the start
An early memory for me : sitting in my parents mini van with my twin sister in the car seat beside me and the radio is on. It’s either WALK 97.5 or 106.1 WBLI (Long Island girlies know). Then I gasp when I hear a familiar intro and we all giddily exclaim “IT’S THE CHELSEA SONG”
‘Tomorrow we can drive around this town
And let the cops chase us around
The past is gone, but something might be found
To take it’s place
Hey CHELSEA”
Years later, I would share my grief, disappointment, and embarrassment when I was corrected by a boy whom I had a crush on that the lyrics were actually “Hey JEALOUSY”. It was devastating, of course, but it didn’t matter. It is forever known as ‘the Chelsea song’ in my family and in my heart.
However, I believe I deserve compensation from the Gin Blossoms for making the word ‘Jealousy’ sound so much like my name. I was an impressionable two year old who loved listening to music and putting on performances in the living room for my fans (grandparents) and they took this joy from me. But for those years, I felt really special. It was a romantic feeling attached to the idea that the person who wrote this song was writing it for a really cute girl in their life named Chelsea. It’s also scientifically proven that people love to hear their own names. Like, we love it. Dale Carnegie wrote in ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ that the sound of your name being said aloud is the ‘sweetest sound’ you can hear. This causes a chemical reaction in our brains which release all of those feel good drugs like DOPAMINE.
Hey Chelsea was my first hit. I literally couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to get enough of that sweet sweet D.
Years later, dopamine would be a very important drug to me. Every period of my life, I found a conduit of dopamine and sucked it dry of every last drop. As it would turn out, I’d be diagnosed at the ripe age of 31 with attention defecite hyperactivity disorder (ADHD for short) which means that my brain runs so low on dopamine that it impacts my attention, my behavior, goals, and overall functionality. Getting this long awaited diagnosis has flipped my world upside down since this disability presents itself in early childhood. I’d gone two decades of living with an invisible disorder that impacted my every day life, for better or worse, and I’m in the midst of a combination of an identity crisis and a reawakening - it depends on the day.
I’m here, with my ADHD, not quite thriving but we’re getting there besties. It’s been a fuckin journey. The diagnosis came at the right time, but I was in for a shit storm of stress. I was getting married in 4 months and in classic ADHD fashion, I had procrastinated the planning. I could no longer deny my biology and I would not be able to run from it.