And Then I Accidentally Deleted My Entire Music Library

What happens when deprivation meets dysregulation? Find out!

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It was a very bad 24 hours.

I always hesitate to make overly dramatic optimistic proclamations: I’ve finally turned a corner! Things are getting easier! I’m not quite coasting, but. . . I’m not not coasting! Enter The Universe with that terrible Perfect Storm of Perimenopause + ADHD everyone had been going on and on about.

I had just written a column about how my ADHD diagnosis had contributed to a sense of recovery after a turbulent life season—not recovery from something, recovery of something. Namely, my self. But after years of therapy, I should know that any type of recovery is rarely linear. And when you are recovering yourself after divorce, the rhythm is unpredictable and inevitably consists of ebbs and flows, highs and lows, two steps forward followed by one step back, rinse, repeat. But to feel like you finally had your shit together only to unravel upon one little keyboard stroke (Delete!) is terribly demoralizing.

Of course, unraveling sometimes has a positive connotation, doesn’t it? Think lounge chair on the beach with a cocktail and a novel. Being untethered can be both terrifying and freeing. And that’s the thing about destruction—beautiful things grow out of decay, and sometimes unraveling is exactly what we need.

Personally, I was hoping to “ravel” a bit longer before dropping the spool again, but whatever.

On this Very Bad Day, I was headed to the airport, a place where one hopes never to unravel. And while I was traveling, I was treated to an unexpected appearance of one of my originally discovered “parts” of my system, per IFS therapy. Internal Family Systems is a style of therapy also known as “parts work.” If you’ve been around a bit, you know that I often write about the impact of IFS therapy in my life over the past three years.

The picture I had my daughter draw to represent this frazzled, overwhelmed part of myself really says it all: Calendar, phone, laptop, coffee (duh), and presumably a bag of Veggie Straws to hand to a child in the car while a pot of water boils precariously upon her head. . . You can relate, can’t you? I hadn’t been diagnosed with ADHD when I first discovered this part, but suffice it to say, The Octopus pretty much IS my ADHD. She represents the Executive Functioning Clusterfuck of overwhelm + emotional dysregulation. I mean, look at that face. Or maybe she’s just pissed because she only has six tentacles. Shrug.

Could you deprive yourself of reading for a week?

I was already shaken before I spectacularly hit delete. I’ve been doing the legendary The Artist’s Way 12-week book/program and loving it—synchronicities! Creative flow! Insight! But when I got to Week 4—the week when author Julia Cameron famously imposes a “reading deprivation” edict—I hit a crisis point. We were not supposed to READ ANYTHING for a week.

She assures readers that we are going to have a tantrum over it. I did. She tells us we are going to curse her and refuse to do it. But she also tells us not to skip it. I spent days trying to decide if I was going to petulantly cross my arms and insist the rules did not apply to me or whether I would give it a try and remove the stack of books from the side of the bed where my husband used to sleep.

This was my argument in favor of giving Julia the bird, which I tearfully poured out to my Artist’s Way group: ever since the divorce, I had found it nearly impossible to read books at night. I used to love reading before bed. I would typically go upstairs around 9 pm so I had time to cycle through all THREE of the books I was reading at once: one fiction, one nonfiction, followed by a segment of Women Who Run With The Wolves. Reading was my favorite thing. And during the crisis stage of divorce, I couldn’t read. Or watch TV shows by myself. My hypervigilance unilaterally derailed any leisure pastimes. It was simply not safe to relax.

My nightstand book pile stubbornly remained—I would add to it, coaxing myself to read through sheer force of will, to absorb the escape of fiction by osmosis as I slept. But I couldn’t concentrate. And after well over a year, I finally tried to “retrain myself to read.” Which makes me so sad even to type—how could I let go of this beloved aspect of myself?

Those aren’t my books. This is Meow Wolf. But still. I LOVE BOOKS!

In the past few months, I began to read again—it wasn’t easy, and I never felt like I had time. I still don’t. But I did it.

And then that bitch Julia Cameron told me I had to stop reading for a week. (I KID, you guys! I’m grateful she did it. Sorry, JC.) And it kind of knocked the wind out of me. I had worked so hard to recover my ability to read for pleasure! Didn’t she know what it meant to me? But then I read the rest of the chapter and listened to the perspectives of the members of our Artist’s Way group and I decided I could do it. The point was to see what might come up for you creatively and emotionally when you aren’t reading—not just for pleasure, but the news, social media posts, the whole package. People mentioned how they were leaning into their music and playlists, and I relaxed a bit. That was something I could absolutely do.

Until two days later, when I couldn’t.

In tandem with losing my ability to read books due to post-divorce hypervigilance, I noticed another phenomenon: I stopped listening to podcasts altogether and began to listen only to my carefully curated playlists. No Pandora, no Spotify, no radio, no Audible, no podcasts: Just my hand-crafted playlists, designed to accommodate my every mood.

I had them for working out, falling asleep, meditating, cleaning the house, driving in the car. Taylor Swift favorites and seasonal playlists and Epic Road Trip playlists, and “Safe Zone” for when I couldn’t risk any crying songs entering my air space. Where the absorption of novel media vanished, my familiar songs took up residency. It would be fine to set my books down for a week, even though I was going to be traveling and I had been looking forward to reading before bed. I would journal and meditate and dance, and plus, I had my music.

Are you ready? It’s time to chronicle the ADHD Failures.

And then, the day before I went to the airport, I accidentally deleted my entire Apple Music library. I had spent decades building it, and it one careless motion, it vanished. And the motion was careless, yes, but it wasn’t unintentional.

I intentionally wished to clear space on my MacBook, because, ADHD Failure Marker #1: I have an old laptop and its storage or memory or probably both are totally at capacity. I have overfilled my laptop because I am lazy and irresponsible and also apparently greedy because it is so full.

ADHD Failure Marker #2: I did not realize that deleting my music files on my laptop was not the right move. I wanted more space on my embarrassingly overstuffed MacBook. And instead, I deleted all my music on my phone too. Gone. Poof. Clearly, I have no idea how things work.

I lost my shit, naturally. I ugly cried and swore and tried to restore an old iPhone backup twice and cursed Apple, and then the rage at how unfair it was gave gently way to its descendant, utter despair and helplessness. Giving up. Surrender, but not in a good way.

(Or is it?)

After we’d abandoned the technical troubleshooting, my teenage daughter—the one who spoke to me about metamorphoses and cocoons and molting on Thanksgiving Day—reminded me,

“You don’t need the playlists anymore. I know you put so much time into them and they meant so much to you. You made them so you could have control and feel safe. But you don’t need them. You can make new playlists now.”

I took that in a cosmic inch and then returned to self-hatred at my carelessness.

Which reminds me, we left off at ADHD Failure Marker #3: This was especially problematic timing, because I had to wake up early the next morning to go to the airport. I had already put off packing and was not in any way ready for my four-day trip. I was running late and was unprepared. As usual.

Which brings us back to the triumphant, terrifying, and terrific return of the Octopus. I shall now tell the story from her perspective. Grab some milk and cookies, or maybe an Irish coffee.

Takeover of The Octopus

As all these factors combined into a most unsavory soup, The Octopus realizes that she has ruined everything and is not going to make the 7:51 train to the airport. She considers what it would do to her nervous system if she pulled up to the train station as the train departed, and talks to herself gently and says, “You are not going to make this train. You deserve not to rush. You can make another choice. You are going to take the extra half hour to make sure you didn’t forget anything important.”

(Narrator: She had, in fact, forgotten to pack a number of important items, reader, many of which were recovered thanks to this generous allotment of an additional half hour, but potentially not all forgotten items had yet been discovered at the time of this writing.)

ADHD Failure Marker #4: Indecisiveness. Thrice the Octopus changed her mind about taking a later train versus driving to the airport and parking. She chose to take the train that left thirty minutes later.

So she made coffee, packed the Converse that would have been forgotten, charged the phone that had not charged overnight because ADHD Failure Marker #5: We do not notice when the phone cord is not fully plugged in, and grabbed some airport snacks. This was better. And then she left the house at the wrong time because ADHD Failure Marker #6, TIME BLINDNESS. . .

. . . and then she ran, literally fucking ran, with her too-heavy belongings, and BARELY made it through the doors before they closed, heaving her Octopus items onto the seat, scarf and hat dangling, winter coat in her arms, bag spilling over with the hat and mittens she had grabbed earlier when she began to Thoughtfully But Apparently Poorly Manage Her Time. The Octopus literally could not keep her shit together. The overflowing tote bag draped in a scarf and winter coat was basically her familiar. It was as disheveled and unmanageable as she was.

She wanted to sob uncontrollably but she was already low-key having an asthma attack, and was conscious of the fact that she had launched her belongings into the Priority Seating row for folks with disabilities (she considered that she may qualify and would probably say as much if questioned—ADHD Failure Marker #7: lack of filter due to emotional dysregulation) and then chastised herself as her inner best friend grimaced and said, “Um pretty sure you can’t say that, pal,” and then she got angry at that imaginary critical part, because actually, a lot of people have invisible conditions that make them require extra help! and then chastised herself again because really, how dare she?

And so it was that the Octopus deliciously pulled me under on the train as I sweated into my turtleneck and tried to belatedly purchase a train ticket on my phone with shaking hands. But slowly I began to resurface, formulating a text to my stand-up comedy friend: A neurodivergent, perimenopausal woman boards an airplane wearing a turtleneck. That’s it. That’s the joke.

I replayed my brother’s response to my hysterical late-night text about the deleted music library—Talk about a forest fire, he commented. He later apologized, deeming his remark insensitive, but I stand by my previous statement about the dual meanings of unraveling, surrender, and the like. Forest fires rank right up there with beautiful destruction.

As I paddled free from the grip of the Octopus (in a non-judgmental way—love that girl! Just can’t let her be the driver!), I considered the forest fire analogy as well as my daughter’s observation that I may not need my playlists anymore. I thought about Julia Cameron’s suggestion earlier in The Artist’s Way that we may find ourselves shedding things we no longer needed, remembering things we used to love doing, reevaluating the things that brought us joy. I began to make a new playlist.

It wasn’t until I boarded the crowded airport train to the terminal that I truly re-entered my surroundings. I didn’t notice where I had gone until a young teenage girl caught my eye and smiled. Maybe it was because her boyfriend texted her and that’s why she was happy, but I didn’t care. I received it. I remembered humanity and my connection to it. The Octopus smiled back along with me, and her eyes filled with tears as Lana del Rey filled her ears with American. She remembered she was a part connected to a whole.

After I finally settled near my gate with a coffee and my laptop, my wise girl’s words returned to me about the discomfort of molting and metamorphoses, how I had been struggling because it hadn’t been safe to cocoon until now.

I recently learned that everything liquifies in the cocoon. I knew it was a turbulent transformation, not a dormant rest, but I didn’t realize that everything literally liquefies and turns into a brand new material altogether. It is reborn.

Well, my relapse into dysregulation was indeed uncomfortable as fuck, but I also understand it to be the fragile state from which one is reborn. And in the height of a meltdown, when I am full of self-criticism and irritability and frustration and my brain is foggy (ADHD? Med changes? Estrogen patch? Single motherhood?Perimenopause?) and I have mismanaged my time, I will surrender, but in a good way, not a scary way.

I took my trip deprived of my books and also my playlists, but it was then that I began to make new ones. I began to remember what I love now, and how maybe I don’t need what I loved then, not in the same way. Instead of reading, I revised the second half of my manuscript and danced to my new playlist and watched eagles fly over a not-quite-frozen river. I was still. I recovered, again, as I will over and over in this dance of forgetting and remembering, relapsing and recovering.

I’m still going to go to the Apple store, you guys. Someone at the Genius Bar must be genius enough to help me recover what was lost. But in the meantime, I will let the forest fire burn, knowing that I am the only who can recover what is truly essential, and I have everything I need to equip me for that task. Even when I relapse and the Octopus takes the wheel, when perimenopause + neurodivergence result in a metaphorical turtleneck of dysregulation.

XO,
Steph

I would LOVE to write with you in March! Women, it is time to release what needs to be released and to share the words that need to be shared. Let’s circle up and create, together.

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