So What?

{My Little Motto For Moving Through Weird Times}

Mar 17, 2025

I have a little life motto that helps me come around to surrendering to a life circumstance that hasn’t gone the way I expected it to. These two little words help me feel more compassionate with myself and with other people and this phrase helps me stop fighting so much. I’m a fighter through and through. I love control and if you’re like me your relationship with control is a tricky, probably toxic, one. Any time I’m reflecting on a reality I can’t seem to change I eventually ask myself the question….

So what?

And if I don’t have a truly good enough answer, then I just let it be.

So in an effort to normalize some of the less than desirable circumstances in my life that I know are actually pretty common for many people, I’m sharing some of my realities that I’ve made peace with by coming around to asking myself, so what?

So What?

My house just isn’t going to be as tidy or put together as I envisioned it would be by this point in my life. I have three children who live here. Their friends are always coming and going. I have two puppies who are loved here and allowed to live in all the inches of this home. Two people run full time careers out of our home totalling well over 100 hours a week. So what if an expectation I had, that was created years ago, without all the necessary information, isn't regularly met? Some days I want to use my extra time in the day restoring order to my home and some days I don't. So what?

I have children who still end up in our bed, or ask us to sleep in theirs, at some point during the week. If you would have told me five years ago, when I was still so sleep deprived my bones ached, that this was still going to be our reality it would have done me in. I craved predictability and the belief that as soon as everyone sorted out their sleep issues my life would get infinitely better kept me going. But as I’ve come to accept this is just how it goes sometimes, I’ve realized that what truly exhausts me more than anything is fighting against reality when instead I could just embrace it. I could just continue tending to them on the nights they need me and let go of the fight. The more I surrender to it the easier everything gets. I get more sleep, my family is happier and healthier and somehow everything just seems to work better. I thought sleep would be perfectly sorted out by now…it isn’t. So what?

My weight fluctuates within a range of the same few pounds every month or so and I just don't care anymore. On any given day I will weigh something different which has reinforced my belief that I actually don’t really want or need to weigh myself very often, if at all other than to soothe my decades old wounded compulsion. My “comfortable weight" has always been higher than what a BMI chart says it should be but all of the other factors that I think are important are actually fine. I feel good enough, I'm healthy as far as I know, I'm strong, I feel okay enough in my clothes and my body still supports all of the things I want to do in my life. So what if there are days this number is higher than I thought it might be at this point in my life. Truly, so what?

I don’t regularly consume the news and haven’t in the majority of the time I’ve been a therapist. I experience a lot of vicarious trauma in one of the roles I was working in during my early career and news headlines were triggering, so out the window they went. I doubled down on this after becoming a mother and my post partum anxiety was regularly choking me out. Fast forward to today and this is a personal boundary that’s come in handy and when I collapse this boundary in an effort to stay informed and soothe my “privelege guilt”, I pay the price with existenial crises and panic spirals as I watch our democracy crumble. But then I remember I can’t sprial and I don’t have time for crises; I have three children to love on, guide and protect. I have endless snacks and meals to make, carpools to drive, a business to run, clients to see, a life to live and kids to love and shield with every ounce of me. I can’t lose it. I won’t let them take that too. So I might only catch up on the headlines once a week and follow up on the bits I hear on the tennis court or in group texts, but that’s it. Call it selfish, white lady privelege…whatever you want. So what. It’s the only way I know how to keep two feet sturdy and solid on the ground so I can keep showing up for everyone else. And if you need to do the same, so what?

We don't sit down for family dinner on weeknights and stopped doing this a few years ago for a variety of reasons, all of which contributed to a miserable experience for all. I would be the last one left, sitting alone at the table after yet another disagreement about who got to sit next to me, a blowup over whose elbow touched whose and if it was on purpose, a refusal to eat, a sensory meltdown over sound triggers, etc etc etc....feeling so defeated and asking myself why I kept pushing for something that was clearly not meant to be. Why did I always have to be such a dog with a bone when I was determined to do something? I had this preconceived notion, an expectation, that for us to be a whole and fully functioning family we needed to come back together at the end of our days, at our kitchen table, and share our dinner. That having dinner together every night, like the Keatons and the Cosbys would be a sign that I was a good mom and working to uphold the values my husband and I had decided were the most important for our family. But it wasn't working. And the objective that I was trying to accomplish was not being accomplished; the opposite was happening actually. So I decided to press pause on family dinners, make it a more casual affair around the kitchen island and with some strategy and boundaries our dinners work much better for us. It's not what I envisioned and I still get sad about that sometimes, but that's motherhood. So what. My children are so much happier, I've been able to keep the values around meal time in tact and even though I'm just another mom who in general dreads dinner time, it's more pleasant. It doesn't look the way I thought it would, but it works for now. So what?

Not every corner of my home is updated, aesthetically pleasing or just the way I want it to be. I have spent years, and I mean years, ruminating and stuck in analysis paralysis trying to decide what cabinets to replace the builder grade cabinets in my mudroom/laundry room and continue to come back to square one because I can’t make a decision that feels just right. And I've come to the conclusion that I can’t make that decision because it’s actually just not that important enough to me. And so what? It doesn’t mean that that’s not an important thing to somebody else but for me, at this point in my life right now, I just don’t think I care enough. And that's fine actually. I often ask myself if there wasn't Instagram or Pinterest or Chris Love Julia and the like, would I still want to replace these perfectly fine cabinets? Probably not. Having ADHD means I struggle with all of executive functioning skills and it exhausts my brain just adulting and parenting to get through the end of the day. When I'm motivated and excited to change something up in my home then I will gladly tap into those executive functioning skills, but I can't waste them on going back and forth on something I don't genuinely care all that much about. My laundry room is not going to end up going viral on Pinterest. No one cares what my cabinets look like. So what?

Not taking the high road or being overly nice when someone else has already lowered the bar to hell. I was never good at this to begin with and perhaps I could use more polishing, but after the last four months I don’t have any reserves left in my tank of niceties and performative surface level conversation to ensure others feel comfortable. I don't see how that is any different than being complicit with the wrong side of history and justice. I have taken the high road for four decades and I will not be quiet; my children are watching. So what?

I've spent most of my life doing things differently than just about everyone else. As my tennis coach likes to say "you just seem to lean toward the unorthodox" :) For decades I used to think that there was something so very wrong with me for naturally doing the simplest of things in a different way than everyone else even though I achieved the same outcome, or sometimes even a better outcome, and I never understood why it seemed to be a conflict. My way was always met with resistance and hesitation just because it was different, despite getting the same result. I now believe that there really are very few things that are so clearly black and white with only one way to do it. Most systems and viewpoints in our society are all shaped from the neurotypical perspective and that's just not me; never has been never will be. I've always done things my way and they turned out just fine, but things got way better when I stopped feeling badly about it and feeling the need to over explain myself. If my way works for me, then good for me! If your way works for you, then good for you! So what?