Interoception, which is the internal sense of knowing what you’re feeling, tends to work differently in ADHD brains. We may be more likely to notice a funny looking cloud, but less likely to name the emotional effect it has on us.

That’s probably why it’s easier for me to recall delight that was scheduled than fleeting moments of delight that happened naturally throughout the day.

I don’t think either type of delight is more important than the other. Eating good sushi with a friend you haven’t seen in a while can be just as impactful as seeing a bee asleep in a flower.

Most people probably get delight both ways but may put more weight on one or the other.

What about you? Are you paying more attention to spontaneous or planned delight?

This month on Bored Leopard, we’re looking at Delight — what it takes to notice it, plan for it, or both.

When I experience delight, it seems like I’ve discovered a secret moment of joy or enchantment that slows time and floods my body with chemicals that simultaneously invigorate and soothe me. While I get that feeling from both solo and shared events, there are certain differences between them.

The feeling I get when I bury my face in Bonnie’s fur and smell the residual scent of sunshine, see a rainbow when I’m alone on a walk and sense harmony with the universe, or gaze upon Mt. Hood from my airplane seat and appreciate nature’s beauty – that feeling is usually more sentimental and based on my unique experience of the world. It’s my secret moment to savor and I reflect on these moments when I want to find calm.

In contrast, the feeling I get when I share an inside joke with friend and recognize our connection, laugh uproariously with a group during a card game and embrace the silliness of the moment, or finish a movie quote started by my husband and appreciate our affinity and history – that feeling is compounded because my companions’ happiness amplifies my own.

Not to mention, a lot of us with ADHD regulate better, and feel more, when we’re borrowing someone else’s energy in real time – co-regulation, not just company. That’s why the card table version of delight doesn’t stay the size it started at.

For me these moments are shared secrets that strengthen our rapport.

I need delight in my life and want more of it. To get more solo delight, I’m trying to slow down and engage with my world instead of moving through it as I focus on a goal. (“Stop and smell the roses” but with less allergy-inducing flowers.) For collective delight, I’m challenging myself to intentionally make time for and plans with others.

How do you experience delight? Is it easier for you to find delight solo or with others? I look forward to hearing from you as we examine delight this month, especially in our Community Conversation on September 18th. Subscribers get the invite.

Always,
Amber

I have a friend who recently got her license for somatic practicing. One of the licensure requirements was a certain number of hours guiding people through somatic exercises, so she asked her friends (including me) to be her test dummies.

When I went into our first session, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I’d had a somatic counselor before, and what I remember from our sessions was a lot of picturing my feelings as objects or people I could talk to. But somatic practitioners and somatic counselors are two different beasts, so I mostly came in with an open mind and the knowledge that once I was done, I was going to get myself a Happy Meal at the McDonald’s near the bus stop.

The current toys were Changeables, a re-imagining of Happy Meal toys from 1987 and 1990 that transformed from McDonald’s objects (like hamburgers and cash registers) into space dinosaurs. And even though I already had the Fergon, I felt a great need for more toys in that series.

When the day arrived, I took the bus, got off at the McDonald’s, and walked through the drizzly afternoon to an unfamiliar office building to see my friend. As soon as I sat down on the therapy couch, I had a vivid image of a child climbing into my lap.

I was caught off guard and needed a moment to figure out who this child was and where they came from. The only child I’d recently been in contact with was when I babysat my friend’s 6-month-old a week before, but the child in my lap was around 4 or 5.

It didn’t take me long to realize this was my younger self. I didn’t want to disrupt the session, and it seemed that they were getting a kick out of secretly being there, so I didn’t tell my friend, and instead, followed the hour-long somatic exercise of tuning into my senses and nervous system and noticing all the feelings I could place in my body, while my inner child giggled, squirmed, stood on my lap, sat back down, commented on the exercise, and did basically whatever they wanted.

I did eventually tell my friend about the child, but not until our debrief of the exercise, when I realized I didn’t want the child to go away when I left the room. It just so happened that I had already planned to get a Happy Meal afterwards, so why not get it for the both of us, adult me and child me?

Ever since then, I’ve felt more connected to my child self. I sometimes find myself asking, “What does little Hannah want?” and Little Hannah tells me they want to read a particular type of story, or to go for a night walk, or to bury my face in the cat’s belly. I’ve found that Little Hannah is better at knowing what will make me happy than Big Hannah is.

I generally think of myself as someone who is tuned into delight, who deliberately makes room for and protects that room for delight. I can’t really imagine not being pre-occupied with delight given that my brain is typically dopamine-starved due to ADHD. But since my encounter with Little Hannah, I’ve become even more attuned to my own happiness and, particularly, more capable of pulling away from the things that I feel should bring me delight but ultimately don’t. Things I want but know won’t make me happy and instead would just make me want more. Little Hannah calls bullshit on those things much faster than Big Hannah.

What about you? How do you tell the difference between want and delight? Do you have a voice in your head that calls bullshit?

Best,
Hannah

PS.

If you know someone with a connection to ADHD, whose inner kid could use a little more delight, forward this along.

After enough of your referrals subscribe, we’ll mail you something.

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Friday, September 18th at noon Pacific, we’re talking about delight — the kind you plan for and the kind you’d miss entirely if you weren’t paying attention.

Register and add this to your calendar now before you forget.

Register now

We aren’t sharing the recording after the live conversation, so register now, mark your calendar, and don’t miss out on this chance to connect with your community.

Join us

Always,
Amber

PS: Community conversations are for women and gender minorities.

Hi there,

I spent a few months this year sick enough that I couldn’t eat solid food. It wasn’t just that I felt bad physically, it was that I’d lost access to one of my main mood stabilizers, namely, meals with textural variance.

Coming out the other side, solid food tasted like a miracle, and I noticed something else: I was craving delight. So, I did two things. I committed to a monthly dive trip with my husband, and one Saturday morning, on no notice at all, I called up a friend and we went to the Portland Soap Box Derby to watch full grown adults race home-made vehicles down the paths on Mt. Tabor. It was completely delightful.

Those are just two examples of how I’ve been chasing delight in my recovery, and I think they illustrate two distinct paths. One took a calendar and a commitment; the other took noticing a spark of interest and following it on a whim.

What delights you? And how much of your own delight do you think you’re missing because you’re not tuned in to notice it?

On Friday, September 18th at 12:00 PM PT, join our community conversation to talk this out together — the delight you plan for, the delight you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention, and everything in between.

Tammy, a regular participant says, “I think the biggest benefit to having these conversations has been finding that others see the world in a similar way that I do. It takes away the feeling of isolation and replaces it with a feeling of belonging.”

Come belong with us.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Delight

Friday, September 18th, Noon PT

Know someone who should be in this conversation? Forward this to them.

This event is completely free — just subscribe to our Substack community to receive your link. If you’re already subscribed, you should receive the invitation in your inbox shortly.

Subscribe now

The recording won’t be available for viewing after the event, so mark your calendar for Friday, September 18th at noon Pacific.

Always,
Amber

PS: Community conversations are for women and gender minorities.

During our August Community Conversation about play, I asked a question that we never quite resolved: with the world feeling so hard right now, does fun feel less important? Because, for me, if I don’t prioritize my own happiness, it can easily get lost among the bad news and stress.

But it occurred to me that some people might naturally really dig into fun as a way to destress or avoid thinking about the hard stuff, at least for a little while.

So, I’d like to open up the question to you all, but this time a little more broadly: when the world or your life is particularly hard, do you find yourself reaching for play more, or is it usually the first thing to go? Tell us in the comments.

Always,
Amber

We’ve been talking about fun for the last two months, but it wasn’t until the August Community Conversation that I realized how much identity is involved in my feelings about play.

When we discussed whether you could consider an activity to be play and have it not be fun, one of the community members described how she tended her horse’s eye infection, which required applying ointment four times a day to a reluctant horse’s eye. In no way, shape, or form was this fun, but every time she came back to the house from the barn, she thought, “Cool, I did a cowgirl thing!” Her association with the identity of being a cowgirl transformed her perception of an inconvenient treatment chore into a girl taking care of her horse, so much so that she did a little chair dance when she told us she was a cowgirl.

Once she highlighted identity as a component of play, all the conversation participants shared stories about how their assumed identity totally changed their perception and feelings about an activity. Designing a space can make us designers, doing physical activity can make us athletes, creating a costume can make us artists…and tending a horse can make us cowgirls. This ability to become something else — recognizable by the tools or equipment we use, the activities we perform, and the people (and animals) with whom we do activities — is simultaneously a freeing from our “regular” lives and a comfort in its recognizability. It lets us escape from our real-world expectations and connect with other aspects of ourselves.

When I wrote the relatable story about giving up playing soccer, I failed to recognize how much I lost when I gave up my identity as a soccer player. The loss wasn’t simply the physical activity, social connection, routine, strategic mindset, and escape from the real world — the loss was greater than the sum of these individual parts. I wish that I had had this conversation 5 years ago because I might have been better prepared for the profound and lingering sadness that I experienced when I gave up an identity in which I’d invested 25 years.

I’m looking forward to exploring more identities as I find more playful activities — and I hope that I enjoy them enough to do a little dance when I tell people about them!

And please share in the comments, what identities do you like to try on?

Always,
Amber

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However, once I started considering the items that gave me pause, the first consideration became immediately clear: all my play activities involve rules, and I don’t always know or remember them. That said, I’m willing to learn on the fly as long as there is a way for me learn.

The next big consideration was about physical activities and my innate ability to injure myself. If I’m physically able to do the activity, I need to determine the likelihood that I’ll hurt myself. Because I’m going to hurt myself whilst walking through a doorway anyway, danger, even life-threatening, doesn’t automatically rule an activity out. For example, scuba diving is a sport that involves risk, but with training, I was happy to do it.

I am intimidated by activities that require a lot of special equipment – where do I get it? Where do I store it? How do I maintain it? Will I remember to bring it all with me? Will I remember how to use it properly? Yet again, if there is an easy way to mitigate the stress, then I’m still in. (For scuba diving, the equipment becomes “easy” because my husband is our gear master.)

Lastly, I have more fun and am more willing to try to play something if I have a buddy to share the adventure, so I added a note to invite a friend.

How does this flowchart map to how you consider whether to play? What did I miss? Tell us in the comments or come to the Community Conversation tomorrow at noon PT.

I don’t particularly enjoy cooking for a lot of reasons. I hate the stinging sensation in my eyes when I dice onions. My dyspraxia means I’m always knocking things over, which is messy and loud. I’ve never found a balance between the agony of standing over a stove and waiting for things to brown vs stepping away long enough that the food doesn’t burn. And I’m mildly resentful that dinner requires so many steps every single day.

To top it all off, it’s just kind of a boring chore. So, when I cook, to keep things at least a little bit interesting, I’m wont to experiment — swapping ingredients, trying techniques I saw in a YouTube short, seeing what happens if I add a bit of miso. And because I’m experimenting with the food, I do think of it as play, even though very little about it is fun.

Eating is the opposite. Once the food’s in front of me, there’s no more improvising. I’m not testing anything. And if the food is good, I’m just enjoying it and trying to slow down so the pleasure of the flavors and textures isn’t gone too soon. Mealtimes are some of my favorite parts of the day, and none of the fun comes from choice or invention, which means, for me, it’s not play.

I like to think of play as experimenting with no end goal other than to try things out. Fun, on the other hand, is how I feel when I’m enjoying myself. Usually those line up closely enough that nobody bothers separating them. But since this month’s theme is all about play, and this quarter’s theme is about fun, I thought it a worthwhile distinction to make.

The restlessness that makes me change the recipe every time isn’t a personality quirk. It’s boredom intolerance, which is a documented feature of ADHD brains. Novelty isn’t a bonus I add to cooking to make it more fun. It’s the minimum requirement for me to stay engaged long enough to not burn anything. Without it, cooking slides into the same category as filling out a timesheet or brushing my teeth: not fun, not play, just a thing that has to happen so I get paid, keep my teeth, or eat something other than the same five dishes on rotation. Those tasks don’t ask anything of my attention beyond finishing them, and I don’t ask anything of them beyond that either.

However, I’d love to find ways to make brushing my teeth or filling out my timesheet more bearable. It could mean incorporating play or fun, but it doesn’t have to be both to keep me interested.

Do you have specific playtimes that aren’t fun, or do you ever have fun when you’re not playing? Let us know in the comments or come to the Community Conversation this Friday.

Best,
Hannah

I recently came across a youtuber who dissects comedy videos. His posts are usually titled, “why is [blank] funny?” but he doesn’t actually tell you why the sketch or comedy set or sitcom is funny. Instead, he talks about the rules behind the improv.

I watched one video about “Fanoli,” an episode of the improv Dropout program, Very Important People (aside: I highly recommend this episode of VIP for anyone who has ever been creeped on by an older man). The youtuber I mentioned talked about the games the actors, Vic Michaelis and Angela Giarratana are playing. The games are made up as the skit progresses, but neither actor breaks character to say what the rules of the games are. The reason the actors know how to play off of each other is that the games are based on typical improv rules and the established relationship between the two actors. Even with that basis, the games are improvised on the spot and specific to the scene.

What’s interesting to me is that the game they’re playing isn’t just the scene, the game is also building the rules that make the game.

So, I want to know, are there games you play where making the rules up on the spot is part of the playing? I feel like because novelty and discovery are such big needs for people with ADHD, my guess is that building the game as you play it is more common among our set. Let us know in the comments.

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For many years if you asked me what I did for fun, I’d immediately answer that I played soccer.

If you asked me why I enjoyed it, the answer was a bit more complicated.

Honestly, I wasn’t ever a great or skilled player, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the game. Over the 25 years that I regularly played soccer, I was part of several teams that were way above my skill level. I once asked a team captain why they kept me on the squad and they said that my enthusiasm, commitment, and speed made up for my lack of formal skills. This assessment of my contribution surprised and reassured me because my skills were noticeably inferior to my teammates. In one game, I successfully “made a move” with the ball and the entire team cheered and congratulated me on it. (Still one of my life highlights!)

It’s rare that I’d list getting together with a large group of people on my fun-things-to-do list, but soccer was the exception. Soccer was my primary way to meet and be with people when I moved to a new place. And while I didn’t always (or ever) like everyone on a team, I did make some good friends and a soccer connection even led to me meeting my husband.

When Covid brought life to a screeching halt, soccer was one of the casualties. The co-ed, indoor team I played with for 14 years disbanded and after Covid, I decided I didn’t want to fall down anymore and so gave up the sport at 55.

What I miss about soccer is the collective hyperfocus. I miss the complete time warp experience where the real world disappeared and I was completely absorbed by competing with other adults to chase and kick a checkered ball around a field of astro turf. I miss that there were no real consequences if we won or lost. And I miss that while the game lasted, I had a shared purpose with teammates whose last names I never learned.

I cried the day I gave away my soccer kit because I was losing the place that had given me reason to get out of the house multiple times a week, kept me active for years, and freed me from daily stress. I’ve tried other sports and activities but none of them give me the true fun I got from soccer.

Soccer was my true love for play. I miss it and I find I’m still looking for something to fill the gap it left in my life – a structured setting in which I can play with my friends on a regular, scheduled basis. Do you have something like that? And if so, how did you find it?

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As someone with ADHD, my brain often runs on all-or-nothing logic — an activity either clears the bar completely or it gets thrown out. Applied to play, that logic produces a strict fun test: if it wasn’t enjoyable the whole way through, it doesn’t count. That test disqualifies a lot of real play. The question isn’t whether something felt good the entire time. The question is whether it was voluntary, spontaneous, and its own reward — which is a different test than fun, and a more accurate one.

Objection 1: “If I’m not enjoying it, why would I keep doing it?”
Busted: Wanting to do something is a reason on its own — it doesn’t need enjoyment backing it up in the moment. Musicians go back to a piece even though they keep missing the same note, not because getting it wrong feels good, but because the wanting-to-get-it-right hasn’t gone away. That’s play. It doesn’t need fun’s signature on it too.

Objection 2: “If it’s frustrating, it’s stopped being play and started being work.”
Busted: Scuba diving takes real planning, and being thirty feet down can be genuinely stressful before it’s anything else. None of that disqualifies it, because what makes something play was never the emotional register — it’s that the activity has no goal beyond being in the water and seeing what’s there. Frustration is information about difficulty. It’s not a verdict on whether something is still play.

Objection 3: “If I have to force myself to start, it wasn’t really play to begin with.”
Busted: A lot of play needs a container to happen at all — the dive trip has to get booked, the key has to get chosen before the singing starts. Resistance to that first step is real, but that initial resistance doesn’t disqualify all the play that comes after.

Objection 4: “If it takes real effort or skill, that’s practice, not play.”
Busted: Most exercise takes effort too, and, at least for me, it’s still not play — not because it’s hard, but because I’m not improvising. I’m told exactly what to do next. Jazz is just as effortful and just as skill-dependent, and I still think of it as play, because the experimentation inside it is chosen. Effort was never the disqualifier. Lack of room for choice is.

More on play — what it is, what it isn’t, what happens when you lose your way into it — all month. Subscribe to get the invite to our live conversation on August 21st.

And let us know, either in the comments or in the community conversation, what’s something you’d call play, even when it’s not fun?

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As people with ADHD, open and unstructured can feel like too many options. For some of us, play needs structure, the dive trip has to be booked, the singing session planned and the key chosen, and only once the structure is in place are we able to relax and open ourselves. Sometimes, it’s the boat that gets you to open water.

So: can your play show up in real open, unscheduled time, or does it need structure to exist at all?

We’re talking about play in our August community conversation. Subscribe if you want the invitation.

Subscribe now

I’ve always been a big daydreamer. Because of the ADHD, I don’t have the mental stamina to write long form fiction (or short, for that matter), but I’m always carrying about upwards of ten novel-length stories in my head that I can drop into whenever I’m bored, antsy, or uncomfortable. These daydreams are my companions while I ride the bus, work on rote tasks, and as I fall asleep.

Growing up in a conservative evangelical church, I was convinced that my propensity for daydreaming was a sin. For one, I often cared more about and spent more time with my characters than I did worshiping God, so I thought they must be idols. Daydreaming was also anti-productive, and while laziness wasn’t exactly considered a sin, people definitely treated it like one.

As an adult, I’ve recontextualized my daydreaming as play, and often, play therapy. I even journal about how the stories I work through in my head are related to real issues I’m dealing with emotionally. And looking back, I now recognize that my childhood daydreams played a similar role.

I can think of one recurring daydream I went to throughout grade school about finding a hidden pond in the woods behind my house and meeting a girl with long dark hair there who got me in a way no one else had. There was probably more complexity to it, but from decades out, I can say this was likely a small outlet for my repressed queerness and it also helped me feel less alone.

Do you think daydreaming counts as play, or not? And what’s your relationship with it?

Best,
Hannah

PS

If you know someone who’s also carrying a few unwritten novels around in their head, forward this along. Enough of your referrals subscribe and we’ll send you something in the mail.

Refer a friend

My father’s memorial is coming up. People keep assuming my husband will come with me. He’s not — not a conflict between us, just that I’ll already be managing myself in that room, and I don’t have it in me to manage his reactions too.

Even though the above is not a particularly fun example, it’s the same question from my fun flowchart: am I running the thing, backing someone else up, or just a participant who has to be okay with whatever happens? Each one changes how much fun I’m having.

When you’re the one steering it for someone else, does it cost you your own fun every time, or only sometimes?

Share as much or as little as feels right in the comments.

Always,
Amber

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In our community conversation a few weeks ago, we talked about the hidden costs of fun. When I’m deciding whether to do something, energy is the first number I check. Not whether I’ll enjoy it, but rather whether I can afford it. Recognizing that activities cost energy isn’t the problem. Tallying them like a bill is.

Here’s what the energy debit tally sounds like when I’m invited to a party:

More than four people: cha-ching. Might include people I don’t know: cha-ching. Unfamiliar location: cha-ching. Could be noisy: cha-ching. Can’t walk to it: cha-ching. On a weeknight: cha-ching.

By the time I’ve run the numbers, the anticipated cost looks too high, and I say no — not because I know I won’t have fun, but because I calculated a possible price and it scared me. This has cost me plenty of nights I probably would have enjoyed.

What scares me more than a possible energy toll is missing out on my own life. So I’m trying something different: instead of tallying debits, I’m tallying credits.

Same party, same invitation, new enjoyment credit math:

I can catch up with multiple friends at one event: cha-ching. People I actually want to see will be there: cha-ching. The location has quiet spots to retreat to: cha-ching. I can ride with a friend and talk the whole way: cha-ching. I haven’t left the house all week: cha-ching. The food will be good: double cha-ching.

I’m not pretending the party will cost me nothing, but I’m no longer letting that be the first and only number on the page. The party might be fun. It might even generate energy, because I’ll see my people. And if there’s good food, that’s bonus points.

I still run out of energy. I still cancel sometimes, and the debit column doesn’t disappear just because I found a credit one. This isn’t a system that makes every decision easy. But it’s stopped me from saying no to things by default, purely because I was scared of a bill I hadn’t actually been handed yet.

What’s on your credit side when you’re deciding whether to show up? Do you already tally enjoyment, or does the cost column still get the final word?

Always,
Amber

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In my late 20s, I dated a guy who was obsessed with music. While I can appreciate a good song, let’s just say I’ve been called “picky” about music. I prefer “selective.” So, when one of his favorite bands announced a show in town, he was thrilled. I was not.

Two things worked against me here. One, I genuinely had zero interest in this band. Two, I have a well-documented history of falling asleep at concerts — even good ones. I can count on one hand the number of shows I’ve stayed awake for start to finish. When I passed, he said he’d find a friend to go with instead. Problem solved, I thought. He gets his concert, I get my couch.

Then one of his female friends said she’d love to go. Perfect! Two enthusiastic people, one show, and me nowhere near it. My joy was short-lived. It turned out her husband was not on board with his wife going to a concert with another man. His verdict: either all four of us go, or she doesn’t go at all. I sat with that for a minute, genuinely stunned that this was a real negotiation happening in my life, and then agreed to go. I rationalized it by making his enjoyment of one of his favorite bands more important than my discomfort at a concert.

Cut to concert night. I know exactly how this is going to go, and it goes exactly like that. Loud venue, uncomfortable chair, and me dozing off within fifteen minutes, jerking awake every time I slumped too far sideways or got jostled by another concert goer.

At intermission, we step outside for air, and the husband turns to me and says, “Don’t you think it was outrageous that they wanted to come to this show alone?” I looked him dead in the eye and told him the only reason I was there, wasting my evening and my money, was his insecurity.

Unsurprisingly, he did not love that. I, tired and cranky from an hour of contorting myself into an old, cramped chair with minimal cushion while music I didn’t choose blasted at me, did not particularly care. We survived the second half. My date and I laughed the whole way home. We stayed friends with her. We never saw him again.

That night is one of the most memorable versions of a pattern I’ve repeated more times than I’d like to admit: agreeing to do something I already knew I wouldn’t enjoy, because saying no felt harder than being miserable.

Getting my ADHD diagnosis changed that. It helped me see that “I won’t enjoy this” is a valid reason to stay home— not a character flaw I need to argue myself out of. Some activities just aren’t for me, and I don’t owe anyone a concert-length apology for that.

This July, the community conversation was about the freedom to have fun — and sometimes that freedom starts with skipping other people’s fun. For me, skipping a show I know I’ll be miserable at isn’t a failure to show up for people. It’s showing up for myself first.

What’s the activity you’ve discovered, probably through trial and error, isn’t for you?

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When faced with the opportunity to do an activity, I often have difficulty figuring out if it will be fun for me. The same type of activity can be enjoyable or draining depending on a range of factors. Rather than simply skipping the activity because I’m overwhelmed, I thought through the factors that contribute to my evaluation and outlined them in the order that works for me.

The first two decisions are deal-breakers for me — I cannot enjoy myself if the event is too loud, and almost nothing is fun if I’m stressed out about logistics. Once I get past those disqualifiers, it gets more complicated. It took me a while to figure out that my energy investment really impacts my pleasure at events. The issue isn’t only whether I’m the one carrying the mediation burden, but also whether I can be comfortable in a context where I may not understand the social dynamics. This is where joining folks I don’t know well for dinner can become a minefield for me.

Next, I sorted through how to measure the outcome of an event, which doesn’t always correlate to the energy I expend while there. Rather than spending hours of therapy time divining what all the outcomes could be, I settled on a binary value: whether the emotional payoff is worth it. I recently decided not to book tickets to an event because, while I really like the performers, the subject matter would require too much from me emotionally.

At this point, I’ve already ruled out a lot of events. But if I’m still considering an activity, I have to get real about how I’ll recover. I’ve passed on events I would have loved to attend simply because I recognized I didn’t have enough available recovery time, which sometimes invokes some FOMO.

Lastly, I took on one of the biggest hurdles — how will I know if I’ll enjoy the event when it’s actually time to do it? I tried to put some parameters around how far in the future the event is, but finally accepted that a) I’ll never know what future me will want to do, b) when faced with staying home or going out, I’ll likely default to staying home, and c) I only know how I feel about it today. If it sounds like fun at this point, I’m calling it fun.

The result of this thought exercise is that I have a lot of reasons to think something isn’t fun — and sometimes I simply need to give it a chance to prove me wrong.

Fun doesn’t always come easy or obvious for me, and I’ve made peace with needing the whole map. This Friday we’re defining fun for ourselves. Join our community conversation on Friday, July 17th at 12:00 PM PT. Subscribers get the link.

A particular question has been on my mind a lot lately: what is fun for me, actually? Not historically, not aspirationally, but right now, in this exact season of my life?

It’s harder to answer than it sounds.

It seems to depend on where I am on a given day, what threads I’m following emotionally and intellectually, and what is boring me. And given that my ADHD is always packing up my interest and moving it to greener pastures, I don’t always arrive at fun when I set out for it.

What about you? We want to know what gets in the way of fun for you so we can talk about it in our conversation on July 17.

Please take our one-question poll and select the option that is the most relevant for you right now. If you don’t identify with any of the options, leave your thoughts in the comments.

About a year and half ago, I started regularly singing Sacred Harp, an American folk-acapella tradition that dates back to the early 1800s. So, when Amber and I were planning our July theme (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Freedom) and talking about fun post-covid lockdown, she asked what made me seek out Sacred Harp.

I could have answered her question with descriptions of the weird melodies, full throated singing, and the dopamine rush you get when you’re standing in the middle of the hollow square, the clanging harmonies coming at you from four different directions.

That would have been an acceptable answer, but it bypasses the false premise of the question—which is the assumption that I sought out Sacred Harp for fun.

In the moment, I had two options, either give her the answer in the shape she expected it would come in or point out the underlying assumption and explain why it missed the mark

We had time, so I was honest. As an introvert, the most enjoyable activities for me are solitary. When I want to have fun, I read, play video games, or do crafts in my living room. The presence of other people, more often than not, detracts from the fun.

So, I didn’t join a singing group for fun. I started going to Sacred Harp because I had some familiarity with it, I knew one person who was a regular singer, there’s no performances, and making music helps me regulate my nervous system. I keep coming back because of the nervous system thing and also because the community is so strong. Fun is an after-thought.

I say all of this because, when Amber and I had the conversation, I felt very defensive of the fact that I don’t do Sacred Harp for fun. The tradition is really important to me, and it felt like a betrayal to categorize my participation as simply, a fun activity. But since then, I’ve realized that my defensiveness was not fully merited.

For me, Sacred Harp is fun. In fact, the fun is probably a big part of what makes the act of singing so regulating to me. It’s also part of the glue that holds the community together.

So beneath all of my navel gazing, there’s another false premise, which is the idea that having fun isn’t important.

My body really struggles with either dopamine creation or dopamine absorption (I don’t really know all the science behind it, just that I NEED MORE DOPAMINE). And maybe I’m being overdramatic here, but because of that, fun is necessary for my survival.

So yeah, I sing Sacred Harp for a lot of different reasons, and tangled up in those reasons, is that it’s really fun.

It’s definitely not everybody’s cup of tea (there are regular singers who can’t carry a tune, it’s really loud, and most of the songs are about longing for death) but it makes me happy. And that brings us back to July’s theme of fun and freedom—officially, the freedom to have your fun even when it doesn’t look like fun to other people, but also, the freedom to prioritize fun.

What’s one thing you love that doesn’t look like fun for most people?

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