“There was a girl I knew
She said she cared about me
She tried to make my world
The way she thought it should be

Yeah, we were desperate then
To have each other to hold
But love
Is a long, long road
Yeah, love
Is a long, long road” -Tom Petty

Ohhhh TommyP TommyP TommyP. 😍What I wouldn’t have given to share his physical space for a chunk of time to pick his brain and listen to his enlightened poetic insights.

Can’t do that.

But I can and do benefit from the legacy he left all of us with his art, which IMHO is one of the most beautiful things about art: its ability to transcend death of the physical body. And while you may never have considered yourself an artist in the more commonly interpreted terms, I ask that you do so now.

After all, aren’t we each creating and contributing something while we’re here? ALL of us? Put a pin in that thought and take some time to consider what kind of legacy you’ll leave behind. We’ll circle back in a future post.

p.s. if your answer was $$, please dig deeper because while money is a completely useful and generous legacy to leave, you’re more than your $$ whether you realize it yet or not… but I digress.

As I’ve said many times before, music draws me in, fills my senses with its power and often leaves me with the gift of divine revelation. Something in the music or lyrics will jump out and message me, urging me to dig deeper in order to uncover something I’m missing- a puzzle piece of sorts, in an area of my personal life puzzle where my progress has become challenged. In the case of this song (one of my favorites) the pieces began here:

“she tried to make my world, the way she thought it should be.”

Okay knock me over with a feather- Tommy P is on to me.

Is it true? In the words of Steve Urkel, did I do that?

Yes I did. But I didn’t know I was doing it.

As I alluded to in a previous post , my husband and I are a mixed neurotype couple. Though we’ve been together 39 years and married for 35 of those years, our knowledge of this neurodiversity is fairly new. And while I’ve learned that our ADHD&spectrum-y blend is a rather common relationship dynamic among neurodiverse couples, it’s not something we’ve spoken about with many others. I’m not sure others who know us would understand or maybe even “believe” it in the sense that a person may not “seem” like they’re on the spectrum because the world is only just beginning to begin to understand the complexities of neurodiversity and its implications.

In other words, there’s a whole heluva lot of lonely, confused adults out there who just think they’re “bad at relationships”. Or wonder why they:

• can’t commit
• have intimacy issues
• may display a variety of behaviors mistakenly attributed to other diagnoses
• are confused by reciprocity issues
• become dysregulated more easily than others
• struggle with communication
• and the list goes on…

Often these are undiagnosed adults on the spectrum. But how would they know that if they’ve never been exposed to what “on the spectrum” means? I’ll just say this:

it can mean A LOT OF VARIOUS THINGS, but let’s get back to my role in all of this and how it came to me from a song lyric.

Making somebody’s world the way I thought it should be.

sigh.

And though I first believed my tendency to “fix” began with my son’s autism diagnosis, it wasn’t long before I realized that what I was doing was something I’d always done with the people I was closest to.

Maybe even those I wasn’t close to. 😲 Sheesh.

Helping people to make their world

THE WAY I THOUGHT IT SHOULD BE.

How did I do that?

Or the even bigger question: why would I do that?

And even more importantly: how did I stop?

The road with those answers continues in my next post.