Messy Minded Momma

It’s 2001. The colour pink takes over every girl’s bedroom. Posters from Teen People, J-14, and Seventeen line the walls. Neon crop tops, low-rise jeans, and butterfly patterns fill our closets. Dial-up internet screeches from the family computer after dinner. We love the movies The Princess Diaries, Save the Last Dance, Josie and the Pussycats. After school, it’s Lizzie McGuire and BraceFace. We pass notes in class, wear body glitter, take photos on disposable cameras, wander the streets of downtown Toronto, and end up outside Much Music hoping to catch a glimpse of someone famous.

Life feels simple. Safe. Full of possibility. And it was the beginning of my love for Hilary Duff.

Hilary Duff and I are less than a year apart in age, and it felt like we were growing up together. Crushes became boyfriends, songs became albums, fashion lines turned into books and perfume launches. (Elixir and Stuff by Duff…IYKYK.) When she stepped into new life stages, they often mirrored my own. From teenage roles to working woman to motherhood, I followed all of it. I even cried when I got her autograph in 2004. Her career wasn’t just something I observed. It felt parallel to my own life.

So now, more than twenty years later, when she releases new music and I cannot bring myself to listen, I have to ask why.

Friends send me clips and I don’t open them. Tour promotions fill my Instagram feed and I scroll past. Yet if she starred in a new TV show or movie, I would watch without hesitation.

The difference is the music.

Her music was never just background noise. It was a time capsule. Songs don’t sit on a shelf the way films or books do. They live in your body. When I hear tracks from Metamorphosis, I am instantly 15 again, standing in my childhood bedroom planning outfits and overthinking a boy who barely deserved my attention.

Music is memory fused with emotion. And as someone with ADHD, that imprinting runs deep. ADHD is not just distraction. It is intensity. When we attach to something, we attach fully. Interests become part of our identity. They regulate us. They comfort us. They stay predictable when other parts of life feel chaotic. Hilary Duff’s early music became one of those anchors for me.

And ADHD brains do not always love transitions. Emotional shifts can feel bigger than they logically are. A new era is not just new songs. It symbolizes movement and change.

But the original chapter felt complete.

There is a quiet grief in realizing something formative belongs firmly in the past. Her new music gently confirms what I already know: that pink bedroom, that version of me, that time in my life is over. Intellectually I understand that. Emotionally, part of me wants to preserve it untouched.

Attachment plays a role too. When you follow someone for decades, even from afar, a bond forms. She became a steady reference point through girlhood, young adulthood, and motherhood. That continuity felt grounding.

Avoiding her new music is not rejection. It is protection.

Not pressing play keeps that chapter intact. It allows me to honor the era without forcing it to compete with the present. Being “not ready” is simply my nervous system recognizing something sacred and asking me to handle it gently.

One day I may press play. Not to prove anything. Not to keep up. But because I can hold who I was and who I am now at the same time, without feeling like one has to replace the other.