By Amber Weigand-Buckley
Have you ever tried so hard not to mess up that trying itself made you mess up?
Have you ever dropped the ball for someone you love—not because you didn’t care but because your brain just didn’t get the memo that you were needed? That’s what it feels like to live in a spaghetti brain.
And if nobody has ever explained that to you—consider this a decoder ring. From us to you. With love.
1. We Are Not Making It About Us.
When we say ME TOO, we are not hijacking your story. We are handing you a lifeline. We interrupt because we connected.
We offer solutions because we hate seeing people hurt. It lands wrong sometimes. We know. We replay it for hours afterward.
We didn’t mean it the way it landed. We promise.
2. Our Brains Are Overcrowded, Not Empty.
The distracted mind is not a lazy mind. It is an overcrowded one. Too many tabs open. Too many feelings. Too much noticing all at once.
We notice beauty. We notice injustice. We notice emotional shifts in rooms. We notice hurting people.
The problem is never that we don’t care enough to pay attention. The problem is that we are paying attention to everything simultaneously.
3. We Are Exhausted From Trying To Prove We Care.
All our lives we’ve been told our inattentiveness indicates we don’t care about anyone else but ourselves. And we do care. We feel genuinely guilty every single time we forget something someone asked us to do. Not a little guilty. The kind that replays on a loop at 2 a.m. alongside seventeen other things we probably also forgot.
ADHD feels like that Operation game—trying SO hard not to touch the edge until the pressure itself makes your hand shake. The minute I get handed something I’m asked not to lose, I immediately have a panic attack knowing the harder I try, I AM definitely going to lose it.
More than five decades in and my keys are still attached to me with a carabiner—like a preschooler still wearing mittens on strings. It is not proof that something is wrong with you. It is just a very full brain doing its very best.
4. We Are Not Ignoring You Our Brain Just Took A Jog.
My husband says my multitasking is a disorder. Honestly, he is not wrong. My brain is continually completing four projects, replying to conversations I haven’t had yet, and building a new business even when I am sitting completely still.
My body may be in the room—my brain took a hard left turn thirty seconds ago and disappeared down a dark corridor with a random squirrel. We are not ignoring you. We promise.
5. We Need Our Spaghetti With A Side Of Stabilizers.
We need our spaghetti friends—the ones who get the tangents, the looping thoughts, the ME TOO, the weird connections that make perfect sense to us.
And we need our stabilizer friends—the ones who ground us in reality, slow us down a bit, and help us land safely without making us feel defective for needing help landing. Even when we sometimes want to drop-kick their advice.
And One More Thing
Psalm 139 says God has searched us and known us. He doesn’t just see what we did or didn’t do. He sees the heart behind the mess. He knows we were trying. He knows we meant it.
We are not broken. We are heavenly haywired in our divinely-on-purpose DNA. And we are so grateful you stayed long enough to understand us a little better.
Amber Weigand-Buckley is a multi-award-winning bestselling author, founding editor of Leading Hearts magazine, and podcast host. Her book #SisterhoodoftheShortYellowPencils: Mental Health Mayhem, One Sticky Note at a Time, was featured in Times Square. Find her at ShortyellowpencilRX.com and on socials @shortyellowpencilRX. Find #randomdevothoughts with Amber wherever you listen to podcasts.
