We’ll figure it out. In my first several years of parenting, that was my mantra. Every day, multiple times a day, my husband and I would run into a problem that we had no idea how to solve. We had no time, no money, no energy – and quite frankly, we both needed medication.

After three miscarriages and thousands of dollars spent on making our child a reality, he turned out to be a strong-willed extrovert who would eventually be diagnosed as 2E: ADHD-combined and gifted, who had to have both a surgery and take medication that kept him from sleeping through the night for the entire first year of his life. And then while he was a toddler, the pandemic hit, and our beautiful but struggling family (an ADHD toddler, ADHD dad with depression, and me, a neurotypical type C perfectionist with hyper-empathy) was locked in an apartment together for a year while I worked from home and tried to keep the peace. I was beyond overwhelmed, so were my boys, and there was nothing to be done.

I was very lucky to be able to work from home. We scraped by with nothing but some debt and our fair share of psychological damage. But it was still incredibly hard. When we ran into a problem that I didn’t know how to solve, all I could do was take a breath and say, “We’ll figure it out.”

The great thing about that is that we did. Either we figured it out, or the problem went away as so many parenting problems do when your child gets older. The biting phase ends. The tantrums ease. Some of it is from the work you put into it, and some of it is just plain time and the understanding that progress is not linear.

Here’s the interesting part. I went through hell, sure. Lots of parents do, and many of them have it so much worse than I do. But the interesting part was when a coworker said, “I’m having this problem with my son. I can’t figure it out.” And you know what?

I had, finally, figured it out. Even though life is complicated, and even though I don’t have enough time or energy in the day to do everything on my list (ever), I have learned enough that when someone comes to me and says, “Hey Rae, have you ever dealt with…” In a lot of cases, I have.

I have been overwhelmed in my life so many times. Life these days is so overwhelming and complicated. There isn’t just one right answer to any problem, and as a born-and-raised perfectionist, I can tell you that we have this tendency to try and find the perfect solution before we act. It took me a long time, but I’ve finally stumbled upon the hard-won realization that action is the perfect solution.

I started therapy in 2023 because I couldn’t stop feeling overwhelmed by… well, everything.

Problems getting things done at work, problems in my marriage, problems figuring out the public school system, German cockroaches in the walls, steadily increasing credit card debt, steadily increasing waistline, missed birthdays and missed car registration deadlines and late Christmas presents and phone calls I hadn’t made to family members who wouldn’t be around forever and what the heck do I make for dinner oh god it needs to be done in 15 minutes so we can stay on schedule so that my son can get to sleep so that I can breathe for two minutes.

Everything felt like a trade-off. If I started an exercise habit, I had to slack at work or slack in my parenting. If I zoomed back in on work and hit inbox 0, I had to slack in my meal prep or slack in my house cleaning. Most habits didn’t stick because I couldn’t just add hours to my day to start.

I would see the clock hit 3 pm, realize that my work day was almost over and that I’d have to go pick up my son, and I would get hit with an anxiety attack so strong my fitbit would think I was doing cardio in my computer chair. And this was after a lifetime spent developing systems to streamline everything. Even with all that, I still couldn’t solve that massive list of problems. It felt like I was one massive disappointment to everyone who’d ever had the misfortune to know me.

What I learned in therapy, though, was that I wasn’t a disappointment. I was just me. Trying my hardest, kicking hard underwater just to stay afloat. Just like you are.

If you’re overwhelmed by the Everything-ness of life, you’re in good company. I’d like to help, if I can. Maybe we can help each other. If I’m confident in any one thing, it’s this:

We’ll figure it out.