Chasing the Squirrel: ADHD and Finding a Higher Power in the Rooms

I hope everyone had a good day today. I hope you kept your thoughts straight, and you didn't spend an hour chasing the squirrel around the room the way my brain likes to do. I'm glad we're all still here, still doing this, still sober. Tonight I want to bring up a topic that took me a long time to actually sit with: ADHD and the concept of a higher power in the rooms.

I went to a meeting tonight, mostly to stay level. Some days that's the whole reason I show up — not because I have something profound to say, but because sitting in that room, around people doing the same hard thing I'm doing, keeps me grounded in a way nothing else quite does. My brain runs fast and loud most days. The rooms are one of the only places I've found where it's allowed to slow down without me forcing it. Tonight, in that stillness, I felt connected to my higher power — the one I personally call God — in a way that felt steady instead of complicated.

Some of this goes back further than tonight's meeting, honestly. As a kid, I was a confused kid in the middle of a family that was deep in its own drug addiction, and I genuinely had no clue what I was supposed to believe in. There was no church. There wasn't much of a community around us holding anything up. What was consistently there instead was drugs, alcohol, and the kind of insanity that comes with both running the house. When that's the environment raising you, belief isn't really on the table yet — getting through the day is. So looking back, it makes sense that I didn't grow up with a higher power already built for me. Nobody handed me one. I had to go find mine myself, as an adult, in a folding chair in a room full of strangers, which is its own strange and fitting place to finally build it.

Here's the honest version. For a long time I couldn't find my higher power at all. Not because I didn't believe something was out there — because I couldn't get still. Every meeting, every quiet moment where I was supposed to sit with the idea, my brain was already three rooms ahead, chasing a squirrel, replaying a conversation, planning something that didn't matter. You can't find something that asks for stillness when stillness has never once felt safe or possible to you. That was the real block. It was never really about faith. It was about speed.

What changed wasn't a lightning bolt. It was letting go of the obsession I'd carried around for years — the constant low hum of needing drugs and alcohol to manage a brain that was already running too hot. Once that obsession loosened its grip, even a little, something else became possible: I could actually see clearly. I could slow down enough, for the first time in a long time, to build something instead of just surviving the next hour. That's when the relationship with a higher power stopped being a concept I nodded along to in meetings and started being something real I was actually building, on purpose, at my own pace.

I want to be honest about the word I use for it, too. Personally, I call mine God. That's genuinely what fits for me, and tonight, sitting in that meeting, it felt less like a concept and more like something I could actually lean on. But I try to hold that loosely when I talk about it here, because everyone in those rooms is entitled to their own interpretation of a higher power — whatever gets them through the times we all need help getting through. For some people it's God, same as me. For some it's the group itself, or nature, or something they can't fully name yet, and that's fine too. My word doesn't have to be anyone else's word for either of us to be doing this right.

So that's tonight's topic, and honestly, just bringing it up out loud — here, to you, instead of just turning it over in my head at 10pm — felt like its own small win. Slowing down enough to say it is still the whole practice for me. Some days that looks like meditation. Tonight it looked like writing this instead of letting the thought spin out and disappear like it used to.