because I had a major hole in my learning. She wasn’t even the one to fire me. The manager who helped me had that honor.Unemployment helped after that, but no one was really hiring during the pandemic and I still needed to pay down my debt. I made it work for as long as I could, but after 3 major layoffs, partially due to and luck and widely due to me not being good enough, I was finally broken. I tried so hard to make it.Together my debt, rent, and car payments were starting to drown me. I felt like the cycle would never end. It felt like too much, and I was alone in a strange city, and I became suicidal. I remember calling my mom one night to see if she would take my (now 2 – cause foster fails happen) dogs if something happened to me.I realized then I needed help. I got treatment I was doing better for a while. I met a great guy and I was doing really well. But I still didn’t have a job and I was still in debt and it was getting worse. Due to someone making a mistake filing my unemployment, I never received the COVID-19 bonuses or extensions. I got the bare minimum payments and Texas Unemployment was not taking calls or emails or in person visits to fix things. I tried for weeks, but there was nothing I could do. I ended up having to take out my 401K and IRA to make rent pay my bills and credit cards for two months. Then I stopped being able to make rent and I had to put a month on my credit card. My mental health was floundering all over again and this time, I had no money left for therapy.The I finally got a new job. A great one, making $95K! It was finally over!! I immediately hired a money coach to help me set a budget and develop techniques to help me stick with it and pay down my debt.But right off the bat, the lack of structure got me again. I tried to put my own into place using things that worked for me in the past, but between executive dtysfunctioning issues and time blindness and my muddled thoughts, I was crashing and burning right out the gate. I was still suffering from severe anxiety, and depression, and (without knowing it) ADHD. All of the worst habits from my ADHD overtook me. I was so scattered, I couldn’t remember anything, I couldn’t communicate well, I was missing the few deadlines I had because they weren’t clearly communicated. I’m pretty sure they thought I was on drugs because I lost my job a month later.And that was it. I had nothing left. I hit absolute rock bottom. Thankfully, my lease was up, so I could leave. I was supposed to move in with my boyfriend, so we started introducing our dogs, with a trainer friend helping.But he has a dog that is dog aggressive and extremely reactive. We never know what will set him off with mine. His dog attacked mine and hurt him. As we scrambled to figure out where I could go that would be safe for my dogs and give me time to get my (seriously plummeting) mental health in order, I managed to get another job. This one is the biggest step back I’ve ever taken in my career, in expectations, responsibility, and pay. But it’s a job that allows me to pay my bills and that’s what was important. My boyfriend and I would figure out the dog things and we’d find a new trainer, and get to where we could safely move in together and everything would be okay. I just needed to figure out a place to go in the meantime.But my parents recently moved to Arkansas, so I couldn’t go back with them. My sister ended up offering me a place to stay for a few months. At first, she told me I was as welcome for as long as I needed and my boyfriend and I focused on trying to free up enough time to work with his dog.But my boyfriend was working 90 hour weeks at the time. It took 2 months to realize that isn’t going to change any time soon. There’s been too much turnover on his team and they are too short staffed. He can’t work with his dogs right now and it won’t be safe for me to move in there any time soon.I started looking for my own place, but I’m having a really hard time trying to find anything in budget that will let me keep my dogs. I make $3000 a month after taxes right now. $2,000 a month goes to that mountain of debt. I’ve already scaled back as much as I possibly can. I’ll only have $1000 left for rent and utilities. I am completely screwed if something else happens and I’m trying so hard to find something in budget that is livable, that unicorn affordable housing situation that would somehow make this doable and let me keep my dogs.I’m trying so hard to get out of my sister’s house. She and I have never been close. I had hoped coming here would be an opportunity to change that, but after 2 months, she’s making clear she wants me out. She expected this to be over as quickly as I hoped it would and I know I’m driving her crazy.I finally got diagnosed with ADHD and I’m working on getting treatment. I’ve been working on addressing my CPTSD and trying to get a hold on my anxiety and depression. I’ve been trying to be better and pull myself out of this pit, but it feels like it’s never ending. My mental health is just getting worse at this point.I’m finally doing well at work, finally having found a job with structure and good communication. I’m using my natural skills and there are enough redundancies available, it’s an environment made for people like me to thrive. I’m working really hard to heal from the horrible esteem problems and wounds and toxicity I’ve felt through the rest of my career.I hate that I’m finally doing everything right. I’m budgeting and managing my money appropriately. I’m working on my mental health; introspecting, healing, and trying to be a better person. I’m looking for a mental health professional to help me overcome my ADHD, depression, and anxiety issues so I can finally stop feeling like I’m always struggling, but it’s not enough. I don’t think it will ever be enough as long as I have that dollar bill noose around my neck, because all of my spare money goes to paying down those bills right now and I can’t afford to get proper treatment. I can’t even afford rent on my own place right now, not without going back to making minimum payments and letting the debt pile up again.I need help. I just need this stupid debt gone. I’m getting help for my ADHD, so I won’t fall into it again, but I can’t move forward anymore as long as I have it.I need to stop being a burden to people around me. I need breathing room to save money and create a safety net. I need stability so I can save for the future and be prepared when I get knocked down again. I really need help. Please help get out of this. I finally understand what I need to do. I’m ready to be better and make the changes I need to to thrive in life. I just need help getting rid of that green shadow.All bills together total $38,400, but everything helps. Paypal link https://paypal.me/KellyW793?locale.x=en_US