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Finding Peace and Joy Again by Kitty Bucholtz

January 9, 2026 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz, Writing tagged as ADHD in writers, It's Worth It, joy, Kitty Bucholtz, menopause, Perimenopause, writing

It’s been a rough few years for me. Burnout, butt-kicking perimenopause, then menopause that didn’t “pause” my symptoms much. I’ve felt broken. And every January, I hope and pray that this year will be better. This New Year’s, I barely let myself consider the idea for fear that I will be disappointed yet again.

And yet…

A friend of mine has been urging me for months to read some of the materials she’s found on ADHD in adult women. I’ve resisted, feeling these diagnoses are yet another fad created by Big Pharma to increase their profits at our expense. But I finally listened to one of the audiobooks over Christmas vacation. I felt as gobsmacked as when I took the CliftonStrengths test a year or so ago!

Suddenly, it seemed a light turned on in my head showing me what I already knew about myself but with a lot more depth and clarity and understanding. Both times, it was like I could see things I knew were there (like the living room couch, the TV stand, the window covered with blackout curtains) but now I could SEE them! The couch is red and has thick, soft cushions. The TV stand is small, made of pale wood, but the TV is quite large. And the window is bigger and lets in more light than I realized when it was curtained.

What a difference!!

Personality traits that I have been both comfortable with and frustrated by now appear to be different than I’d thought. Maybe I wasn’t actually broken; maybe some of my tools had broken. The tools I’d used to cope with life (we all have them, whatever our personality traits) stopped working as well when hormones and stress blind-sided me. But the books I’ve been reading have reminded me that I am not broken and I don’t need to be fixed. I’ve just been shoved, hard, off course and need to catch my breath and remind myself how to get back up again.

I have no interest in getting tested for ADHD by a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I am very interested in improving my toolbox: sharpening old skills, developing new ones, perhaps letting go of mechanisms that no longer work as well for me. And I think this is going to make a big difference in my writing.

I’ve just started reading The Artist’s Joy by Merideth Hite Estevez, and The ADHD Advantage by Dale Archer, M.D. Both are blowing me away and making me feel — I’m not the only one who feels this way!! (The book that I first read on my friend’s suggestion is A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD by Sari Solden, M.S.)

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with life, or lacking joy and passion, perhaps some of these books or other similar titles will help you get a better handle on what’s not working and how to get back on track again. I’ll continue writing about this in the future in case it’s helpful!

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Planning for Peace by Kitty Bucholtz

December 9, 2025 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz, Writing tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, menopause, organization, Perimenopause, Planning, writing

Everyone who knows me knows I’m big on planning. That’s because my brain gets all stressed out if I don’t know what’s going on, whether I have time to say yes to something, or when I’m afraid I’m missing out on something. That’s why I already know where we’re spending Christmas (with friends a few minutes away), what I’m bringing for dinner (a homemade chocolate pie, homemade cornbread, and drinks), and what I’ll be wearing (embroidered jeans, a lightweight knit shirt, and taking both a sweater and sweatpants for warmth and comfort later). All that in the first week of December! Woohooo!! And now I’m not stressed at all about Christmas. (Yup, Christmas shopping already done!)

But when it comes to still trying to balance the changes menopause is having on my brain and my energy with the goals I want to achieve in 2026…well, planning in a way that will bring me the most peace is critical. One of the things I learned is that cortisol, the stress hormone, can make menopause symptoms worse. So if I’m feeling stressed by how I’m feeling (or by how it’s keeping me from achieving my goals!), the stress actually makes the symptoms worse.

Not to mention the fact that unused cortisol (if there are no tigers to run from or I don’t walk it off quickly) gets stored as fat. Great. Talk about insults and injuries.

I bought a one-year subscription to MasterClass.com last Christmas because Halle Berry hosted a 90-minute “class” with interviews with several doctors and women going through menopause. Here I am two weeks before my subscription expires and I finally finished watching it and taking notes. There was a lot of good information in the class, but let me give you a few bullet points that fit with my topic of planning for peace.

Decluttering — I knew this was not a time-waster or procrastination technique!! But I’d let people convince me it was, and my mess has been stressing me out all year. It’s gotten to the point, I don’t even like to spend much time in my office. Several items on my to-do list now have to do with sorting papers that are currently piled everywhere, filing the important must-keep stuff in boxes I just bought, and throwing out as much as I can. I need to let go of all the old plays I wrote a million years ago…even though I don’t really want to. I never look at them, won’t use them again, and don’t have room in our small apartment to keep writing only for nostalgia’s sake. (And no, for those about to leave a comment about scanning them or taking photos, it would take me weeks to do that! I have a lot of old writing!)
Have a “launchpad” where you keep your keys, your wallet, your purse, your phone/charger, etc. I’ve never called it a launchpad, but I get the idea. I have a bowl I made in pottery class in college where I put all those things. It is so stressful when I’m rushing out the door for the train and realize one of those items did not make it to the bowl and now I have to look “everywhere” for it…because right now my brain can’t remember.
Prioritizing tasks on your list before you begin. Many days I only have a few hours of functioning brain time, so I need to be sure that if I can only get one thing done today, it’s the right thing. And if I can get 2 or 3 things done, they are things I’ll be happy or relieved got done. Much as I want to watch the last episode of The Beast in Me on Netflix to find out how it ends, that is not the best use of my limited brain-time right now! And because limited brain-time has made me perpetually behind in all my goals, when I have a good day (like today!) and can get a dozen things done, I want them to be the things I desperately needed to have done last week and the week before.
Organizational Skills Therapy — one of the doctors mentioned this and I have no idea what it is, but it sounds awesome!! I’m totally Googling it later!

So those four items are now on my list of tools I want to use to plan for peace in 2026. I have no idea what to expect next year. My brain seems to maybe be working better, but I’ve thought that in the past right before a new wave of menopause hell bowled me over. At least with these tools, I can get a few of the most important items done and choose to be satisfied with it, not stressing about what I can’t control.

I hope this is helpful for you as well! Whether you’re in need of this information or know someone you can share it with, it’s always good to have some reliable tools in your author — and life — toolkit. I hope you plan for a peaceful and joyful end of 2025 and that it spills over into all of 2026. God bless you! And Merry Christmas!

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