How I Plan to Make My Life Slightly Easier in 2026

This is my year to go from mourning and resignation to acceptance

2025 was the awful rock bottom year I needed to realize my life fundamentally was not working and I need to make pretty huge changes.

My horrible marriage is officially over. The partial childcare coverage I had is not enough for me to work full-time without more help. My financial life is a mess. My aging house needs a ton of work.

The major realization that’s really helping me figure out what to do to solve these problems is this:

The help I need isn’t going to magically show up. I need to get control over what I can control.

Some hard realizations:

• My marriage has been bad for years. I should have ended things years ago. I kept hoping my partner would change and help me more. That was never going to happen.

• I cannot afford my lifestyle. I made the mistake of thinking that things would just ‘work out’ the way they always had before. The world is extremely expensive and while I make good money, it hasn’t kept up at all with how expensive everything is now. The lifestyle that felt normal 10+ years ago is not the lifestyle I can afford now.

• I need to find a way to pay for regular childcare in order to get more significant uninterrupted hours of work in. I need to have more face time with my team onsite. I need focus time, and I can’t catch up on that work while my kids sleep - they go to bed too late and wake up too early, and I’m exhausted. I need sleep.

None of these things are going to somehow solve themselves. Me stressing, beating myself up and wallowing doesn’t solve these problems.

Mourning, Resignation, Acceptance

I have spent a long time (too long, probably) mourning the fact that I have ADHD and my life is harder because of it. Lately I’ve been hearing people describe this as having a ‘victim mentality’ that people need to just get over. I think there’s generally some empathy fatigue in society at large and people are tired of hearing ‘complaining’.

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization - rather, I would say, when someone is going through something challenging like being diagnosed with ADHD and/or raising an ADHD child, it’s reasonable to have a period of mourning. I think it’s totally understandable to take some time to mourn the life you thought you or your kids would have, and realize that your life didn’t have to be as hard as it was if you had had more support for your neurodivergence. It is fair to acknowledge that it sucks that having ADHD in a neurotypical world.

There seem to be two paths outside of mourning: resignation or acceptance. Resignation means you surrender to the fact that life is hard and unfair and will always be so; there’s nothing you can do about it. You will just have to suffer endlessly. I will admit, I got stuck here for a few years. Well, life sucks so I guess it just has to suck. Nothing I can do.

Acceptance means you acknowledge the difficulty and take steps mitigate that difficulty. I accept the world wasn’t made for me, aiming to feel as neutral as possible about that fact. What can I do about it?

The biggest thing I have control over is how I ask for help. I need to not ask for help from people who have shown they are not reliable or make me feel bad for asking for help. I will need to find a way to pay for a lot of help I need (namely related to childcare). I need to be honest about my own limitations and the fact that my work schedule is impossible without more care for my kids.

In October, I hired a few babysitters for a couple of hours each through the Bambino app. One of the sitters lives very close by, is very reliable, and her schedule aligns pretty well with when I need care. I set up a regular weekly schedule where I have care at least some of the hours that I need.

I still need more help - but I’m not in denial about the amount of help I need, and I will keep trying to fill in the gaps. My next problem to tackle is school pickups - I need to find some way for my daughter to be picked up from her school that is 30 minutes away from where I work.

I do sometimes backslide into mourning/resignation mode. My team at work has been downsized and that…sucks. Work is more complex and demanding than ever, and we’re needing to find ways to cover that increasing workload with fewer people. No doubt about it; that sucks and there truly isn’t much we can do about that, other than find ways to get work done faster. But I’m not really feeling ‘neutral’ about the situation yet.

But we can find ways to get work done faster, we always have. And I can figure out a work schedule that works. And I can stick to a budget. And I can enjoy the glorious freedom of no longer living with a spouse who hates me.

Things I’m trying in 2026

Here’s a quick list of things I’m going to try in 2026 to hopefully make life a little easier and reach my goals more easily:

• Asking help when I need it right away. Don’t go back and forth with not wanting to bother people. If I need my mom to watch my toddler or I need to hire a sitter or I need a handyman to come fix something in the house, I do it right away. No more waffling about whether I can make it work or handle it myself. I’ve already learned I can’t do everything alone.

• Sunday work hours - arranging a sitter for Sunday afternoon/evening so I can get a jump on the week and not feel so overwhelmed Monday morning

• Tiny pocket notebook instead of phone - I’ll use this track to-do lists, notes, and things to look up later. I’m committing to waaaaay less phone time this year.

• Debt snowball method - I’ve already paid off two credit cards this way

• Cash spending bucket - getting out the amount of $ I’m allowed to spend each month that isn’t already planned; once the cash runs out, I’m done with spending until the next month

• Running (literally) my youngest to daycare - my son’s daycare is a bit more than a half mile away; on my WFH days this spring I’m going to run him there in the jogging stroller for exercise

• Renting a dumpster - next week I’m excited to have a dumpster delivered for a day. I’m going to fill it with so much crap and empty out my house and garage as much as possible. I’ve made a lot of progress with decluttering but absolutely can do more.

I’m not going to hope for a better year this year. I’m going to make it happen my own dang self.