Writing with ADHD Episode 1: The Shame
WRITING WITH ADHD
EPISODE 1: THE SHAME
I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 30.
I had always had it, it turns out. It just concealed itself as a lack of self-discipline, a touch of anxiety, a hint of depression, and a dash of social awkwardness.
A lot of adults around the world have ADHD and don’t realise it. It’s that kind of disorder that hides easily. From the outside, an ADHD person who can’t tidy the house just looks lazy. A gifted ADHD kid who grows up to be anything but a doctor, lawyer, or spaceship engineer—that’s just someone who wasted their potential. A gifted ADHD kid that does become a doctor or lawyer, but feels inadequate—they just need to be grateful for and proud of what they have achieved.
Right?
That’s how it can appear, but the reality is more complicated.
ADHD has a lot of symptoms. What is common between us is a lack of dopamine and [let me google how to spell this quickly …] norepinephrine. Our brains have problems with motivation and reward.
Some people respond to this imbalance by being very messy. Others are fastidiously tidy.
Some are gregarious, the life of the party. Others keep quiet, out of fear of being seen as awkward.
We can have trouble starting a task. We can have trouble focusing on it. We can have trouble focusing on anything else—what I call tunnel vision. There are times when people call my name, but I am too absorbed in what I’m doing to answer.
All these opposing symptoms make the disorder hard to diagnose, and hard to understand.
Amphetamine medicine gives us the chemicals we lack. It helps many of us a lot, but it isn’t perfect. I have a good dosage of medication that I respond well to, but I still have ADHD.
This condition has a special relationship to writing fiction.
I love writing as much as I hate it.
I get so much writing done, but it’s so very, very, far short of what I want to be doing.
I have improved over time, but I’m still ashamed of how bad my writing comes out.
Why do I write at all, if it causes so much strife?
Why I write
I have always been ‘a creative type.’
At any given time in my life, I have been seriously engaged in:
Acting
Writing
Songwriting
Playing the trumpet, piano, drums, guitar, and/or singing
I acted throughout school, and a little bit after. I played in the swing band, concert band, and a barbershop quartet.
Then, when I was at university, I wrote, recorded, and produced two Pop-Punk EPs instead of studying. (I think the music is catchy, but I wish I could re-do the lyrics)
Then I tried to write an animate a series of internet shorts about goblins. (That one didn’t go anywhere)
Then I started writing Fantasy novels, and so far that one has stuck.
I still go back and dabble with music from time to time.
So, to answer the question at the top of this section, I write because I have to have something creative going on.
The experience of sitting in an empty room with only my brain for company is a dynamic and thrilling one. I don’t have to sit and think of storylines or characters. They just pop up in my brain, like pesky notifications on a phone.
I have to write almost as an act of washing the dirt off my brain. If I let all those story ideas build up, my brain might develop scaling and grime like the area under a shower nozzle. So I write and I write, and all the ideas that swirl around get a place to live.
It’s a good system. My brain—partially because it has ADHD—give me free ideas all the time. I write them down, and we’re all happy.
Right?
THE SHAME
ADHD never lets me off easy.
A big component of my experience with it, is that I never feel lasting pride for things I have accomplished.
Instead, I feel intense shame and guilt. I set bars for myself that are unfair, and I get upset at myself for not reaching them.
This part of the experience is much better now that I’m on medication.
But for 30 years, it was not good.
It doesn’t only affect writing. But writing creates something of a perfect growth medium for shame.
The bar I set:
I want to be the best writer who ever lived. Whospeare? F. Scott. Whatgerald? Virginia Huh? They’ve all been forgotten next to Timothy S Currey.
It’s an arrogant thing to even say that’s my goal, but we’re being therapeutic here. It doesn’t pay to pretend I don’t have the flaw of arrogance when it comes to this.
The real, rational part of my brain just wants to have a good time writing, and to write good stories. But the shame doesn’t come from the rational part, does it?
It is a foolish bar to set, but that’s the nature of things. I’m not satisfied with imperfection in myself, because I haven’t really felt satisfaction with myself before. My brain takes this to logically mean that if I could only achieve perfection, then that long-awaited satisfaction would arrive at last.
With meditation, medication, and daily reminders to see a more constructive and positive view, I have been able to relinquish this unrealistic goal. By just a little.
Still, what do I do to pursue that goal?
I write every single day, and I read lots of good fiction, of course.
Actually, no I don’t.
On good weeks, I do write pretty consistently. But every single day? That has never happened. I don’t think it ever will.
It is nigh impossible to write thousands of words a day with a brain like mine.
But weirdly, even writing is a bit easier for me than reading.
Maybe I spend too much time watching TV and playing PC games. Maybe I spend all my time at my day job focusing my eyes on things, and the prospect of reading is just too fatiguing.
Whatever the reason, I have to set aside blocks of time to read. It’s something I’m ashamed of, but it’s true. I have to set aside reading ‘appointments’, with the same reluctance as booking in a scale and clean at the dentist.
I like reading. I enjoy the books I read. But I only read a few books a year. I wish it was a few books a month.
Why this is, I don’t fully know.
Naturally, I blame the ADHD. It is nice to have a scapegoat.
I think the root cause is the fact that reading was ‘just for fun’ when I was younger. Back then I would devour the larger Harry Potter books in a few afternoons. Now that I’m serious about writing, reading books is homework.
It’s homework that I have to choose to subject myself to.
Since the diagnosis and the medication, I have gotten better at reading. There is still internal pressure there, and shame when I go more than a few days without reading. But in the end, I read more, and I feel less shame.
Writing is still a challenge, even though it’s easier than it used to be. The act of sitting down and putting my hands on the keyboard is tough emotional labour. It is for anyone. It’s just that ADHD can make that particular hurdle a little higher.
On any day that I don’t write, I feel ashamed.
On any day that I DO write, I still feel ashamed. Why? Because whether I wrote one thousand, two thousand, or five thousand words, I still could have written more.
How can I hope to ever be the greatest writer of all time if I don’t bother to write a classic novel every single afternoon?
The answer is that my goals are silly goals to have, and shame is a silly thing to feel in response. I know these things, way deep down in the hard-to-access, rational part of my brain.
But I know it’s possible to get better at this stuff. I have improved to get to where I am now, and I just need to keep going on that same trajectory.
Growth mindset - look it up.
So what, Tim? Writing is hard for everyone!
Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
Isn’t it annoying when people like me bellyache about how hard it is to be a tortured artist?
Every writer hates sitting down and writing. The logical thing for me to do, therefore, is shut up and put up with the slog like the rest of them.
I have a purpose for writing this, though, which I’ll get to.
I do have ADHD. That part is not bellyaching. I have a fancy doctor’s signature on my prescriptions and everything.
ADHD does affect things that relate to writing. If a non-ADHD person says writing is hard for them, then I am saying that with ADHD, it is harder.
Here’s the purpose:
Your situation may resonate with mine. Don’t go ahead and use Doctor Google to self-diagnose, BUT, if you have a sneaking suspicion that your experience may be undiagnosed ADHD … look into it.
The only person who can diagnose you is a trained psychiatrist. (psyCHIatrist, not psychologist). It is best if you get one who is specially trained in adult ADHD. It’s hard to catch, and many of the symptoms overlap with other disorders. Not every doctor or psychiatrist understands ADHD. The first doctor I went to told me that ‘ADHD is when little boys can’t sit still’—an unfortunately common perspective.
If you pinky swear not to diagnose yourself based on it, I can share a short list of symptoms or experiences that are common to ADHD people. Again and again I will repeat: see a real specialist.
Symptoms and experiences include (but are not limited to):
Trouble with motivation and focus (either being unable to focus, or becoming intensely focused on one thing)
Messy and disorganised, or sometimes highly organised to aid a ‘mental calm’ feeling.
Emotional regulation problems, incl. anger, irritability, shame, sensitivity to rejection (last one is commonly felt but not scientifically proven)
Sometimes but not always fidgeting, getting up out of seat, strong feelings of restlessness.
A decline in academic results as education progressed (gifted in elementary, skated by in high school, failed out of college, that kind of thing)
Trouble with sleep / insomnia (often from random thoughts that spin and spin and spin and won’t let you sleep)
History of depression, anxiety — especially if resistant to SSRIs. 70% of people who have anxiety may actually have anxiety as a result of ADHD as opposed to other primary causes (citation needed, I think I saw that on a TED talk once)
[Please don’t use this list as a medical diagnostic tool or a scientific source. It’s just a bunch of things I experience, noticed in others, and read about online. If you think you have ADHD, SEE A SPECIALIST]
None of this is conclusive. Even if you feel strongly that all these symptoms and more describe your life, it may not be ADHD.
But if, like me, you end up getting the right diagnosis?
Trust me. It’s worth it. Ask your doctor.
[Note: I’ve included all this, despite my need to include a thousand warnings and caveats, because I was once someone who didn’t know they had ADHD. I came across random stuff online that clued me in, I got my diagnosis, and now I know. I think the best thing for me to do morally is try to spread the word so that more people can get diagnosed, even if I’m not a qualified professional]
Wrapping up: The Shame
A lot of ADHD people report feeling guilt or shame on a daily basis.
It’s a kind of abstract, floating shame, that just follows you around wherever you go. You feel like you are never enough, that you can’t get things right, that you have something to prove. It’s hard to feel proud of your accomplishments, because the ADHD part of the brain likes to forget positive things faster than usual.
Right now I’m living with the shame, negotiating with it.
I know its games, and the rational part of my brain knows that shame isn’t appropriate. Dealing with it is about reminding myself constantly of this fact.
The thing that bothers me most about it is the link between shame and motivation. Those two are always in an intimate dance together.
The shame demotivates me. The demotivation makes me feel ashamed.
For me, it’s important to try and calm myself and be mindful of my emotions before I sit down to write.
I need to remind myself: I only ‘need’ to sit down and write a little bit. Often, I’ll get carried away and write plenty. What this really does is reduce the pressure, and lower the bar.
I need to remind myself when I’m done: I got some writing done today. Woohoo!
I need to take my medication at an appropriate time, in an appropriate dose, and manage my diet and hydration to make sure it’s working properly.
At least some level of The Shame might be inevitable. But between medication, emotional regulation, and taking things one step at a time, it’s possible to feel less of it, less often. Whatever your relationship to The Shame —ADHD or not— it is possible to make progress. I know I’ve been making fairly good progress.
As my shame has diminished, it has even made room for a little bit of The Pride.
I’m proud of the books I’ve written.
It feels nice to write that.