I’ve been on a hiatus from this Substack for several months in order to give my attention to completing a book project and deal with the fresh hell that is book promotion. (If you’re curious about the book, you can learn more here.) Paid subscriptions have been paused during this break, and will continue to be until well after I resume, hopefully by summer’s end.

In the meantime, I want to tell you about the HippoCamp Weekend (8/14-16), which will feature quick sessions on craft and publishing, roundtables with debut authors and book champions, and deep dive workshops.

I’m excited to be giving one of the Craft Minis: Writing with ADHD: Throw Away the Rule Book, talking about the ways in which conventional writing advice may not be helpful for people with ADHD. Hope to see you there! Check out the full schedule and register here.

A quick note before the chat, I’ve been on a little hiatus from Substack while I’ve been wrapping up a book project (check it out!) and I’ve paused paid subscriptions until I’m back fully early this summer. But I’m breaking in now just to share this great interview with Katie Ward.

Katie Ward is a New York based portrait photographer and art director. She’s known for creating striking portraits that are both whimsical and timeless. Her work has been published by Vogue, Vice, People, The Jewish Museum, Heartful Magazine, and many others. Ward began her photography journey in photojournalism, where she worked for and studied under Burt Glinn, the former CEO of Magnum. She has a master's in contemporary art and photo history. Throughout her career, Ward has produced arts and culture programming for PBS, worked as the director of a contemporary art gallery on the Lower East Side, and created one of the original dog influencer accounts with her late French Bulldog Pickle (@picklebeholding), among other things. It’s this varied and cultured past that has led her to great success in blending current culture and fashion with the unique tastes of her clients in order to create the striking photos that she is known for. Born and raised in NYC, she lives in Queens with her husband, 2 kids, and standard poodle.

Before we get into a conversation about ADHD and creativity, tell me about your work. What do you create?

I’m an editorial portrait photographer who blends lifestyle and documentary photography to create what has been called “classically modern” portraits. I work with individuals, teams, companies, and families.

What has been a successful recent project?

This is hard to put a finger on, because sometimes my projects take years before they are published or considered successful. In the last two years, I’ve worked with a couple of authors who have used my photos for their book jackets and for features in magazines like Vogue. But, as someone who struggled to keep a traditional job—either due to the job market, the industry I was in, or my ADHD—my biggest success is keeping my business open and profitable for almost a decade.

And what are you looking forward to this year?

Since starting my business in 2018, I’ve been slowly working to develop my unique point of view and voice. I finally feel confident in my ability to consistently produce images that I’m proud of and feel like me. So, I’m excited to really step into my power and confidence this year with all the clients that I work with.

Let’s talk about ADHD and creativity. When did you discover you had ADHD, and what prompted or led to that discovery?

When I was 30, my therapist diagnosed me after I told her, “I need to write this down so I don’t forget.” I thought it was something everyone did, but clearly, most people don’t need to write down to remember to drink enough water.

Would you describe yourself as primarily inattentive, hyperactive, impulsive, or a mix?

Definitely inattentive. I was the little kid who would forget they were playing a team game of soccer and go pick flowers.

Did you expect the diagnosis—was it not surprising—or was it a lightbulb moment that suddenly made everything seem to make sense?

I absolutely did not expect it. It wasn’t something I was thinking about or looking to have diagnosed, and in 2016 there wasn’t a lot of chatter about ADHD in women the way there is now. I wasn’t there for an evaluation; it was just a casual comment by my therapist that was a revelation. The diagnosis has helped me to understand myself better but has also brought up a lot of anger at the missed support and opportunities that other members of my family received as kids. I was even evaluated as a child, and they missed the diagnosis, since women with inattentive ADHD weren’t widely recognized in the 90s.

Do you think of your diagnosis as a sort of watershed moment that divided life into the before knowing and the after knowing?

For me, the watershed moment was the day I found the right medication. The first day I took Concerta was a revelation, an “oh, I was in first gear trying to go 60mph.” That’s really when everything clicked, and I realized a few things. First, that I actually had the capacity and potential others had seen in me over the years. The “missed potential” was a constant source of heartache because of the continual and consistent disappointment of promises unmet and potential wasted. The second was a deep sadness and anger at the loss of decades of support and possibly careers and opportunities I never had. And the third was a lightness, an opening up, to possibilities that seemed impossible. And, for the first time in my life I had the kind of confidence that I’d always envied in others. And I’ve really been able to create a business and show up for my clients and myself in a reliable and authentic way.

What was your initial emotional response to discovering you had ADHD? Has that changed over time?

My emotional response really fluctuates. When I was first diagnosed, there was a bit of wonder and clarity about it, as well as the real anger in being let down. Now there is acceptance since I’ve found a career that I thrive in. I see how my ADHD has shaped my capabilities, and all of my special interests over the years has led me to a place where I’m able to offer my clients an experience that not many others can or want to do. Although perimenopause has really been kicking my butt. My meds have been less effective even after I went on HRT. So there’s definitely a bitterness at the struggles that others don’t have.

Do you consider the experience of being diagnosed with ADHD transformative in any way?

Not really. No.

What’s the least and most helpful advice you’ve been given?

My cheeky answer is that “don’t beat yourself up” is both the best and worst advice. Because, if I don’t beat myself up, I don’t get anything done, but learning to give myself grace and take it easier on myself has also allowed for a more creative and spontaneous practice.

My non-cheeky answer is, the worst advice I’ve gotten is, “You just have to do the thing.” I don’t know how to explain it to someone without ADHD, but sometimes you just can’t, and you just can’t for a long time, and I don’t know how to fix it or make it better. But the guilt sure doesn’t help.

The most helpful advice/insight I’ve been given is to stop victimizing myself. As harsh as this sounds, we are in a day and age where it’s so easy to play the victim, and it’s actively encouraged. I’ve found, for me, that this mindset has held me back in my work and personal life, and is also isolating. Have I been through hard/difficult things? Yes! Everyone has. Life is hard. But, I think we’ve all been forgetting that “It’s the hard that makes it good.”

Are there any self-care practices that, for you, ease difficulties associated with ADHD in general or with creating in particular?

Right now, I’m coming out of about four months of almost a complete breakdown of executive function. It was a mix of burnout and needing medications tweaked. I am 41. I was on HRT for two years, but it stopped being effective. When I first started it, it was like a light switch, I felt back to normal, and lost days, where I was just frozen, were few and far between. Over the last few months, I was only having bad days and worse days due to extreme hormonal fluctuations. My ADHD meds helped a little, but not enough. So, we decided to switch from HRT to birth control, and so far, the change has been surprisingly great. Other than making sure my mental health is taken care of, I’ve made an effort to have creative practices that are not my job. Things that I can just be bad at and have fun with, so for the last year, I’ve been taking ceramics classes. I’ve only made a set of cups, but it’s been a lot of fun. The freedom to create and to fail without consequence has lightened the creative load in my job.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions people have about ADHD?

I think a lot of these misconceptions are being openly talked about by professionals who can better explain them than I can. What I think could be talked about more is the hurt that others can feel when our ADHD symptoms are out of our control, and taking responsibility for that. The diagnosis is a tool to help us learn about ourselves and grow, but I think a lot of people (myself included) use it as an excuse for hurtful behaviors. Like always, forgetting the things that are asked of you, or never fully finishing a task—like cleaning the kitchen—but then that task gets left for someone else. Over time, these seemingly small mistakes can cause big hurt.

Do you have a working routine, or do you find a routine to be incompatible with your experience of ADHD?

I have two kids—five and nine—so I’ve had to implement a working routine. Does it work every day? No. I generally schedule work for myself between 10 am and 4pm. Sometimes I’ll sit down and have a really productive day, others I won’t. I’m naturally a night owl and get my best work done late at night, but because I’m up at 5 to get the kids up and to school, I can’t work late without risking severe burnout.

Once you knew you had ADHD, did you alter or attempt to change your working process in order to accommodate your new understanding of the way your brain works?

No, but I have been trying to outsource tasks that I struggle with.

Do you believe ADHD gives you an edge creatively? If so, in what ways?

My job as a photographer is to notice things, all the things, all at once. I need to make sure my subjects are comfortable and relaxed, and posed correctly, that their clothing and hair are in place, that the background is good, and, most importantly, I need to have the ability to see beyond what we’ve planned. Noticing those spur-of-the-moment opportunities, or being able to quickly sell an idea that I know will work while the shoot is happening, is one of the best parts of my ADHD. It’s walking around the Upper East Side with a client, seeing a DARK red fragrance store, and knowing that the photos there are going to make the shoot. Or doing a portrait session with a client in the fluffiest tuille dress and remembering the YooHoo in the fridge, and knowing how cheeky it would be instead of the typical fancy glass of booze.

What aspects of your practice does ADHD complicate or make more difficult, for example, choosing or sticking with a topic, keeping a routine?

Consistency and follow-through are the overall themes that I struggle with. It looks like doing blog posts once a week and email blasts once a month for six months, then being unable to do them again for four to five months. Or getting behind on editing because I haven’t managed to fold laundry for three weeks, and for some reason I can’t do one without doing the other first.

Do you have a top five list of the biggest challenges, in your practice?

1. Marketing/social media—it’s not my personality to sell myself this way. I just want to make beautiful and whimsical pictures and call it a day.

2. Outreach—similar to #1, but reaching out to photo editors for editorial work feels like an imposition. A lot of imposter syndrome shows up when I try to do this.

3. Timelines—I struggle to find the time to sit down and edit. I always feel I should be or need to be doing other things, so I find that I’m behind on deadlines.

4. Dealing with difficult or disappointed clients—I’ve gotten very good at managing and problem-solving for these clients so that they feel seen and cared for, but it’s definitely an emotional challenge when a client is disappointed. I feel like a failure, and sometimes I can’t get out of my own head, thinking that I’m the problem.

5. Finding a team—I’ve been working for years to find a consistent team to work with. I have a good network now of hair and makeup artists, wardrobe stylists, prop stylists, and assistants, but I really want to have a regular group of professionals where we work together frequently enough that we are just in a groove together.

Have you learned anything that helps with those issues or developed your own workarounds?

Outsourcing what I can, being patient with myself, and knowing that if I actively work on these problems, I will come up with solutions. It’s the ignoring and thinking they will resolve on their own that doesn’t work.

Do you find that your ADHD affects the other parts of running your creative business? Where do you find it the easiest and hardest?

ADHD affects every part of my business; how could it not? I think that it’s a huge asset when talking to clients, because it enables me to understand who they are and to get to the point quickly. To take all the different parts of a person: where they are from, what they like to wear, where they live, what they do, what they want to be doing, what their hobbies are, how they’ve decorated their house, their favorite designers, etc … and understand what they need in a photoshoot. How they should dress, where their shoot should take place, the mood, the colors, and then clearly communicate all of that to them so they feel seen and accepted. The hardest part are the menial day-to-day tasks like bookkeeping, and actually scheduling time to sit down and work during the day.

Do you believe ADHD has affected your overall career?

This is a difficult one to answer. Do I think that if I had been diagnosed earlier and had the proper support from a young age that things would be different. Yes. I might have had more support with understanding social cues, learning to meet deadlines, and following through. Yet my ADHD is why I have the ability to quickly amalgamate all of the relevant aspects of my clients’ personal and working lives, boil that down to a point of view, and create meaningful photos for them. I also think that no matter what, when starting perimenopause things would go upside down for me.

If you were late diagnosed, how do you think your career might have been different if only you’d known you were neurodivergent? If so, do you experience any feelings of grief or regret about that?

I’ve dwelled on this so much, and felt so much pain from the fact that my late diagnosis really held me back socially and professionally, that I had to make a decision to let go and move forward, because I can’t change the past. I’m not going to engage in being a victim, because all it does is make me feel stuck and angry. Instead, I’m grateful that I have a care team that is helping me manage my ADHD and an extremely fulfilling career that I never thought I would be able to have.

All artists face rejection, and most on a regular basis. And while it’s not fun for anyone, people with ADHD often experience it acutely. If that’s your experience, how do you cope? What keeps you putting yourself out there?

I’ve grown a thick skin when it comes to certain kinds of rejection. I’m too expensive? Totally fine. I’m not the style you want? Also fine. We don’t get along? That’s ok. You want me to photograph in a different style? Go find someone who works in that style. You want to work with me, but only want work-for-hire, go find someone else.

Where I really struggle with rejection is when that rejection makes me feel inadequate. So, cold emailing photo editors is really hard because what if I’m not cool enough? What if this dream of working for a specific publication is squashed? So, submitting to open call submissions or portfolio reviews brings up feelings of inadequacy because if I’m not selected, it must mean I’m not a good enough photographer.

If you could recommend just one thing for people with ADHD— a book, a podcast, a Substack, whatever—what would it be?

Knitting. It’s a hobby I’ve had since I was a kid, and the repetitive movements help me to concentrate and clear my mind. I was definitely the weird kid in class, knitting so that I could focus.

Finally, if you could give up your ADHD, would you?

No. I wouldn’t. I’m at a place where I’ve accepted all parts of myself. Of course there are things that I want to do better, and am working on them, but I don’t know that I would be as successful without all of the different special interests that I’ve put together to create the client forward, bespoke experience, I don’t know that I would be as successful as I am.

Learn more about Katie at her website and follow her on Instagram.

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I’ve recently had to do one of my least favorite things: ask for a favor. After curating and editing an anthology, it would seem as if the hard part was over, but it was just beginning. While I’m relieved that the manuscript is off my desk and on its way to the designer, I’ve been stuck in that purgatory everyone about to launch a book is familiar with—that uncomfortable place I’ll call blurbville. I don’t know a writer who doesn’t dread having to ask five or ten or fifteen other writers or experts to read their book and offer a snappy comment for the jacket or a well-wrought paragraph or two for the front of the book. And then there’s the waiting and, later, as the deadline draws near and nothing has landed in your inbox, the need to nudge those who’ve agree to blurb, all the while being certain that they haven’t responded because they hate your book.

Let me be clear: This isn’t an ADHD thing (except, perhaps, the part about jumping to the conclusion that your book is trash…or maybe not). I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t dread having to request blurbs. It’s understandable, because you’re asking busy people with deadlines of their own to spend a minimum of several hours reading your book and then adding the pressure of expecting them to come up with attention-getting copy that makes you look good to potential readers. And all they get for their effort is the satisfaction of giving someone else a boost.

What is an ADHD thing is being uncomfortable asking for any kind of help … from anyone. Like asking for a simple favor, even from someone we know will be all too happy to comply. Or asking for advice from someone because we’re afraid to bother them, even though we know that most people are flattered to be called upon to give advice and are usually willing to provide generous help. If only we ask.

But we don’t wanna ask!

We don’t even want to ask for directions, let alone for something more substantial.

I once dragged a heavy bookcase up two flights of stairs rather than ask for help and hurt myself in the process. Worse, I refused help when it was offered because I thought it was somehow important that I be able to do it myself, even if I had to wrench my arm out of its socket to do so. And the reality is, though I managed—just barely—I wasn’t strong enough to be absolutely sure I was equal to the task and I could easily have lost my grip, potentially hurting someone unlucky enough to be heading up the stairs behind me. And I did this after insisting on putting the bookcase together myself, despite not having the appropriate tools or the two sets of hands necessary. And if you’re wondering, yes, I botched the construction, and by the time I made it up the staircase, the whole thing fell apart. I cleaned the mess up myself, even though a neighbor offered after coming out to see what the racket was. I clung to the idea that it made me capable and independent to do everything myself, when it fact it only made me look foolish and demonstrated my incompetence.

It wasn’t an isolated incident.

Our reticence to ask for help not only may prevent us from getting what we need, but it also causes us to miss opportunities to develop and deepen relationships. Asking for help and receiving it is a form of communication that can generate trust and cooperation while building a kind of social capital. We miss out on potentially beneficial mentoring opportunities, and instead of learning from others, spend more time than necessary figuring things out on our own. Or we come up short because finding the answers is simply beyond us. We spend an inordinate amount of time doing what needs to be done by ourselves thanks to our stubborn reluctance to reach out.

Why is it so hard to say three little words: can you help?

ADHD gives us so many reasons to shy away from “feeling needy.”

• We don’t want to draw attention to our perceived inadequacy or lack of capacity because doing so can increase our feelings of shame and disappointment in ourselves.

• We often experience social anxiety, which makes us too timid to reach out and afraid of being a bother.

• We fear being perceived as an imposter.

• We’re afraid of being judged, rejected, or thought of as less intelligent or less proficient than others.

• We experience shame about not knowing something—or being able to do something.

• We have a stubborn streak that makes us feel we need to do everything ourselves, because anything less would make us imperfect.

• We have executive function challenges that can make it difficult to know how to express our needs or be clear about what we want.

• Masking the difficulties associated with ADHD can be habitual; the last thing we want to do is let anyone know we don’t have it all together, that we’re not fully in control, or that we’re struggling with anything. Asking for help might be like ripping off the mask. Painful.

• Sometimes we feel so overwhelmed that although we know we need help, we can’t figure out exactly what it is we do need.

No one has to do everything alone. Needing help isn’t a sign of weakness. Consider how we talk about achievement—it takes a village, it takes teamwork, it takes collaboration. By definition, each village, team, collaborator requires the help of others to supplement its own talents and capabilities.

Remember that game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? There, asking for help—for a lifeline—was a strategy for winning. There’s no shame in needing help—everyone needs it sometimes. To borrow from the Beatles, “We get by with a little help from our friends.“ Or, for Stones’ fans, “…we all need someone we can lean on.”

No one will think less of you for asking for help; in fact, asking for help is often viewed as a highly positive trait. Think about how you’ve reacted when someone asked you for help. Maybe you were flattered; maybe you appreciated the opportunity to be of service; maybe you remembered when someone gave you a leg up and what a difference it made in your life.

Learning to state what we need helps build agency. It’s uncomfortable, but with practice—asking for small favors and making simple requests—it can become less intimidating and stressful.

I don’t have solutions. But I think two questions can help. Any time you need support, first ask yourself if there’s someone who might provide what you need. Then ask yourself if that person will think less of you for asking for that support. The answer to the second question will almost always be no.

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Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn more about my editing and coaching services. If you need help managing the broader life challenges posed by ADHD, find a certified coach at ACO, CHADD, ADDCA, or PAAC.

This post contains no AI-generated copy or affiliate links.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.

If you haven’t already rejected the myth that people with ADHD are underachievers, Katie Rose Guest Pryal will persuade you. And if you think your ADHD keeps you from accomplishing your vision, she’ll inspire you. She’s a bipolar-AuDHD (Autistic+ADHD) mother of two AuDHD children, a lawyer, a professor, a competitive equestrian, an expert in mental health and neurodiversity, and an award-winning author of more than 15 books, including Your Kids Belong Here: An Insider’s Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children (championed by Temple Grandin) and A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education. Katie Rose speaks to audiences all over the world, combining personal stories and science to promote acceptance and understanding of neurodivergence—to advocate for belonging and inclusion.

Learn more about her at katiepryal.com; find her letter, “The Misfit Manifesto” at themisfitmanifesto.com; follow her on instagram, and look for her books at pryalbooks.com.

Before we get into a conversation about ADHD and creativity, tell me about your work-in-progress or, if you’re not working on a new writing project now, your most recent.

I’m so excited about my current book. It’s titled An Autistic Girl’s Guide to Horses: Horses, Horse Girls, and the Lost Generation of Autistic Adults. It’s a hybrid literary memoir; I started riding horses again at the exact same time that I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD.

There is a “lost generation” of autistic adults. As prominent psychologists wrote for The Lancet in 2015, millions of adults—predominantly women and people assigned female at birth (AFABs)—grew up undiagnosed because diagnostic criteria were built around disruptive white boys who liked trains. Research shows that 80% of autistic women remain undiagnosed past the age of eighteen. Now, as adult diagnoses surge, these women are reckoning with childhoods they finally have language to understand: the bullying, the social confusion, the obsessive interests that were mocked rather than recognized as neurodivergent traits.

One of those traits, it turns out, is loving horses. According to psychological research, horses are among the most common obsessions of autistic girls. When you hear that horse girls are “weird,” it’s true—so many of us are neurodivergent, which is basically a synonym for “weird” in our ableist society. No book has yet put these two things together: the explosion of late autism diagnoses in women and the deep, documented connection between autistic girlhood and horses. Guide to Horses explores this connection through my own journey.

When did you discover you had ADHD and what prompted or led to that discovery?

The answer is the most Gen-X story ever. As I was writing my last book, Your Kid Belongs Here: An Insider’s Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children (Johns Hopkins, 2025), I was interviewing my mother about what I was like as a kid. She said, “ … after the psychiatrist diagnosed you with ADHD…” and I said, “What?!” So yes, I was technically diagnosed when I was in first grade—and for a girl to get that diagnosis in the 1980s was a big deal since mostly ADD/ADHD was reserved for white boys of a certain presentation. Turns out my parents did nothing to support or treat my ADHD; they didn’t even tell me about it. Yeah, you had ADHD, we did nothing, you seemed fine, look at you now, that hose water you drank must have helped. LOL. I’m not angry; at this point it’s funny. But I definitely suffered for it because I had no support and felt like a weirdo.

Would you describe yourself as primarily inattentive, hyperactive, impulsive, or a mix?

I was hyperactive as a child—I’ve probably learned to mask that these days. I’m still impulsive, but I’ve built protective measures to help me from acting impulsive in ways that cause me pain. The problem there is that I second-guess my decision-making constantly. It would have helped a lot to have someone teach me these skills rather than muddling through on my own. I struggle with decision paralysis as much as the next ADHDer, but I am not inattentive.

Do you have a writing routine or do you find a routine to be incompatible with your experience of ADHD?

I suffer from the “too many projects” problem. There are so many things I want to do, and I want to finish them. As writers, especially writers of books, it can be hard to stay focused because there aren’t real deadlines unless you already have a book under contract. So that is one of the things I do—I try to get my books under contract as soon as possible so that there is the outside pressure. Routines are definitely helpful to me. I’m very organized, and if there is clutter on my desk, for example, I find it very, very distracting. My main challenge is to avoid working on the lesser-important things that are quicker to accomplish so that I can focus on the bigger things that I need to work on every day, like writing my (current) book manuscript. If I don’t write, at least a little, every day, then I will lose track of where I was and have to spend half my time catching up again, which is a huge waste of time and effort. The longer I stay away from a project, the bigger that catching-up task becomes, and then I just avoid it altogether.

To summarize, there are three things I (try) to do first thing every morning: (1) Write in my notebook my thoughts about the day. This activity is very soothing for me and allows me to brain-dump and therefore focus better. (2) Get out my to do list (I use paper and pen in the same notebook) and write this one thing: “Write [Book], [Date].” That way, I have an actual item to check off every single day that is writing in my book. There’s no page count required, or any other numerical goal. Sometimes I just open the document, write a sentence, and close it. The low pressure allows me to keep going.

Do you believe ADHD gives you an edge creatively? If so, in what ways?

I get told, all the time, by people from different areas of my life, how “productive” I am. I don’t think I could hate that word more. It is capitalist garbage. I’m churning out word-widgets for the machine or something. One thing is true, though. I can, indeed, sit down and write a book, fast. I think it is because of my AuDHD in many ways, in part because I had to overcome challenges on my own without knowledge of my diagnoses—and the tools I created serve me very, very well. For example, when I get stuck, I dictate. I can dictate an entire book chapter in maybe twenty minutes. Learning how to dictate took a bit, but once I did, it changed everything. I also have the hyperfocus gift, so I can sit down and write for three hours, and emerge with 5000 words. Which I know is a lot.

But what people don’t realize when they talk about how productive I am—when they give me that “compliment”—is the cost. I joke that I’m like a Formula One car: really high-performance, and really delicate. I’m always on the edge of burnout. Of overwhelm. Of all of the things that we struggle with. Some days, I don’t get out of bed, and honestly, it’s the best thing for me.

I am lucky because I have a hobby that forces me out of my head. You cannot ride a horse around a jump course with your focus elsewhere. (I compete in showjumping and dressage.) That’s a surefire way to end up in the dirt. Horses are amazing creatures. They’re goofballs who are also magnificent. Kind of like us.

All writers face rejection, and most on a regular basis. And while it’s not fun for anyone, people with ADHD often experience it acutely. If that’s your experience, how do you cope? What keeps you putting yourself out there?

Rejection used to DESTROY me. [I definitely have rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD).] My first memory of a super-painful professional rejection went like this: the rejection happened—I was invited to interview for a professor job, made to feel like I was a shoo-in, then rejected. Look—it happens, I know that. I sobbed, feeling like my career was in the toilet (it kind of was) and also feeling helpless.

And then, literally an hour later, I got up, grabbed all of the course materials I had generated over the years for a course I created for my institution, and turned them into a book proposal. I sent it to a big textbook publisher, it was accepted, and that was my first book. I was pregnant with my first kid at the time, so this must have been 2008? But taking that rejection energy and turning it into my first ISBN taught me an important lesson—that I have more control over my destiny than I think I do. Not “control,” perhaps, but that I can put something good out into the world without the permission of gatekeepers. And in the end, I was much, much better off without that job and with that book, because it led to the most well-paying book I’ve ever published. It literally started the ball rolling on my professional writing career.

I have ten stories like this that I could tell you without thinking much about it, but they all go the same way: I’m rejected from something I think I want. I grieve, a lot. I take that grief energy and turn it into something generative. And every time, what comes out of the rejection is better than what I lost.

What are a few items on your dopamine menu? What gives you hits of joy or excitement?

As an author, there aren’t a lot of dopamine hits when writing a book. The process is just so long; it’s a tortuous experiment in delayed gratification. So, while I write books, I also write short pieces for magazines and such. Seeing my name in a byline, having my writing out there in the world in a more immediate fashion, helps me keep going.

Finally, if you could give up your ADHD, would you?

Of course not.

Sign up on Katie Rose’s website to get a free copy of A Brain-Based Guide for Writers Who Want to Break Through Anxiety and Perfectionism.

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Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn more about my editing and coaching services! If you need help managing the broader life challenges posed by ADHD, find a certified ADHD coach at ACO, CHADD, ADDCA, or PAAC.

This post contains no AI-generated copy or affiliate links.

No, this isn’t an alert about a product or a service. It’s a warning to beware of buying. Impulsive buying. Indiscriminate buying. You-know-you-shouldn’t-but you-just-gotta kind of buying. Buying, buying, buying.

Those of us with ADHD are good at many things. Being financially responsible, typically, is not one of them. Research has demonstrated that we tend to have more problems with financial decision making and management than the average person and that women are more prone than men to have money woes as a consequence of ADHD. Studies suggest we’re four times more likely than others to be impulse buyers. I’m betting you didn’t need a study to tell you that.

We’re like kids at the candy displays at the check-out lanes in supermarkets—it’s there, right in reach, and we want it and think we have to have it. Others might pause and consider before grabbing some and tossing it in the cart, but we don’t have the filter that lets us ask do we really need it, can we afford it, is it good for us?

It’s taken me years of overspending and irresponsible credit card debt to learn to pay off my credit cards in full each month and not to spend beyond my means. But that doesn’t mean I don’t continue to overspend. I still buy more than I need and make mindless purchases, I just do it more or less within my budget. Well, no, who am I kidding? Of course I don’t have a real budget. What I mean is my spending probably won’t put me in debt or cause me to miss a mortgage payment or fail to pay my health insurance bill. I won’t find myself, as I did so regularly in my younger years, paying a fortune in overdraft fees or standing at an ATM that tells me it has nothing for me.

I honestly believe if I had all the money I’ve wasted on things I didn’t really need I’d be fabulously wealthy. For many, the money pit isn’t filled with the big things. It’s all the little things that add up, over years and decades, that keep us in financial chaos, prevent us from building wealth. It’s all the clothes in my closet I had to have and have never worn, the tap shoes that seemed like such a fun and whimsical purchase … and that I’ve put on exactly once. It’s the air fryer that I just had to have—the one I purchased several years ago and haven’t even taken out of the box.

Why do we do it? Our executive function doesn’t support good decision making. Our impulsiveness doesn’t let us resist temptation and makes instant gratification so incredibly attractive. And emotional dysregulation plays a role too. Spending is self-soothing—a way to cope with anxiety, strong emotions, and boredom. It brings a hit of dopamine and … later … a bigger hit of shame and regret.

What’s all this got to do with writers?

Let me answer this way. I have a folder brimming with videos, recordings, and transcriptions of classes I’ve purchased—dozens of them—most of which I’ve never looked at. And today I very nearly signed up for another. I’ve been a journalist for more than three decades, and yet each time I see a pitch class I consider it, even though I’m doubtful there’s much new that anyone can teach me about pitching.

We’re bombarded with enticements for classes and workshops and retreats and, yes, editorial services like those I provide. And while there’s tremendous value in many of those offerings, some of us have a trigger finger that tosses them into our shopping carts before we give it any thought.

On top of impulsivity, executive function deficits, emotional dysregulation, and the chase for dopamine, there’s also FOMO, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism, three saboteurs not unique to writers with ADHD. What if from that one class you see promoted on Instagram about finding an agent, for example, you’ll get that one genius tip that hasn’t been offered in the dozen other how-to-get-an-agent classes you’ve coughed up cash for? And that tip will make all the difference, right? Running through your head is the thought if I don’t take the class, I’ll never get an agent. We somehow believe that if we only learn the information that will be delivered in one more class, if we only make one more connection at yet one more retreat or conference, and if we only get one more manuscript polish from one more editor, we’ll feel legitimized, somehow more worthy.

As far as I know, there aren’t any quick fixes. ADHD coaches and therapists may be able to help. It’s easy to say look before you leap, but the truth is we really like leaping blind. It’s easy to say “Pause and think about it,” but if it were that easy, we probably wouldn’t have the problem in the first place.

Still, I like to advise potential clients to take a day or two or three to determine if they really need what I’m offering, and I think it’s good advice for all of us before we sign up for classes, workshops, retreats, conferences, and editorial services. During a brief pause you can consider whether the rewards are worth the cost and whether there’s a real necessity for what’s being offered. It may help to try to consider what you’re feeling as you whip out your credit card and begin to register for the next can’t-miss event. Are you acting out of anxiety or boredom? FOMO or imposter syndrome?

Having an accountability buddy can help with ADHD in so many ways, including impulsive spending. Make a pact with another writer, with or without ADHD, not to sign up for anything before discussing the opportunities that present themselves. Just that much pause can be enough to allow you make a better decision.

I won’t lie. There’s a good chance I’ll sign up for another class tomorrow. But I’ve made a pact with myself. When I’m tempted, I’ll fill out the registration form and promise myself not to hit send for 24 hours. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, with ADHD, that’s enough.

Photo by Kelly Sikkim on Unsplash.com.

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Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn more about my editing and coaching services! If you need help managing the broader life challenges posed by ADHD, find a certified coach at ACO, CHADD, ADDCA, or PAAC.

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It’s more than two weeks into the new year and I’m just getting around to thinking about resolutions. But not too hard. My mind wanders. Mostly, I’m thinking about how much snow has piled up—again—while I slept late, after staying up way too late—again—and how that snow is not going to shovel itself. If know that if I start now, it’ll be easier, before it’s too wet and heavy. But the weather app on my phone tells me it’s 29 degrees, feels like 21, and the snow will continue for at least another hour and it’s warm inside and I have a nice cup of coffee and the next to last of the lovely gluten-free Snickerdoodles a thoughtful friend dropped off. And … well … I just don’t want to do it. To deal with the snow will take some effort, gathering the warm clothes, the hat, the scarf, the gloves that are never where they’re supposed to be and so will take some time to find.

It would be so much easier if I were the kind of person who always had a dedicated place for things, or who remembered to put things in the designated spot when I actually did designate a spot, but, no surprise, I’m not one of those people. And I know there’s a good chance I left the window brush/scraper in the car instead of bringing it inside, so I’ll have to clear some of the snow off with my hands to get to the brush/scraper that I should have put back where it belongs—inside. And, of course, at the first prediction of snow last night, I should have moved the car down the driveway, but I was busy and I made a mental note to do it a little later.

You’re laughing, aren’t you? A mental note! What a joke! But you’ve made mental notes too! You know you have! We all do it, even though we (we who have ADHD) know we should never, ever, under any circumstances, make mental notes. Last night I made a mental note to defrost the chicken, so tonight we’ll be having pizza. A mental note is like the autumn leaves (I didn’t rake) under the snow I haven’t shoveled. I know they’re there, but I can’t see them. Out of sight, out of mind. I know this, and still I make mental notes. It’s like the people in horror movies who go into the basement. We yell at the screen: don’t go in the basement. But they do. Every time. And nothing good ever comes of it.

What’s this got to do with resolutions, anyway? There’s a very flimsy thread here; stay with me.

Forgetfulness, inattention, and procrastination are ADHD qualities—well, human qualities exaggerated in people with ADHD. And these are behaviors that are essentially incompatible with resolving. Making a resolution is a commitment that’s bound to fail unless it pertains to one of our highest priorities and is also wrapped in urgency and novelty, the twin drivers of our attention.

That’s why I’m not going to continue to make resolutions I know I don’t have the resolve to keep, which is virtually any resolution. A resolution is an “empowerment” strategy that sounds motivating at the end of December but is nothing but self-defeating once the shine is off the new year. And there are so many reasons resolutions don’t work, different for each of us. Yet one key reason pertains to almost all of us—our resolutions are likely to be wildly unrealistic. A resolution not to procrastinate, for example, hasn’t got a prayer. A resolution to write every day between 10 and noon—because I really want to finish that book!—is almost certainly unsustainable. At least for me. As soon as I make a pledge like that, the whole idea of writing seems like a chore. Which points to the other reason our pledges so often crumble: a resolution is a lot like an order to oneself. And many of us with ADHD balk at commands. Having to do something triggers a stubbornness that causes us to resist. I’d call it a childish obstinance, but then I’d hear my ADHD therapist in my ear reminding me: check your language, curb the impulse to be judgmental, don’t be so self-critical. But so much of procrastination, for me, has to do with that oppositional attitude. I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it; I don’t want to do what I’m supposed to do. If what needs to be done is snow shoveling, for example, I’ll happily do something else, even something I was putting off. And I’ll childishly think (sorry ADHD therapist) haha! I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing! As if I’ve gotten away with something, gotten over on someone, pulled the wool over my own eyes. But it’s ADHD that gets the last laugh.

I spend hours creating schedules I’ll never follow. Each time it’s something like a resolution. People say folks with ADHD are inconsistent, but I rearrange my calendar consistently. At the beginning of each week, I tear apart the schedule I worked so hard to craft the previous week and fully failed to keep. I block out times for the necessary and desirable things on my to-do list—a list that’s always too long for the calendar, like everyone else’s, made longer still by that other ADHD trait of wanting to do it all, everything all at once—that refusal to admit that there’s only so much we can do in any 24-hour period. Which, in the end, is nothing but a failure to prioritize. I don’t so much need to fine-tune my writing schedule as I need to refine and commit to my priorities. It’s not a matter of keeping my eyes on the prize, because my eyes are all over the place; it’s a matter of keeping the prize in front of my eyes by whatever means necessary—Post-its on my laptop, signs in my office, affirmations, meditations, accountability sessions with a writer friend in the same ADHD boat—remembering the incentive to do the hard things.

So I’m going to try out a new approach—to think in terms of priorities rather than resolutions, and to have a more flexible attitude toward realizing those priorities. If my highest priority is to finish the manuscript that’s been languishing, I’m not going to pledge to write every day or hit a daily word count. And I’m certainly not going to insist that I write in some specific time slot on my calendar. That’s not to say I’ll let myself off the hook and have no goal and nothing for which to be accountable. I am going to aim to try to write most days, and to try to prioritize the early part of the day for creative work—but I’ll allow for more fluidity in my schedule. Instead of a daily writing practice and word count goal, I’ll think of it as a weekly target. And on days when ADHD hijacks my attention and ungrounds me, I’ll respect my rhythms, offer myself some self-compassion, and get back to it with a full head of steam when my focus returns.

And instead of resolving to curb procrastination, I’ll aim to procrastinate better, by which I mean that when I don’t want to do what I need to do, I’ll procrastinate by doing something useful, with the knowledge that I’ll get around to that other thing in good time if it really needs to get done.

An example: I was exhausted just thinking about going out in the cold to shovel snow. So I started this post instead. It needed to be done. The snow is still there, but I accomplished something. I got something done while avoiding doing something else. Not exactly a win-win situation, but also not a lose-lose scenario. If I were a course developer I might call it Conscious Procrastination or Stalling with Intention. It’s not a prescription. I’m not an ADHD coach or expert and I can’t claim there’s evidence for such a practice. Will it work? I don’t know. But getting things done with ADHD requires experimentation and flexibility. It’s worth a try.

I’d love to know … what works for you?

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Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn more about my editing and coaching services! If you need help managing the broader life challenges posted by ADHD, find a certified coach at ACO, CHADD, ADDCA, or PAAC.

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Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

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Sometimes it seems like completing every little task is like climbing a sheer cliff. We’re at the bottom, struggling for a foothold, and high above us, we imagine everyone else at the pinnacle, high-fiving each other. We’re grasping and fumbling, wondering how they breezed right past us and just glided up that treacherous rock face.

You know it’s not true. Of course they didn’t glide. They gripped and clawed. They lost a foothold, fell, and had to climb again. But so did we, in our own way. And measuring our progress against theirs is just a way to keep ourselves at the bottom. It’s like trying to keep pace with an Olympic runner.

I know. We all do it. But we don’t have to get to the top of a mountain or win a race. And we don’t need the high-fives as much as we need self-compassion.

You might feel this sense of falling behind or underachieving now more than ever at this time of year. Because almost inescapable in these days leading up to the new year are the lists of personal accomplishments touted on all of our social media platforms. Everywhere we turn, we can find friends’ tallies of all the books they’ve read this year (or the books they’ve written), and the proud recitations of their creative or professional accomplishments—the articles published, the pitches accepted, the book deals made, the residencies attended, the contests won and the awards received. Then there are the personal milestones and goals met—the amount of weight lost, the 5Ks run, the self-improvement triumphs. (They’re the same people who just managed to do all the holiday stuff—the cooking and shopping and decorating and merry-making—while we wanted to crawl back to bed just thinking about it.)

They have a right to crow about meeting their goals. Nevertheless, all these self-congratulatory posts can make people with ADHD sink lower and lower as, in response, we tally everything we didn’t do this year. However much we want to, and do, congratulate our friends and acquaintances—because their accomplishments are worthy of sincere praise and they should pat themselves on the back—sometimes it’s hard to hear about their victories without measuring them against what we perceive as our everyday flops or our epic fails. We think about the washouts, the missteps, the things we botched, the times we crashed and burned. We think about all the things we meant to do, fully intended to do, were sure…well, thought maybe…we’d manage to do. But somehow, again, we didn’t.

I didn’t, for example, finish revising my memoir in 2025. I didn’t pitch that essay on ashes I’ve been meaning to write for years, or the piece about how my brother ghosts me again and again, or the one about the cruelty of hope. I haven’t read my way through the stack of craft books that might help me revise that memoir, or the shelf of ADHD books that might give me more insight into why I haven’t met my goals…or read those books. I still haven’t gotten back into a consistent strength-training routine or been vigilant about the physical therapy exercises that can keep the pain of a pinched nerve at bay…if only I do them. I haven’t emptied and cleaned the pantry and kitchen cabinets or shredded the mountain of paperwork I’m afraid to throw out lest it lands me in the dark web. I haven’t renewed my passport or signed up for fear-of-flying therapy so that I might love flying as I once did and might actually use that passport. I haven’t…well… you get the idea.

There’s so much I haven’t done that I think I coulda, shoulda and woulda done. But I have to remind myself that I haven’t done nothing. I’ve pushed forward, with the help of a good friend and a roster of collaborators, a passion project that I’ll be thrilled to see come to fruition next year. But perhaps the best thing I did this year was to find an exceptional ADHD therapist who has helped me understand that I don’t need to measure my accomplishments against anyone else’s achievements. And recognize that I’ve accomplished more than I give myself credit for. She’s taught me that I don’t have to view not meeting all my goals as failure. The failure is in continuing to judge myself against neurotypical people and in aiming again and again to do what they do, how they do it, instead of learning to use my ADHD brain in the best way possible. My way. And to set realistic goals and pat myself on the back for my wins, even when they don’t seem as brag-worthy as those of others. (And here, my therapist would certainly tell me to check my language and remind me that they are certainly as brag-worthy.)

The problem isn’t that other people are achieving what we may not have achieved. Or that they’re singing their own praises. They ought to. And we can celebrate them without reinforcing the self-defeating notion that we’re less than—less capable, less prolific, less good. The problem is that we aspire to be neurotypical instead of recognizing our unique abilities and advantages and working with our differently-wired brains instead of against them. We can also celebrate even our small wins, the things that take more effort than neurotypical people can even imagine, as we work toward the bigger ones.

Let’s give ourselves a break in 2026. Happy New Year!

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Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn about my editing and coaching services! If you need help managing the broader life challenges posted by ADHD, find a certified coach at ACO, CHADD, ADDCA,or PAAC.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Though she’s as vulnerable as anyone else with ADHD to rejection sensitive dysphoria, Alice isn’t afraid of rejection. She’s learned strategies for quieting its noise and shares her skills and stories to help others keep rejection—especially what she calls self-rejection—from sabotaging their careers and preventing them from doing their best work. She’s turned the topic into the basis for an award-winning podcast, My Rejection Story, on which she interviews authors such as and about how they’ve experienced rejection and how they’ve leveraged it, overcome it, or made peace with it.

Alice is from South Africa, but she joined me on Zoom from Dubai, where, conveniently, she’s working on U.S. time.

Photo by Ash Dowding

Tell us about Hustling Writers.

We’re a podcast booking company. Primarily what we do is get founders, CEOs, authors, and keynote speakers booked on podcasts. The mission is to make visibility accessible, so it comes through in other ways like free resources and the newsletter, and generally sharing webinars and courses. The origin stemmed from my rejection challenge, which was way back—well, it actually wasn’t that long ago—in 2019, 2020. I set a rejection challenge as a journalist, which was to get 100 rejections. And that’s where I learned to pitch, and learning to pitch is what led to running a PR company, because I was also doing some freelance work for clients who were largely in the coaching industry, and they wanted to get themselves featured in media. And because I knew how to pitch, I could figure out how to write a podcast pitch. I kind of stumbled into that and learned it, and then a business was built.

Are you working on any writing project now?

I am not. I send pitches for personal essays whenever I have the bandwidth, or, rather, inspiration—if an idea sparks—so I might send a pitch to Business Insider, a contact I’m still familiar with right now. I write in the [Hustling Writers] newsletter, I write on social media, and I’m actively trying to build an audience and platform through the podcasts that I hope will lead to a book deal. I have overly perfectionistic standards when it comes to writing compared to everything else, where I’m like, very much do it, do it imperfectly, do it however you want. But I don’t want to write a book that nobody reads.

When did you discover you had ADHD, and what led to that discovery?

I remember being in university and doing an online quiz to see if you have ADHD. It said I probably have ADHD, but then I think it also said my roommates had ADHD, and I was, like, I really don’t know if I trust the validity of this quiz. But we were at university, and I was taking ADHD meds, methylphenidate—Ritalin—because it was just so widely used in the university context and I didn’t think there was anything unusual about the fact that I was using it to get through exams or pretty stressful periods of the year. And then when I stopped studying and I was in the kind of routine of having to work every single day, that’s when it actually hit that something’s wrong. I think I’d gotten away with it in the schooling system because you could work in bursts, you could work for a little bit, get all your assignments done, and then do nothing for a few weeks and, you know, whenever the urgency hit. And so I was hitting that point where I needed to actually work every single day . So that’s when I started getting curious. I don’t know the exact date when I got diagnosed, but it was long after I knew I had ADHD. I think it was early last year when I officially got diagnosed by a psychiatrist, but I suspected it. My brother got diagnosed a few years before I did. He had the exact same struggle—he was struggling to work. He had a nine to five, he wasn’t self-employed, and I think in his early jobs it was actually really affecting his ability to stay employed. And so I was able to see what he has, and … I don’t know when it clicked to me because he exhibited very differently. He had hyperactivity, so that’s more usually what gets diagnosed … even though he wasn’t diagnosed either. I wasn’t hyperactive, just inattentive. I kind of pieced it together and then I actually wanted to speak to a psychiatrist.

So, once you did that, and looking back, did it seem like one of those light bulb moments that so many people experience, or the sense that people say often— suddenly everything made sense?

You know, there wasn’t one light bulb moment; I think that there are lots of small light bulb moments where I was constantly learning, oh, that’s something related to ADHD. It’s not just because I’m bad person or bad … whatever.

One memory I have is of someone I know who got diagnosed with ADHD before I did, and I remember that being absolutely life-changing for them. And I was pretty sure I had ADHD and I couldn’t relate to how much this label seemed to absolutely change their life. I didn’t think I had it that bad because I didn’t feel like it’s this terrible affliction.

But then as time has gone on, it actually does help to know and have resources, and also to know that it’s affecting my life in a lot of negative ways that I guess I never really accounted for. I just sort of brushed it under the carpets, and I was like, this is just me … I don’t know, this is just life.

When you do write, or even in your other work, do you have a routine, or do you find a routine incompatible with the way you think, the way your brain works?

I have routines, but I don’t always stick to them. Sometimes I forget them; sometimes I come back to them. Something that’s really helped me with writing … I kind of like Pomodoros. I always go back to them when I’m really stuck. Like, okay, you have to spend at least 25 minutes facing this, even if you’re just reading the thing that you’re going to write about or you’re just writing the notes, you’ve just got to do it.

And so that has been something I always turned back to. I force myself to do 25-minute increments. Then I can take a 10-minute break. I force myself to do it even if I feel like I’m getting nothing done—that’s something that has stuck. I’ll go sometimes a few weeks without doing it, but when I’m really stuck with a big project, I go back to that. I don’t know if that’s a routine.

Do you believe ADHD gives you an edge creatively?

Absolutely. A thousand percent! I mean, I don’t know who I would be without ADHD, but I think that some of the most interesting thinkers I know are also neurodiverse, and I think that being able to notice patterns, being able to be aware of things outside of … yes, there is cost, but also, I don’t think I’d be an entrepreneur if I didn’t have ADHD. I love my brain, even though it can be a pain in the ass. I definitely think there’s an edge.

What other aspects of your writing or creative life in general does ADHD complicate? I mean, you’ve talked about what good it does, but are there other ways it challenges you?

There’s a term someone coined called ADHD tax, and for me there’s some major tax. I filed an invoice yesterday for $500 that was for an article I wrote in 2023. I have no idea if they will pay me, but I went into the invoice portal for the publication and it was still there as pending. I filed an invoice and I don’t even know what it is but I just had so much resistance going in. Another thing is that my domain expired for Alicedraper.com, and I had canceled the bank card it was linked to, so the payment bounced. I got an email weeks ago saying this payment bounced, and I thought, oh, I better do something about that. And then I didn’t. And then they kept sending things, like they’re going to cancel the domain. So now there’s urgency. I don’t want to lose this domain. I go in and then it says “error” when I try to check out. Yesterday, I forced myself. I was, like, even if it takes you hours, you have to figure this out. And it was painful. I wanted to rip my hair out. I had to get onto customer support. Then they eventually were able to send me to a cart to pay it. So there was the ADHD tax—like an extra $100 dollars for letting my domain expire. The domain itself was very cheap, $8 or something. And that whole process was excruciating, and I don’t know why. It’s not like it was cognitively hard. So the tax and admin … we need to do admin to make sure things keep moving, especially if you run a business. And I can sabotage big time when it comes to the admin stuff.

I’m laughing because you won’t believe this. I spent maybe three hours yesterday with exactly the same issue. I’d gotten notices to transfer one website to another hosting plan. I got online with the service provider, and I talked and talked. I finally got almost to the point where it was all settled, and, because I hadn’t plugged it in, my phone died, and then I spent an hour trying to get back to them.

I was in a cafe and I didn’t have my physical bank cards, and my online banking was glitching, so I couldn’t get a virtual card , and I was, like, I’m here and you’re telling me that I have to go home? Eventually I managed to get a virtual card to work. This is just my form of torture.

It looks like you have a great career, but do you think it would have been different if you didn’t have ADHD? And if so, do you have any regrets about that?

Hmm. Interesting question. I’m sure it would be different, but I don’t know how, so I don’t have any regrets. I don’t know. And I have this perspective when it comes to what life could have been like if we had or hadn’t gone through something … You know, I will be the first to say that the hard things I’ve gone through, like different traumas and stuff, have been like an arsenal, my toolkit, have shaped me into who I am, but I’m also not going to say I’m glad I went through that because I don’t know what version of me would have come out if I didn’t. So, yeah, I have no idea what my career would look like, and I don’t know if it would be better or worse, but I am happy with the career I have, and I’m happy with the brain that I have, and yeah, I wouldn’t change that.

You have that entrepreneurial edge that’s so many with ADHD have. But you’ve been able to turn that into something successful. So many people with ADHD, myself included, start all kinds of businesses that don’t work because something else new and shiny comes along. But you’ve been able to sustain that.

I know this is an area that you’re especially interested in. All writers face rejection. You’ve done something about it. Can you tell me about your podcast and about how you cope—about what keeps you going in the face of rejection.

Yes, of course. It’s called My Rejection Story, and the podcast came as a culmination of a lot of different things. I spoke about rejection a lot. When I’d talk about my own journey into entrepreneurship and writing, I noticed that whenever I spoke about rejection, people just responded. That was always my most responded-to content. So there was this audience piece — it seemed like something that people want to learn, to hear more about. At the same time, in my PR business, I was talking to my clients and trying to develop story angles for them. I’d learned from my own pitching work that there needs to be a narrative arc and there needs to be some kind of pain for the transformation piece to come through. And so I just realized, everyone—every one of my clients, who I think are super impressive people doing really impressive things—are here because of shit they’ve been through. And they have a different relationship with how they get through this and that’s why they’re successful. So success is not like the absence of rejection. It’s the relationship you have with rejection. And so then that sort of sparked the idea … and I was, like, okay, we need to do something. We need to start a podcast about this.

When it comes to ADHDers and rejection, we struggle with rejection because … I mean, I don’t think people really know why. It could be because we experienced so much more early rejection. I think William Dodson said it—like 20,000 more negative comments before age 12. Yeah, there’s the cognitive wiring, so I think I can feel it harder, but rejection is also hard for everyone, and I think it’s something that needs to be spoken about. I think rejection is so much harder when it’s in the absence of community, because it threatens our survival instincts. So being able to talk about it and being able to hopefully connect with other people, will make it easier. Probably a very debilitating side effect of rejection sensitivity and ADHD is not putting ourselves out there to avoid rejection, and that results in a far worse form of rejection, which is self-rejection. I don’t think that many of us look back in our lives and regret the times people rejected us. We rather regret the things that we didn’t do and the goals we didn’t pursue. I was super, super rejection-sensitive for years in my early twenties. One Saturday night, I went to see a talk that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave, and I put my hand up in the Q&A and invited her onto the podcast in front of, like, 500 people. I had some friends there, and they said to me afterwards that they were sweating with anxiety because they were, like, oh my God, what’s going to happen?

It’s like proposing in public.

Yeah, it is. She said to me that she loves the audacity of a woman who dares. And because I asked in this way, she is definitely going to consider it. So then she put me in touch with her manager. So fingers crossed that happens, but … afterwards, my partner said he was super impressed because of my personality type … the fact that I did that, and it just is something that would be unconscionable to me a few years ago. I do feel like it’s a combination of building rejection resilience, but also being very, very connected to the purpose of my work. I’m sort of obsessed with the work and I’m willing to endure public humiliation for it. So yeah, I just want to share that kind of story so that other people maybe go and humiliate themselves publicly for the purpose of their work.

That helps me right now because I’m working on something involving having to ask some high profile people for help. I’m not doing it publicly, but that gives me courage to ask.

Yes, big bold audacious asks!

I love what you said about community, because I’ve talked to so many people who have ADHD, may have had it for a while, and still don’t know that rejection sensitivity is a part of that — and they still thought it was just them, and felt that they’re just babies. The community aspect doesn’t get talked about enough.

That’s really so important, to find people, because it gets worse the more you sit in silence and shame. It diffuses the power that rejection holds on you. If you can talk to someone who is a safe space that you trust, suddenly it doesn’t feel quite as awful as it is when you frame it in your mind alone.

Yes, and the shame aspect, which … you know, that’s a difficulty for so many people in so many ways—the people who think they’re broken or they’re stupid. And community helps. And seeing people who are doing brilliant things helps.

Do you have any self-care practices you do that help you when ADHD gets overwhelming? Some people meditate, some people …

If I’m not being too cliché, I exercise. I feel like exercise has been very helpful with just generally being in a better mind, a better mental space. I turn to friends, I turn to community. I give myself permission to not work when I really am just not working. So I make a thing of, like, okay, let’s not spend all day feeling guilty about the fact that we’re not being productive and just mentally take this day off, and then we’ll return tomorrow and it’ll be more productive. Yeah, in the midst of major procrastinating, earlier I would just feel guilty all the time that I wasn’t working and then working other times and never enjoying a second off. So that’s helpful. I take weekends off as well and I feel I need that like guardrail of not working. And I think that’s important because procrastination can mean I’ll leave it to the weekend, and then it’s as if you have no off time. I worked like that in my first year of business and I could see that it’s not sustainable. And so I switched to no weekends. And now it’s almost impossible for me to work weekends. I think in the last few years I worked one or two. There’ll be times where I’m really pressed. I have so much work to do and I just can’t work. I just can’t open my laptop on a Saturday or Sunday. And I think’s that’s very healthy.

That’s brilliant. I think it must be very hard for entrepreneurs to do, and I know it’s hard for writers to do.

Do you have a dopamine menu? Do you have, you know, certain things that give you hits of joy or excitement?

A long elaborate way of drinking coffee. I don’t have the Breville coffee machine. I think that that would be something that would give me great joy, as I like the whole complicated process. I like a good cup of coffee and the process of making a good cup of coffee. So coffee, exercise. Because I work US time zones, and I’m in the Middle East … I don’t work in the mornings, so it’s very much like a morning of complicated coffee process, reading, or … right now I’m busy playing chess on my cell phone. This is like a new thing. So I’ll do something like that. Sometimes I’m playing Sodoku. So I have some kind of activity that I do when I’m still emerging.

Still emerging … that’s an interesting phrase. I like that.

And then often in the week, because I have a slow morning, I’ll go have tea with some friends. I don’t know if it’s part of a dopamine menu, but there’s a little tea spot nearby. And then I’ll go to the gym and start my day by having … I sometimes cook. But yeah, I start the day having achieved personal things.

Because mornings are hard, right?

Yeah. So hard.

If you could give up your ADHD, would you?

No, I would not.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to say about ADHD or ADHD in creativity?

I think that finding creators you admire who have ADHD can be quite a powerful reshift for anyone who feels like it’s something that’s holding them back. I mean, I think there are some debilitating things, but for me at least … when I think of some of my favorite communicators—I love the way Trevor Noah communicates as a speaker, and him having ADHD, I think, oh, that makes sense. And seeing positive examples can help—at least it’s helped me a lot with reframing of how I look at this.

That’s why I wanted to do these interviews. Someone recently commented after reading one of the Q&As that she felt very seen by reading what other people feel and that it was empowering to her. Thanks, Alice, for taking time to add to the conversation!

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Find Alice at Hustling Writers, on Instagram, and at My Rejection Podcast.

Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries, proposals, or pitching? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn more about my editing and coaching services! If you need help managing the broader life challenges posted by ADHD, find a certified coach at ACO, CHADD, ADDCA, or PAAC.

This post contains no AI-generated copy or affiliate links.

Photo by Mohammad Metri for Unsplash.

Podcasts for Writers

Electric Lit offers a roundup of “9 Podcasts that Welcome you Into the ‘Literary World.’” For all writers, not only those with ADHD, these podcasts make the writing world more accessible to those who feel they may not belong in it, according to writer Grace Gaynor. But writers with ADHD might be particularly interested in Writer’s Routine, which features interviews with authors about the ways they optimize their creativity. (Don’t be scared away by the word “routine”—this isn’t the place to get tips on sticking to a daily practice.) My top pick of Gaynor’s recommendations is NPR’s Great Podversations. Each episode features a conversation between two individuals, one or both a writer, for example novelist Ann Patchett and author Kevin Wilson; opera singer/author Renee Fleming and novelist Richard Powers; authors Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss, and, two of my favorites, Anna Quindlen and Amy Bloom.

And Why, if You’re a Woman with ADHD, You Should Listen to Podcasts

Understood.org partnered with researchers from Torrens University in Australia to study whether podcasts help reduce shame and stigma for women with ADHD and increase hope and confidence. Spoiler alert: They do!

It All Makes Sense Now

Meredith Carder (@meredithcarderadhd) blends memoir with solid information to craft an intelligent, insightful book that frames ADHD as a difference rather than a deficit. Like so many others, she received a late diagnosis as a consequence of seeking evaluation for her child’s apparent ADHD issues. The more she learned, the better she was able to make sense of her life, and she wrote the book she needed when she was first diagnosed: It All Makes Sense Now: Embrace Your ADHD Brain to Live a Creative and Colorful Life. With well-organized chapters on the primary challenges faced by people with ADHD—most containing tips and practical strategies—she helps readers learn to live better with the brains they have instead of taking the self-defeating route of trying to masquerade as neurotypical. What I like best about the book is that Carder, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and is an ADDCA-trained ADHD coach, embraces the idea of information as a foundation for rewriting our narratives and changing the way we perceive ourselves and our strengths and weaknesses. It’s an approach that emphasizes acceptance as opposed to overcoming. As she writes, “This book can’t fix you, but I hope it can begin to unwind the false belief that you are an object to be fixed.”

Author Sue Monk Kidd on The Joy of Flow

You already hyperfocus like crazy, right? So why do you need to know about flow? Because while they may seem similar, they’re quite different. (More on this in a future post.) Unlike a state of flow, hyperfocus is generally out of your control and can have negative consequences. Sue Monk Kidd, author of, among other books, the bestselling novel The Secret Life of Bees, muses in LitHub on her experience of flow and how to relax into writing.

New Thinking About How Noise Benefits People with ADHD

Random auditory noise, such as pink or white noise, has been observed to boost cognitive function in people with ADHD. The explanation for that phenomenon is based on two assumptions, first that people with ADHD have insufficient levels of internal neural noise, and second that internal neural noise is amplified by stochastic resonance. Research at Ghent University in Belgium put those assumptions to the test. The study findings contradict both hypotheses.

This post contains no AI-generated content or affiliate links.

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Need help developing your story? Guidance about crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch to learn more about my coaching and editing services! If you also need help for managing the broader life challenges, find a certified ADHD coach at ACO, ADDCA, CHADD, or PAAC.

Author photo by Katie Ward

Carla Sosenko is a big personality. She’s lightning bright, deeply reflective, and quick to laughter. She has a sharp sense of humor that, while sometimes hilariously self-deprecating, reveals great perception and insight into others.

Executive Editor At Large at Us Weekly and a journalist with bylines in numerous major publications, Sosenko published her first memoir in May, I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: And Other Thoughts I Used to Have About My Body. A project, she says, that was 20 years in the making, it’s about the experience of living with a rare congenital vascular disorder, Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, which, as she describes it in a piece for Another Jane Pratt Thing, manifests in “legs and bum cheeks of different sizes, and a giant, misshapen, birthmark-splashed back. My body can be confusing to people,” and, she adds, sometimes confusing to herself. The book is about “life in an unconventional body.” And at least partially, about what it’s life to live with an unconventional brain. Because it hasn’t only been Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome that has made Carla feel othered across a lifetime. She also has ADHD, which, long undiagnosed, was another source of confusion—all the “quirks” and behaviors she struggled to understand until she came to know they were the products of a neurodivergent brain—that she wasn’t broken, but simply different.

While ADHD is not the primary subject of the book, it’s a key player. And Carla’s descriptions of the condition and the experience of being late diagnosed are the best I’ve read on the subject. I found myself nodding along in recognition at so many points, such as when she recalls a tendency to do things like show up at a hotel when she didn’t make a reservation but was sure she had, or show up on the wrong day when she actually had made a reservation. Sound familiar?

The Q&A that follows is heavily edited because when you put two women with ADHD on a Zoom, there’s a good chance the talk will go off the rails and back on again numerous times—that we’ll follow our tangents, lose our train of thought, say screw it and catch a different train mid-sentence—the result being a 90-minute laugh-filled conversation with a 12,000-word transcript. I hate having to pare away some of Carla’s thoughts, but Substack isn’t designed to contain a 30-page interview. To get more of Carla, read her book!

Before we talk about ADHD and creativity, tell us what you’re working on now?

I’m working on a book proposal for another book, also nonfiction, with a bit more research and reporting. I’m being super vague because I’m really superstitious. And I’m trying to force myself to sit down and write a novel because that’s a dream. It’s something that really scares me and that I worry I don’t have the talent for, and so I may try to force myself to do that. And then in the meantime, I do a lot of writing at my day job—I’m the executive editor-at-large at Us Weekly, so I write a lot of those cover stories and I do a lot of freelance writing.

So tell me how you discovered you had ADHD and what prompted or led to the diagnosis.

It was during the pandemic. It’s so hard to even remember what the pandemic was like, which is insane to say, because it was two years of our not going outside and we’ve all just collectively decided to forget that. It was at the beginning stage and everybody was starting to talk about pods, and I told my friend Melissa, who lived about two blocks away, you either have to move in or not come back. And we both decided, as two single women living alone, it would be much more fun and less traumatizing to do this together. Melissa is a decade younger than I am and is one of the only women I know who got an ADHD diagnosis in childhood. It was probably called ADD at the time. She started to notice things in me, living on top of each other, and one night she said, “You might want to ask your therapist about ADHD.” And that was shocking and made no sense to me. And so I didn’t even really understand how she was picking up on that. But I also trust her. If she’s noticing something, I am going to say something, so I mentioned it to my therapist, who agreed. “Yeah, I see certain things. It’d be worth checking out.” And my therapist—I appreciate this about her so much—said, “There’s an official test you can do. It’s really expensive. You have to go sit at a facility and do it. I personally think it’s a little bit of a scam and a money maker. But I have this test I can give you. It’ll basically tell us the same thing.” “That’s fine,” I said. I’m not someone who needs to have the official stamp of approval. I just wanted a key to understand my life a little bit better. So she gave me this test, and of course, I answered, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” And then there was one thing I said no to. And I was, like, holy shit, I have ADHD!

So you said it when she first brought it up, it didn’t make sense. Obviously in retrospect...

Oh yes, it makes so much sense.

So did you have to absorb that for a bit, adjust…

I think I was in denial at first, not because I was ashamed, but because I felt fraudulent. I thought, I’ve been fine this whole time. But then, of course—I went through what everybody who is late-diagnosed goes through, which is, was I fine? Or was I just kind of muscling through and putting on a mask and doing all the things that we do? So yeah, there was a period of time where I think I didn’t fully absorb it. And then once I started to, I had a lot of different emotions, none of them bad. I mean, the only thing that was a little bit sad or a little bit—I don’t want to say infuriating—but anger-making, was that if somebody had picked up on this sooner, how different could my life have been. And I don’t even mean in terms of accomplishments—just in terms of my anxiety and my nerves and my worry and all these things I’d decided were faults within myself, mistakes I kept making that were called other things. I was careless, I was absent minded. I was forgetful, I was flighty. I was all these other things. And so once I had a name for it, and I fully took it in, it was actually incredibly helpful for me because it was like finding the master key to my life. And then I kind of went back. It’s like you get on a time machine and you go back and you’re, like, oh, my God, that’s why I did this! That’s why I did that. It’s just a mind blower.

In your book you said, “Things I thought were flaws or personality traits or attributes of my star sign or yes, trickle down effects of KT, are actually symptoms of neurodivergence.” As I read the book, before you got too much into your diagnosis but I knew it was coming, I wondered if much of the shame you talk about and the fear of not being good enough and the anxiety and the compulsive shopping were—I know you obviously had other things going on—but I wonder if they in part weren’t related to the ADHD, and are those some of the traits you were referring to in addition to those you just mentioned?

Oh my god, yes. Like the compulsive shopping is something I’ve considered, and I’m just starting to try to rework and re-understand as [not] like a massive failing on my part, right? That I lack willpower, and I’m shallow, and I’m silly, and I just couldn’t control myself. So shopping is my main dopamine source, and the other one is food. And I had all those feelings of shame around food as well, because I was supposed to, because I’m a woman in the United States who’s alive, but also because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and you know—it gets so complicated. And I’m also sometimes, like, what’s the benefit of trying to figure out where it comes from? Is there one? I don’t know. But it’s, like, I use food as a way to find a thrill, right? To get a little bit happy. And I always assumed that that was because my relationship to food was broken so early because I was forced to diet so young. Because in part, at least, I had this weird disorder, and it was a way of—you know, the adults around me were trying to kind of make me more normal, and more normal meant thinner, because thinner was better, and so I only ever looked at it stemming from that. But I think it also stems from the ADHD, because we’re dopamine seekers, and we’re looking for something. And what’s been put into sharper relief for me is that since going on Wegovy, which, as I say in the book, I have a lot of mixed feelings about, I can no longer find dopamine that way through food. I can’t eat as much. I can look at food and I want to find the joy in it and the thrill that I used to, but I can’t, So I have to look elsewhere. And so sometimes I’m, like, is my shopping worse now? I don’t know.

And those are big examples. The smaller examples are that I put a date in my calendar; it’s for the wrong month. That’s constant for me, and it’s funny. But I will say that my diagnosis has made me much more compassionate to people, and the person who stands out the most is my mom, because my mom 100%, without a shadow of a doubt, has ADHD. There is no question in my mind. And all of her idiosyncrasies and quirks, I’m like, oh my god, it’s the same. It’s like the way she’s looked to me as an outsider is how I must look to other people, and now that I have that understanding about myself, I can see her more clearly, too.

So, do you consider the diagnosis transformative?

Yes, 100%, yeah, because…I keep using the word “key,” but that’s what it felt like. It felt like a master key. It felt like—again, it didn’t provide solutions to anything necessarily, but it also made me reframe things that I’d thought of as problems as not problems really. It was just that my brain works differently. So, absolutely transformative, and I would say purely positively, except for the regret that it didn’t come earlier.

I know you didn’t go through the whole battery of tests, but you probably have a pretty good sense of whether you’re more impulsive, or hyperactive, inattentive, or a mix, or…

I’m a mix. I’m also learning more about ADHD every day. I’m like a newborn, you know? But in terms of novelty and stuff like that, I’m somebody who is inattentive if something bores me. Shouldn’t that be everybody? Like, how can people pay attention if the thing isn’t interesting? But I’m more the other two, but really a mix. I definitely present as the hyperactive kind. My friend Melissa, who I keep bringing up, we started as coworkers. We became friends at work. And, so I was the editor-in-chief of Time Out New York and she was the photo director. And she mentioned something to me when I noticed that in a meeting I move around a lot. I can’t sit still. And she said, “You’re the most kinesthetic person I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Another quote from your book: “What a diagnosis of anything means is only important in terms of what it means for you. The much more important part is understanding that nothing about you, not your body, not your brain, not your feelings, is wrong. You are just you. And if the world is not designed for you, or accepting you, or amenable to you, that’s the fault of the world,” which is tremendous. Did it take you some time to reach that kind of state of acceptance and understanding? Because I think a lot of people never get there.

It absolutely did. But that, I think, was just youth. Inexperience. I think the older we get the more confident I feel and I look outward less for reassurance, and I trust my gut more. As you were reading that back to me, I was thinking of a particular coworker I had in the past who I could always tell was really frustrated with my asking constant questions [and would say] “It was in an email,” or “I already told you,” and I would always get annoyed about it because I was, like, what the fuck is the difference—it’s a question, just answer my question. We’re journalists, we’re supposed to ask questions. But now, my perspective is still irritated, but the thing that I want to go back and say to that person—but I don’t really need to, I just need to say it to myself—is that this isn’t a fault. Like, the fact that you put it in an email once, three months ago, and I can’t recall that, and I don’t even remember that we talked about it, and so I’m asking you, is not some sort of deficit. It’s just the way I process information. If you are giving me directions and you’re just reading them out to me, please know that I’m not going to retain them. And that’s not a bad thing; it’s just not how I take in information. And just because that’s how you want to give me the information doesn’t mean that your way is better. It’s just different.... And that’s, again, is where the diagnosis comes in, because it is helpful for me to be able to remember: your brain literally does not work the same way. It doesn’t.

What’s the least and most helpful advice you’ve been given about dealing with ADHD?

I haven’t gotten a lot of advice about it, and I think it might just be because my friends and family know this: any sentence that starts with, “You know what you should do,” is the quickest way to irritate me and guarantee that I’m not gonna do the thing that you’re telling me to do. I hate any “should” sentence, any unsolicited advice. I can think of very few things I dislike more. You know, like just keep a calendar or use a notebook. There are certain tools that a lot of people seem to find helpful that I don’t think I do, like body doubling—you know, have another person there and it makes you accountable. Works for a lot of people, but I don’t quite get it. Honestly, the most helpful advice I got was to try Adderall, which was a game changer, though not without its downsides.

Well, I think that’s a trait of people with ADHD to not want to be told what to do. When it comes to writing, do you have a routine, or is that just incompatible with the way you think and work?

No, I don’t. Rigidity and schedule are absolutely not compatible with me. And that’s something I felt really bad about for a long time. Like, when I when I went to grad school, I was 23, which is too young to go to grad school, but it was something to do, and I was really fortunate to have parents who supported that, and I didn’t know what else to do. All I knew was that I liked to write. And I liked to read. And an MFA program is a great place to feel terrible about yourself if the thing you’re doing is comparing yourself to other writers and using that information as a way to tell yourself that you’re not a real writer, right? There were some people who woke up five in the morning, every day, and wrote for 20 minutes. And I was, like, okay, 5 a.m. Write 20 minutes.” And somebody else would say, “Well, I can’t do that. But every Saturday, I sit and I write for eight hours straight.” And I kind of used those as evidence that if you do this, you’re a real writer. And I couldn’t do any of them. I’m someone who, when I feel like it, which, thank goodness for me, is more often than not, I will sit down and write for as long as I can. I’ve never, ever, ever had or been able to stick to anything resembling a schedule or a routine.

And yet you manage your deadlines and …

Oh, yeah. If it’s a job and I and I have certain tasks I have to do, I will get them done. There’s no question. When it’s something I’ve felt really passionate about, like an idea for a story I’ve pitched to an outlet and they bought it, and I have a two week deadline, I’ll write that thing faster than—I mean, it’s already half written in my head.

It’s the personal kind of like gauzy sort of diaphanous goals, like write a memoir, that will take, and did take, 20 years.

You said it took that long to write your book. Was that an ADHD issue?

I think there was a lot of things. It was starting really young and not knowing what I wanted to write. And then signing with an agent too early. So I had my first real writing about my body in Marie Claire—an essay in 2009 that got a lot of attention, got picked up on the AOL homepage, and it seemed that would be a good time to find an agent, when I have all this attention. But the truth of the matter was it wasn’t a good time because I didn’t have anything to sell yet. But I got an agent—I’m sure the ADHD does factor in here—I knew I had something to say, I knew I could write, I knew I loved writing, and I knew I wanted to write a book. But I had no idea what that book was, and I was 30 years old, and all I knew was that this person was really excited about me based on one essay I’d written, but I actually hadn’t written anything else yet. And the thing that I learned about publishing is that if you want to sell your novel, you need to have the whole novel finished for someone to buy it.nnBut if you want to write a memoir, a book proposal is much more important. And so that was the best excuse for me to not write the book for 20 years, because all I had to do was focus on perfecting this book proposal, which is a marketing tool. With my first agent, I was so young and impressionable and starting with so little to give her that it really kind of went off the rails pretty quick. It’s in the book that she literally said to me,” It would be easier for me to sell your book if you could find a boyfriend.” And that was because she had an idea for what the book should be, and I didn’t. So I assumed her idea for the book was better. It didn’t sell, and then the book just sat for a couple years until I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and got another agent, and we got a little bit closer that time. I had some meetings with editors, but again, it didn’t sell, and so I put it down again, and then pulled myself up with my bootstraps one last time and then got really lucky and found the right agent and the right editor.

And so it probably was partly ADHD, but not because I was disinterested or not because I couldn’t. I mean, part of it was that I couldn’t focus, but having the book proposal was, like, the perfect fall guy, because it gave me something to do—it kept my hands busy and let me feel as if I was making progress when I kind of really wasn’t.

Apart from that, do you think ADHD gives you an edge creatively?

It’s such a hard question to answer, because you only know your own brain, you only know the way you’ve always seen the world and processed it. But I think it does. I think now that I’ve started to understand it more and understand that there are things that my brain is doing, that, with somebody who’s neurotypical, are not happening.

One of my one of my favorite videos on Insta ever was it’s a married couple. She has ADHD, he doesn’t. They’re having a conversation, and he’s cracking up because they’re talking about like what it sounds like inside their head. She asks him, “what about the narrator?” And he was, like, “what narrator”? That was so brilliant. It would be nice to know what it feels like to have a quiet brain for a minute. But I do think it’s an asset or kind of goes hand in hand with creativity.

Are there any other ways that ADHD influences your writing process or interferes with it?

I mean, I get distracted pretty quickly from ideas. I get really inspired. In grad school, a friend and I had started to write a play and kept working on it and got it into a festival. That was 2001. And during the pandemic I thought, what if I tried to write a play again?” I wrote the first 15 minutes of a play and I got really hyper fixated on it. I found a theater that would let me do a reading, paid for the space, and printed flyers—the whole thing—and it was amazing, and then that was it. I feel like maybe someone without ADHD or maybe somebody medicating, might try to see that through, but what probably happened for me is that I got distracted by another idea, and I wanted to focus on that. That’s why journalistic writing is in some ways perfect for me because they’re these short, brief bursts and assignments, and then they’re off your desk, whereas something like a memoir takes much more time and dedication and constant focus, and so it takes me much longer.

Sometimes I feel inundated by ideas, and it can get really hard to know which are the ones worth pursuing and which aren’t. And that sometimes paralyzes me because I’m afraid I’m going to pick the wrong one and waste my time. I’m really conscious of how limited our time on Earth is in a way that can be very inspiring but also really exhausting, because I’m constantly thinking, oh, God, I hope I’m not wasting my time on this project, because I should be working on this other project, and I’m going to run out of time. It’s not great.

You’ve got a great career, and you didn’t use the word regret, but you did refer to some ways of thinking like that. Do you think your career might have been different if you’d known earlier that you were neurodivergent?

I’m only just recently starting to accept that I’ve had a great career, because I thought of myself as a failure for such a long time, because I was what I thought of as a late bloomer, and because I was so paralyzed by anxiety for so long. I was just debilitatingly depressed and anxious and convinced that I was never, ever, ever going to be able to shake it. I saw all my friends around me, kind of flourishing and taking their first steps off into adulthood, and I was paralyzed…. If only I’d known—and knowing meant that somebody could have been able to convince me that these are not deficits, that my anxiety wasn’t exactly what it seems like, and that there are other reasons for it, and it’s also not a flaw, and we’re gonna figure it out. I just felt broken, a disappointment who, if you’d asked me when I was 20 years old where I’d be at 48, would have probably told you completely honestly that I’d probably still be living at my parents’ house and not doing anything.” If somebody would have helped me with it, that feeling of feeling broken would have been very different.

Because instead of feeling broken, you’d know that you’re simply different, as you came to understand?

Right. I think about that with testing, too. I was really good in the subjects I really enjoyed. And not in the ones that I didn’t. Shocking, right? Like, I always hated social studies. Really hated it. But as an adult, one of my favorite things is to watch documentaries about anything—war, a sport, something I have no interest in—but if it’s a good documentary, I’ll watch it and I’ll love it. And I kind of had this light bulb go off recently, where I was, like, that’s kind of social studies. So what if there had been a social studies class where history could have been taught to me via a documentary? I think I would have done great, because I retain that information if the documentary was interesting to me. Or a nonfiction book. I read this giant book on the Troubles that was fascinating, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keith. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life, so deeply reported. Sometimes I think, well maybe if things had been taught to me in a different way that played to my strength and understood the way I retain information, yeah, maybe it would have been a completely different ballgame.

Tell me about rejection. As writers, we all face rejection. But we often feel it overwhelmingly. If you’ve experienced that, how do you cope? And what keeps you putting yourself out when it can be so hard to do?

So with my personal stuff, with essays I’m shopping or, a book—I don’t know where this comes from, I’m just glad I have it—I have an absolute belief that even on my worst days I’m gonna do it. I should do it. It’s important, and I’m, like, fuck the haters. But I will say, rejection really does hold me back in a lot of areas in my life. Or fear of it. That feeling of being in trouble. Or not having done a good job. In my dating life, the fear of rejection has been the top thing—probably what’s held me back the most. I almost always feel with writing and editing that if anybody has any feedback, they’re pointing out a mistake I made, and I hate that. Or they say, “Great job. There’s a typo on the third page.” And then I hate them. But I also realize that maybe I need to not take that so personally. That’s their job. As editors we have to point out the typos. So yeah, I guess this is all my way of saying I don’t deal with rejection well. I thought I did. I always thought I had a thick skin. I don’t. I have very thin skin. But I just enjoy it too much and want to do it too much for that to stop me.

Is there anything that you do that eases the anxiety or the challenges of writing with ADHD—anything that makes it easier, like meditation?

Not meditation. I think the thing that I do is I just give myself a break more. I used to criticize myself if I couldn’t stick to a writing schedule or I hadn’t written a certain number of days. And now I just sort of accept I can’t right now. And because, again, this is where, like the diagnosis is so crucial, I think before I had it, I just attributed it to laziness. I thought of myself as an incredibly lazy person—an idea I think people around me would have laughed at. But I now know if I’m not feeling it, that’s fine. So just being kinder to myself is really the biggest tip I have, because beating myself up about it doesn’t make me right. It doesn’t get me to sit down and write. All that does is make me feel bad about not doing it. So why not not do that?

A writer I know commented on the last interview I published here, saying she felt seen when she read someone else’s words about their experiences with ADHD. Do you think it’s important to in community or share stories with people with ADHD?

Absolutely. 100%. Without a doubt because there are so many little quirks. I sometimes want to ask, “Do you do this thing?” I remember saying to my friend—I was trying to describe the feeling—and I said sometimes my eyes just get really comfortable. I was, like, that’s so weird, right? And she’s said , that’s ADHD. That happens to me all the time.” “Your eyeballs getting comfortable ? And so it just makes you feel not like a freak. You’re, like, oh my God, there are other people out there who do that or feel that...

I drop things all the time and bump into everything. Do you drop things? Are you clumsy?

Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Do I drop things? I feel like my entire Instagram brand is just photos of beverages I’ve dropped. I mean, if there is something to spill, I will spill it. I lose things like nobody’s business. I never know why I’ve walked into a room. Is it ADHD or perimenopause or all the above? Those are things I never, ever, ever knew were attributes of ADHD. It just knowing whatever you want to call it—just knowing that there are other people whose eyeballs get comfortable. It feels really nice knowing that other people drop things. I think it’s hilarious. And it’s nice to see other people having a sense of humor about stuff.

I don’t remember if I was as clumsy as a kid, but I must have been. And I must have not gotten in trouble for it, right? But what if I had grown up getting in trouble every time I dropped a beverage? Then I wouldn’t be making jokes about it on Instagram, and that would suck. So it’s really nice to have somebody else feel like it’s not that deep. Like, you drop stuff, who cares? It’s funny.

If you could give up your ADHD, would you?

I don’t think so. I mean, listen, I would love to know maybe for a day what it’s like to have a quiet brain. But I also just don’t think I’d be me. There’s a freneticism that’s just part of who I am and that I really consider a part of my personality I like. And it’s not for everybody. I think a lot of us are too much for some people. Yeah, there are certain things I would like to take away. There are times when I just want my brain to stop. But if it’s “You can have ADHD or not,” I would keep it. I don’t look at it with shame at all. It’s just understanding that my brain works differently from someone else’s, or another way of looking at it is that their brain works differently than mine. So, yeah, I’d keep it.

Learn more about Carla on her website, and find her on Instagram.

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Need help developing your story? Guidance in crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch! If you need help managing the broader life challenges posted by ADHD, find a certified coach at ACO, CHADD, or PAAC.

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How ADHD Sparks Creativity

Dutch researchers have shown what most of us already know—that ADHD is associated with greater creativity. Building on previous research suggesting mind wandering as a factor, researchers in the Netherlands performed two studies with a total of 750 participants and found not only that mind wandering is associated with creativity, but also that those with more pronounced ADHD synptoms had minds more prone to wandering. According to the scientists, the discovery has significant implications for treatment and psychoeducation that can help people with ADHD make the most of their gifts. (More on this in a future post.)

Expert Help for Calming the Chaos

Brooke Schnittman, MA, PCC, BCC, understands ADHD from the inside and the outside—that is, as one who experiences it and one who’s studied it. So she brings to her coaching practice and her writing lived experience combined with deep research that inform the 3C Activation program she created to help you conquer the chaos of living with ADHD. Her book, Activate Your ADHD Potential: A 12-Step Journey From Chaos to Confidence for Adults with ADHD, offers practical strategies, lessons, tools, and resources for reducing frustration, tackling disruption, building momentum, boosting confidence, and enabling greater productivity. She makes a big promise to readers and lives up to it throughout.

Late to the Party

New research presented at the 38^th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Annual Congress in Amsterdam this month indicates that although symptoms first appear at the same time in men and women, women are diagnosed roughly five years later than men. What’s more, they experience greater emotional and functional hardships. The research was based on a large clinical sample at a Barcelona outpatient program; 900 individuals underwent a comprehensive clinical and psychological assessment revealing that women had more severe symptoms, greater dysfunction, and more disability, depression, and anxiety.

How the Other Half Lives…With ADHD

Paris Hilton, one of the most high-profile ADHDers, has been a pop icon for years. Now she aims to be a different kind of icon—one who brings about real change and makes a powerful impact on society. Through 11:11 Media Impact, the nonprofit arm of her media empire, she’s committed to protecting vulnerable youth, advocating for people with ADHD, and making dreams come true for people in need. Now, 11:11 Media in a partnership with Understood.org, has created a series, Inclusive by Design, that shows, according to Hilton, “how thoughtful design and technology can make life easier, more joyful, and more creative….” The 3-part program, which premiered on Hilton’s YouTube channel during ADHD Awareness Month, on October 22, tracks the design of Hilton’s new home and the nonprofit’s headquarters to accommodate ADHD for her team of 30 with help from experts at Understood.org. It’s easy to imagine dismissing it as frivolous or a privilege project, but that would be a mistake. There appears to be an authentic desire to change lives underlying this endeavor and to promote design for neuroinclusion, which also helps neurotypical people. And you don’t need a mansion to benefit from suggestions for reimagining your own living and work spaces.

Creativity & Coping

Unfixed: The Podcast is hosted by Kimberly Warner, author of an extraordinary new book, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home. A filmmaker, writer, and founder of Unfixed Media, Warner created the storytelling platform to explore “the creative and emotional dimensions of life with chronic illness and disability.” This episode, “Art, Creative Expression, and Coping” (a co-lab between Unfixed and Beyond My Battle) tells the stories of three individuals who use art to cope with chronic illness. Also featured is an art therapist who talks about how artistic expression can be therapeutic. While the podcast doesn’t discuss ADHD specifically, the conversation is pertinent to anyone who struggles with a chronic condition and might benefit from a creative approach to coping.

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The other day I opened my email and saw this subject line: “A customer left you a negative feedback.” I froze, afraid to open the message. When I finally clicked on it, already imagining a host of dreadful scenarios, I saw this: “One of your customers has made serious complaints about your services.” I scanned down a bit and saw “service not delivered and unprofessional.”

I didn’t have the vocabulary in the moment for what happened next, but I know now my reaction to that message was a manifestation of atelophobia—the fear of making mistakes and being imperfect. It’s also a sign of atychiphobia, the fear of failure.

What does that look like?

My stomach clenched and my heart rate lurched, not only because I’d made a mistake—done something terribly wrong—but also because I did it publicly, and it disappointed someone deeply. I’d failed. At first I thought it was from Substack and the idea of having upset someone so much that they’d complained to the company felt like a crushing weight. My mind raced ahead of the situation, with thoughts of how to make good what I’d done wrong, even before I knew what I’d made a mess of. But whatever it was, clearly, it was very, very bad.

After I nearly worked myself into an epic meltdown, I read the message again. This time I noticed the grammar. “A customer left you a negative feedback.” A negative feedback? Who talks like that? Then I noticed that the company referenced is Square. I heaved a great sigh of relief. I don’t have a Square account!

It was just a damn scam.

Yet in a heartbeat it had turned me into the poster girl for emotional dysregulation.

And then I felt ridiculous, ashamed and embarrassed by my over-the-top reaction. So first I berated myself for a mistake, and then I kicked myself for my reaction to the blunder.

Why?

According to ADHD expert Brooke Schnittman, MA, PCC, BCC, founder of Coaching with Brooke, “Emotional dysregulation is one of the core components of ADHD, even though it is not always listed in the diagnostic criteria. These exaggerated reactions are simply the emotional version of poor impulse control.”

In this instance, it seemed as if my body’s impulses were out of control—the rising heartbeat, shallow breathing, sweaty palms. It felt as if my physical reactions had outpaced my brain and galloped off into a storm of pure feeling. By the time I recognized that the email was bogus and thought it through logically, I’d already fallen down a hole of pure feeling—feeling bad, wrong, foolish, inadequate, frightened. All over what I believed to be a mistake. And again, though I hadn’t yet even discovered just what I was guilty of, I was sure it must have been egregious.

What lack of faith did I have in myself that I was so willing to believe I’d screwed up?

“The same executive function challenges that make task management hard also make emotion management hard,” Brooke explains. “People with ADHD often feel first and think later.”

I asked Brooke, who’s also the author of Activate Your ADHD Potential: A 12-Step Journey from Chaos to Confidence for Adults with ADHD, why these exaggerated responses to mistakes or the excess dread of mistakes is so common among those of us with ADHD.

“As someone who lives and works with ADHD every day, I see this constantly, and it makes perfect sense when you understand the brain behind it. ADHD brains are wired for rejection sensitivity and emotional intensity. When you combine that wiring with a lifetime of criticism, underperformance relative to potential, and impulsivity that often leads to unintentional missteps, you get a feedback loop of shame.”

And as I think many with ADHD will agree, shame is exhausting.

“That shame,” Brooke says, “turns into hypervigilance. We start to overreact to mistakes, not because we want to, but because our nervous system has been trained to expect pain after a slip-up. Even small mistakes can feel like evidence that we are failing again.”

For writers and other artists, there are so many ways we can go wrong. We might misspell an editor’s name in a pitch. Send off a half-baked essay to a literary magazine or a book that hasn’t been fully revised to an editor. Get a fact wrong. Write a clumsy sentence. Make too many typos. Send a query to the same editor twice. (Not that I’ve done any of these things, mind you.)

They may seem like little things, but our reactions are gargantuan. And there’s an art-stifling consequence to our outsized responses to real or perceived mistakes and missteps. Blunders and the subsequent emotional dysregulation are powerful creativity busters. And the fear of making mistakes—for people with atelophobia, and worse, people with ADHD and atelophobia—is a monstrous creativity buster. It makes us afraid to take chances, and it’s difficult to create if you’re always worried about what might go wrong.

People with ADHD who fear making mistakes “shut down flow completely,” Brooke explains. “Creativity thrives on experimentation, play, and risk, all of which require psychological safety. When we are terrified of making mistakes or emotionally flooded by them, the brain shifts from exploration mode to protection mode.”

She points to another casualty. “The fear of messing up kills curiosity. Perfectionism creeps in, and before long, we are frozen, overthinking instead of creating. For ADHD brains, that is a major problem because novelty and play are what fuel creativity.”

Brooke has developed a strategy that can help. “When I notice myself or my clients getting caught in that shame spiral, I use what I call the AIR™ Strategy: Acknowledge, Interrupt, and Redirect.

Acknowledge: Start by naming what is happening, out loud if possible. Say, “I am spiraling because I made a mistake.” This simple acknowledgment interrupts the automatic shame loop and brings awareness into the present moment.

Interrupt: Next, disrupt the emotional momentum. Do something physical, stand up, step away, take a few deep breaths, stretch, or walk outside. ADHD emotions gain speed fast, so you have to change the channel before the storm builds.

Redirect: Once your nervous system starts to settle, shift focus to action or curiosity. Ask yourself, “What do I actually need right now?” or “What can I learn from this?” Then take 1% action, one small step that honors your physiological needs and one small step forward on your priorities.

The AIR™ Strategy helps you move from emotional reactivity to intentional recovery.”

There’s no strategy that stops mistakes, but learning how to reframe your reaction is everything.

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For help coping with the everyday challenges of ADHD, get in touch with Brooke. If you need guidance for developing or refining your story, crafting queries and proposals, pitching to agents or editors, or creating workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD, I can help.

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October is ADHD Awareness Month, an effort to educate the public and share reliable evidence-base information. It’s spearheaded by a coalition consisting of the ADHD Coaches Organization (ACO), the Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA), and Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD).

It’s a fair bet, though, that more Americans get information about ADHD from social media than from these expert-led organizations. And much of the information shared on Threads, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, X, and other platforms, even here at Substack, is at worst, erroneous, and, at best, misleading or confusing.

On any given day on any of these social media platforms, for example, you’ll see countless posts that begin “ADHD is” followed by a behavior the poster believes is not neurotypical. It might go like this: “ADHD is resisting going to bed and staying up until 2am and not being able to get up in the morning.”

Well, no, that’s not ADHD. It might be (okay, it is) how I experience ADHD, and maybe it describes you as well, but it’s not a defining characteristic. Common, yes. But if you stay up until 2 and can’t function in the morning, it doesn’t mean you have ADHD, and if you’re early to bed and early to rise, it doesn’t mean you’re neurotypical.

Or this: “ADHD is hating to talk on the phone.” Maybe. Not always. Lots of people hate to talk on the phone but it doesn’t mean they have ADHD.

Even the “defining characteristics” don’t define everyone’s ADHD. It’s not true that “ADHD is hyperactivity” or “ADHD is impulsivity.” It may be for some, but not for everyone.

So “ADHD is” in fact is shorthand for “My ADHD is,” and leaving off the “My” has significance.

Sure, it’s a nitpicky argument, but it gets at the heart of the myths and misconceptions about ADHD. It’s not a condition that easily can be generalized. And trying to do so, or doing so unwittingly, can contribute to misunderstandings. Scrolling through social media and looking at all the “ADHD is _____” posts, social media users can easily write off a suspicion that they might have the condition because their experience doesn’t line up with whatever they’re being told ADHD is and so fail to seek a diagnosis. Conversely, another may jump to the conclusion that they have ADHD if what they experience merely as a quirk or a habit lines up with what someone else experiences as a deeply distressing and incapacitating symptom.

“ADHD is ______” posts also provide fodder for the common misconception that “everyone’s a little ADHD.” “Everyone” may be a night owl, or distractible, or impulsive, or forget what they walked into a room for. But they may not have that which distinguishes a person with ADHD from one who does not have it—a physical difference in the brain. So everyone has quirks and habits that may seem weird or annoying, but everyone does not have a neurodevelopmental disorder. The issues they relate to in “ADHD is ______” posts may not be pervasive and debilitating, another aspect that separates those with and without ADHD.

Perhaps we make these all inclusive statements as an act of solidarity or a way of creating community—because we want to feel connected and have others say, “Oh yes, me too.” Or for them to recognize the struggles and say “I see you.” And that’s crucial for people with ADHD. Being in community, virtual or otherwise, with others who understand is key to crushing shame and stigma associated with the disorder, to recognizing that we’re not broken, just different. But we can have community, empathy, and understanding by recognizing and respecting our similarities and our differences, without making ADHD seem like a list of behaviors to compare and check off. Perhaps that’s why the theme of ADHD Awareness Month is The Many Faces of ADHD.

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I was introduced to Lynn Shattuck by a mutual friend who thought we’d have something in common. We did. Probably more than she realized. Of course, we both have ADHD. We’re writers, editors, book coaches, and anthologists. And we’ve each experienced sibling loss, which is the subject of an exquisitely beautiful anthology Lynn coedited with Alyson Shelton, The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss and Hope.

She not only writes frequently about grief, she’s also facilitated writing groups for people experiencing cancer or grief, co-facilitated a support group for grieving teenagers, trained crisis response volunteers, and educated police officers about how best to deliver death notifications.

Lynn has contributed to The Huffington Post, Human Parts, Vice, The Fix, and Al Jazeera, and has been a columnist at Elephant Journal for ten years. Here, she shares her ADHD journey and talks about the way it influences her writing career.

Find her on Substack, on her website, and at Loss of a Lifetime.

Before we get into a conversation about ADHD and creativity, tell me about your work-in-progress, or, if you’re not working on a new writing project now, your most recent.

In true ADHD fashion, I’m juggling a couple of different memoir/essay projects at the moment. In June, my co-editor and I launched The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope, an essay collection about sibling grief. We’re really proud of it.

When did you discover you had ADHD and what prompted or led to that discovery?

I first suspected ADHD when I saw an Oprah episode about it when I was 20. But it wasn’t until my mid-40s that I learned more about it—for instance, that people with ADHD can be easily overstimulated, which explained why I hate going to the mall. Or that our ability to regulate emotions is affected by ADHD, hence a lifetime of feeling battered around by my own moods, as if my feelings were strong weather systems.

I didn’t actually get diagnosed, though, until I was 45—right before the pandemic. My dad had just died and I was charged with a lot of extra tasks that devoured my executive functioning capacity. That prompted me to seek a diagnosis and try medication, which I always worried would amp up my anxiety (it totally didn’t).

Would you describe yourself as primarily inattentive, hyperactive, impulsive, or a mix?

Inattentive with a splash of impulsivity that’s been tamed over time.

Did you expect the diagnosis—was it not surprising—or was it a lightbulb moment that suddenly made everything seem to make sense? Do you think of your diagnosis as a sort of watershed moment that divided life into the before knowing and the after knowing?

For me, it was a slow illumination that took place over time. Like turning on a light with a dimmer switch incredibly slowly.

What was your initial emotional response to discovering you had ADHD? Has that changed over time?

Initially, I felt relief, especially once I started medication and experienced the positive effects of it. I remember scooping up dog poop in our yard and feeling like I could just keep scooping until the task was done—it was a revelation!

Later, as I processed how much my self-esteem had eroded because my ADHD was undiagnosed for so long, grief bubbled up.

Do you consider the experience of being diagnosed with ADHD transformative in any way?

Yes. Understanding that I wasn’t just “not living up to my potential” or lazy softened me to my younger self.

What’s the least and most helpful advice you’ve been given?

“Just make a schedule and stick to it” is the least helpful. Learning to reparent myself with gentleness and care—while dripping with cheesiness—actually works.

Do you have a writing routine or do you find a routine to be incompatible with your experience of ADHD?

I’m currently in a generative writing group that meets weekly. It’s new for me to write with others and to share that fresh writing with them, but it’s working.

Once you knew you had ADHD, did you alter or attempt to alter your writing process in order to accommodate your new understanding of the way your brain works?

I think at first I felt like I needed to make up for lost time and get as much done as quickly as possible. Over time, I’ve learned that slow and steady, while not nearly as sexy, is more sustainable and yields better results.

Do you believe ADHD gives you an edge creatively? If so, in what ways?

I don’t know if this is ADHD or not, but I do have a sharpened ability to make mental connections that others might miss and to spot metaphors even when I’m not looking for them.

What aspects of writing does ADHD complicate or make more difficult? (For example, choosing or sticking with a topic, keeping a writing routine) Do you have a top two or three or five list of the biggest challenges?

Battling resistance can feel impossible. Also, sticking to a project when it’s not flowing easily. Having the stamina and patience to keep returning to a project when I don’t know where it’s going or if it will ever become something other people would want to read. Getting stuck on some aspect of the project and freezing up is another challenge.

Have you learned anything that helps with those issues or developed your own workarounds?

I’ve learned that being gentle with myself yields better results than mentally kicking my own ass. Having an accountability partner is also a huge help. And working on the sibling loss anthology with my co-editor, Alyson Shelton, was a gamechanger—she helped me move out of my perfectionism paralysis and keep moving forward until we had an actual book.

Is there anything you’ve tried that has not helped and if so, why?

Trying to stick to a stringent schedule of writing for several hours a day has never worked for me.

Do you believe ADHD has affected your overall career as a writer?

Yes, absolutely.

If you were late diagnosed, how do you think your career might have been different if only you’d known you were neurodivergent? If you do believe it would be different, you experience any feelings of grief or regret about that?

Yes, I definitely feel like a late bloomer who’s taken A LOT of detours on my writing journey. I do feel grief and regret for that, but most days I’m able to stay in the present and be excited about what I have been able to accomplish despite a lot of obstacles and eager to see what emerges next.

All writers face rejection, and most on a regular basis. And while it’s not fun for anyone, people with ADHD often experience it acutely. If that’s your experience, how do you cope? What keeps you putting yourself out there?

Sheer stubbornness. Normalizing rejection. Having a community of other writers who believe in me.

Are there any self-care practices that for you ease difficulties associated with ADHD in general or with writing in particular?

I’ve recently returned to writing “morning pages” (a la Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way). In my writing group, we incorporate a brief meditation and a juicy writing prompt, both of which help a lot.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions people have about ADHD?

That it only affects our attention span and not a whole host of other executive functioning areas, like emotional regulation, prioritization, and organization.

What are a few items on your dopamine menu? What gives you hits of joy or excitement?

Reading beautiful writing. Writing in community with inspiring, sensitive, empathetic writers. Live music.

Finally, if you could give up your ADHD, would you?

Nah. I’ve grown to appreciate my quirky brain, with all of the struggles and gifts it comes with.

Need help developing your story? Guidance in crafting queries and proposals? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch!

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The ADHD Tarot

Christie Sausa, MS, a writer and Tarot practitioner with ADHD, has launched a new substack, The ADHD Tarot. When she discovered Tarot, Sausa found that it aligned well with her ADHD traits. “Here,” she says, “was a tool that honored intuition over rigid planning, embraced non-linear thinking, and offered gentle wisdom without demanding I be anyone other than who I am.” She created her own tarot interpretations to “create new meanings for the ADHD mind.” On the Substack, she delivers practical Tarot applications for coping with ADHD challenges.

Improving Reading Retention

Do you mark up your books in an effort to remember what you’re reading? Alison from ADHD.The Curious Collective, an instagram account run by three Canadian neurodivergent-affirming therapists, shared a reel with some useful visual cues that might help. These and other tips for improving retention are geared toward students and others reading to learn, but they’re useful as well for any type of reading. The therapists—Krista, Marielle, and Allison—offer helpful reels and chats geared toward neurodivergent women.

It Doesn’t Have to Hurt…But if You Have ADHD It Usually Does

Criticism bites. We often—okay, usually—perceive it as rejection. While not written to specifically address the difficulty people with ADHD have with criticism, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, offers strategies anyone can use to take the sting out of criticism and make the most of constructive feedback. Any kind of judgment will always be harder for ADHDers with rejection sensitive dysphoria (which is most of us), but a bit of expert perspective can’t hurt. You may still feel the burn, but once you cool off you might be able to make the most of the feedback.

Fawning

Without wading into the debate about whether ADHD is linked to trauma, it’s safe to say that many people with ADHD have experienced trauma and the trauma response known as fawning—a hypervigilant state in which those affected are always alert to threats and strive to avoid conflict by people pleasing and approval seeking. Ingrid Clayton, PhD, a clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, and survivor of complex trauma, is the author of a memoir, Believing Me: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Complex Trauma. In her new book, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, she blends personal experience and professional expertise to explain the phenomenon and guide readers in“unfawning”—reclaiming their authentic selves.

Time Blindness

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All writers need feedback. None of us, not even editors, can fully edit ourselves or see our work as clearly as can someone looking with fresh eyes. But for writers with ADHD (and plenty of neurotypical writers, too), feedback can be confusing, frustrating, overwhelming, or distressing. Sometimes all of the above.

It can be confusing because if we seek too many opinions, we’re presented with conflicting ideas and, thus, have more choices to make, and decision-making is rarely a core strength for a person with ADHD.

It can be frustrating because once we finish something, we want to move on to the next shiny thing, and it can be difficult for us to revisit our words. Revision may be “where the magic of writing happens,” but to an ADHD brain it can feel like moving backwards when we’re chafing at the bit to gallop ahead. In order to engage in revision, it has to offer some novelty.

When there are too many recommendations, even when they’re spot on and invaluable, they launch us into cognitive overload. We get overwhelmed. Because we don’t know what to tackle first, we often shut down and tuck the work away. Sometimes permanently.

And it can be distressing because even the most constructive criticism can feel like rejection. And with impostor syndrome, low self-esteem, and perfectionism in the mix, feedback can make us feel vulnerable, exposed. Putting ourselves out there can make us feel that we have a target on our back and we brace for the piercing arrows.

Whether giving or receiving, it’s important to remember that feedback doesn’t mean criticism.

When given and received thoughtfully, it’s one of the most powerful tools for growth.

Below are suggestions both for giving feedback to ADHD writers in a way that helps rather than harms, and receiving it without having it trigger fear of inadequacy or failure.

How to Give Feedback

Deliver Only What the Writer Wants

More isn’t always better. Broad feedback can paralyze an ADHD writer, leaving them unsure about where to start, how to go forward, or whether they’re up to the task. Stick to what the writer requested. For example, if a writer wants your thoughts on the big picture issues in their manuscript, skip pointers about grammar or quibbles about word choices.

Organize Your Comments

Sort your thoughts into specific areas so that the writer can process one aspect at a time, not battle an avalanche of input.

Be Mindful of Your Tone

Remember that feedback is advice, not criticism. Focus on what’s working or not working, not what’s “good” or “bad." All writers want evaluations that are gentle, sensitive, tactful, and respectful. But writers with ADHD are acutely attuned to the slightest hint of rejection or criticism, so choose your words carefully and watch for delivering value judgments. Check your language and slash words that might be perceived as blame or shame.

Don’t Judge: Focus on the Work, Not the Writer

If you critique the writer instead of the work, you increase the chances of triggering extreme feelings of rejection and imposter syndrome. It’s always possible to comment on the work without criticizing the writer. Avoid “you” and “your” statements. Replace “your argument doesn’t make sense,” with “This section may be difficult for the reader to follow.” Instead of telling a writer their dialogue isn’t sharp, show them how they can sharpen it. The passive voice generally weakens writing, but it’s helpful when giving feedback because it depersonalizes the message.

Be Specific

Don’t just flag problems. Offer solutions. Better yet, give ADHD writers a prioritized list of suggestions so they know what to tackle and in what order. Task paralysis is real, and creating an agenda or map to revision can be invaluable.

Don’t be a Dictator

Beware of telling the writer what to do. Being too prescriptive can get an ADHD writer’s hackles up and they may double down. Phrasing suggestions as possibilities helps avoid defensiveness and stubbornness. Try saying “maybe,” or “consider” or “you might try….”

Give Reasons, Not Preferences

Don’t recommend changes simply because you’d prefer that something is written the way you’d write it. Back up suggestions with reasons so they don’t come off as arbitrary or subjective.

Respect the Writer’s Voice

Unless you’ve been asked to do so, don’t rewrite or fix a writer’s copy. Better to offer suggestions and ask questions than to impose your ideas upon the text. Preserve the writer’s unique voice instead of favoring your own.

Accentuate the Positive

Above all, don’t forget to stress the positives. In a previous post, I wrote about asking my cousin for feedback on my first (and, thanks to her critique, only) short story. She criticized it brutally but never found one single thing to compliment. It’s always possible to find something to praise or encourage, and the more balance you can offer in your evaluation, the easier it will be for the writer to absorb the constructive suggestions. You’ll gain the writer’s buy-in if you strive to begin and end any feedback with praise and encouragement.

How to Receive Feedback

Choose your Reader Carefully

When soliciting feedback, select someone you trust—someone you can be sure has your best interests at heart. If you’ve hired an editor or coach, ask them to describe their editing or coaching style, how they deliver feedback, and whether they’ll make space afterward to answer your questions or clarify their comments. Knowing what to expect can relieve some of the anxiety about opening yourself up to assessment.

Remember, You Asked For It

Solicited feedback is distinctly different from unsolicited feedback. When you share your work for someone’s opinion, remember that you asked for it. That’s not to say the opinion is always right, or always delivered as you might prefer, but it’s meant to help. It’s not a random judgment meant to wound or belittle you. Try to keep that intent top of mind.

Don’t Respond, Reflect

Resist a knee-jerk reaction. Instead of rushing to strike back with an emotional response or explain or defend your choices, take a beat. Sit with the feedback and then revisit it later. What you read today may seem different on reflection tomorrow. Being defensive makes it difficult to absorb the comments that may strengthen your work and open new avenues for you.

Ask Questions

If something seems unclear or wrong, request clarification. Misunderstandings go both ways; clarifying keeps everyone aligned. Discuss anything you take issue with or that misrepresents your goals and purposes.

Consider the Source

With peers, you can take what you want and leave the rest. But when the feedback comes from a publishing gatekeeper—an agent or editor—the way you respond may mean the difference between your work getting published or rejected. That’s not to say you have to accept all feedback. If you feel strongly that the changes suggested are wrong for you, speak up. But be prepared to compromise or walk away.

Don’t Take it Personally

I know! Easier said than done. We have ADHD, after all. It’s our nature to take it personally, even when it’s not intended that way. But try to step back and remember that feedback isn’t an assessment of you, and that you’re not unique in needing support. All writers can benefit from evaluation and gentle guidance. It’s neither a sign of weakness and inferiority nor a reflection of your self-worth. If you release yourself from defensiveness, you may be better able to recognize your own blind spots and develop greater self-awareness as a writer. Reflecting on feedback offered in good faith gives you a chance to hone your skills and take your work to the next level.

After the Feedback, Don’t approach Revision as a Chore

I’ll say more about this in a future post, but for now, try to think about revising as an entirely new part of the process. Novelty is like oxygen to an ADHD brain. It’s a bit like a magic trick. Use it to shake up your process in whatever way you can—work from a new location, listen to new music, or reward yourself for each page you work on.

This post has no AI-generated content or affiliate links. Photo by Nathan Dunlao for Unsplash.

Need help developing or pitching your story? Or strategies and workarounds for the challenges of writing with ADHD? Please get in touch!

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Vital Skills and Noble Goals

A Substack sure to inspire writers and artists is journalist and author Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. Walker created the newsletter for “people who want to stay interested in life”—a way of continuing the work of his 2019 book The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday. In the Substack, Walker, among many other features, offers a monthly chat where subscribers can share photos, illustrations, or writing about the things they’re noticing, which he curates into various themes. September’s is Ornamentation. The book and newsletter are likely of interest to anyone invested in a creative life, but they may be especially useful for people with ADHD, both because they’re essentially about the art of paying attention and because the bursts of focused attention they prompt can serve as items on a dopamine menu, bringing moments of clarity, joy, and appreciation. The appeal is summed up in the book’s introduction: “To stay eager, to connect, to find interest in the everyday, to notice what everybody else overlooks—these are vital skills and noble goals. They speak to the difference between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening, between accepting what the world presents and noticing what matters to you.”

Alchemizing Creative Roadblocks into Art

We all have obstacles to our creative processes. Sometimes we can hurdle them and other times they seem insurmountable. In SheWrites, writer and editor Hannah Diffey has compiled a list of ten such creative roadblocks—from writer’s block to waiting for inspiration. She shares the reasons each holds you back and the ways to transform them and use them as fuel for your art. And it’s a good idea to bookmark SheWrites, which always has interesting interviews on the craft of writing and editing and the publishing business, from finding a literary agent to marketing your book.

Writing and Failure

Why would you want to read a book that’s all about the ways writers fail and are rejected? One, because it’s oddly entertaining even if on the surface it seems depressing. And two, because it normalizes failure, which, though also seemingly dispiriting, can help writers understand that when they crash and burn, it isn’t all on them; it’s the nature of the beast of the publishing business. In On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer, Stephen Marche not only catalogs his own rejections and failures but also compiles a history of literary fails. His point isn’t to make writers give up their creative dreams, but rather to suggest that success doesn’t have to be the driving force—that what matters most in creating a literary career, as the book’s subtitle suggests, is steadfastness.

For Love of Language

This one’s a little different, not a book or podcast or product, but a person— Benjamin Dreyer, perhaps the most famous copywriter in America. Among the authors whose works he’s edited are two of my favorites, Amy Bloom and Elizabeth Strout. An editor at Random House for 30 years until his retirement in 2023, he’s widely considered the preeminent arbiter of style. His book Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, published in 2019, is a must-read for any language lover or writer who wants to level up their prose. One could get an education in usage just by reading his numerous opinion pieces in the Washington Post and other publications, following him on Bluesky, or playing Stet! Dreyer’s English: A Game for Language Lovers, Grammar Geeks, and Bibliophiles. But if you really want to learn from him, sign up for A Copy Editor’s Guide: Four Lessons on the Art, Craft, and Refinement of Prose, from StoryStudio Chicago, beginning October 6.

Instagram of the Week

A lot of ADHD Instagram accounts try to reproduce the frenetic activity in your brain and mirror it back to you, which can be amusing at times, but is often exhausting. SuperskillsADHD is quiet, with lilting piano music and tips about ADHD superimposed upon animated art. Each post is a gentle dose of practical advice designed to empower women with ADHD.

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This post contains no affiliate links or AI-generated content. And yes, there will be typos.

When it comes to writing or productivity software and apps, what works for neurotypical people often doesn’t work for people with ADHD, and what works for one person with ADHD isn’t helpful for many others. But this one may be an exception. Scrivener can be a game-changer for neurodivergent writers, especially those working on long-form projects. But it’s also helpful as an organizing tool for any number of writing projects or tasks; you can use it to hash out thoughts for an essay or article, separate the pieces of a braided essay, or keep a tally of cited sources. It’s even useful for prioritizing the elements of a to-do list or organizing recipes. Once you start to use it, you’ll likely find uses you never imagined a writing tool could offer.

Granted, if you let it, Scrivener can be too much to even think about. It’s complicated and overwhelming to fully learn because it’s so powerful and has so many useful, configurable features. But the good news is that it’s easy to learn only a few of those features that may take the stress and frustration out of your writing process and then ignore everything else. It doesn’t have to be intimidating. You can simply take what you want and leave the rest.

Maybe you’re like me when it comes to learning about technology or doing anything else that relies on knowledge or memory of a sequence of steps. There’s almost nothing I want to do less than learn how to use software. Like many people with ADHD, I have a disinclination to reading instructions (and more than a little difficulty remembering them), and when those instructions are in-depth enough to require a manual, disinclination morphs into antipathy. I admit I’ve always been guilty of learning the bare minimum—just enough to meet my needs. I still don’t even know half of what my phone can do and I don’t have the patience to learn how to use my microwave for anything more than warming my coffee. And with Scrivener, it’s no different. I’d estimate that I know how to use 25% of its features, if that, and yet it lets me be vastly more organized and productive than I’d be without it. I can’t imagine writing any other way.

This is probably the point at which I should make it clear that Scrivener isn’t paying me for praise. I don’t even have an affiliate account! I’m proselytizing because I hope if it works so well for me it can be equally transformative for you. I’ll share only a few of the reasons Scrivener can make the writing process easier for people with ADHD, and if they sound useful, you can download a free trial and explore them in depth and learn about many more.

Scrivenings

So what’s a scrivening? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s the act of writing or the product of writing. For the purposes of the software, scrivenings are pieces of writing. They can be chapters or scenes, notes, character sketches, and ideas. Think of them as scraps—all the little pieces of paper and Post-It notes and ideas written on the back of scone-stained paper bags or dry cleaner receipts you fish out of your pockets, tuck into binders, or scatter in unruly piles on your desk. They’re the handwritten notes you can’t read five minutes after writing them. The ideas you don’t know where to put because you’re not sure where they belong. The pages of research. Everything you have spread across your desk, nightstand, computer, car seat, and phone. Scrivener’s creators describe the program as a combination of typewriter, ring binder, and scrapbook because it unifies everything you need to sit down and work, providing an organized home for your all-over-the-place scrivenings.

Here’s how Scrivener can help with three of the problems ADHD writers typically have. (There are many more problems and ways the software helps!)

Difficulty Organizing

Scrivener is both a place to write and to organize (and reorganize) all your writing, ideas, and research—your scrivenings—and have them at hand at all times and in ways that let you see everything all at once. It’s this visual accessibility that sets Scrivener apart from other writing and organizing tools and makes it invaluable. You can create binders for each writing project and place folders within them. You can nest folders within folders, like Russian dolls, and files within folders. If you’re writing a book, you might have a binder for your manuscript, and within that, folders for chapters, and within those, files for scenes. You might make a separate folder that holds any number of character sketch files, one for research, one to hold pieces you cut but may not want to delete, and another for ideas you have or bits of work you’re not sure yet where to place. No more scraps of paper or stacks of folders everywhere.

You can view all the folders at once—and, if you open them, all the subfolders and files within them—to see the whole scope of your work and easily find pieces you want to develop or revise. Then the program lets you drag and drop each scrivening to rearrange in whatever manner you choose. It’s easy to try out different writing structures or scene sequences when you can so easily move the pieces around, almost like building blocks.

You can toggle from a text to a flashcard mode, which looks like Post-Its on a cork board, or an outline mode, so you see a synopsis for each scrivening. Each mode provides a different way to see the sweep of the work and rearrange the components with ease. There’s also the option to view and work on two scrivenings at once, which can be helpful when you need to refer back to a previous piece or compare what you’ve written to what you wrote earlier. And you can keep all your research, whether photographs, pdfs, audio files, or text files, all in one place and handy whenever you need it, and can also bring those files up side by side with another file.

When you’ve completed your project, you can compile all the pieces into a final manuscript in Word or whatever format you choose.

Although it’s designed for longer projects, Scrivener works equally well as an organizing tool for essays and articles. I use one for this Substack that contains folders for post ideas, social media ideas, and bits of research and inspiration. I keep yet another one for essay and article ideas. I can organize the folders with those ideas into topics, for example, health or op-eds, and I can rearrange them in order of urgency or priority. And for each of those ideas, I can attach research or submission guidelines for target publications. Speaking of which, I keep another Scrivener for essay and article markets, and in the folders I nest pitch guidelines, editor information, and examples of the kinds of stories the editors assign.

Scrivener can be downloaded and synced it across all your devices so all your work is available together at all times.

Task Paralysis

Getting started on projects is tough for most people with ADHD. Where to start? How to start? It gives us a headache! And when it comes to something as big and complicated as a novel or memoir, there’s so much pressure. Scrivener relieves that pressure and eliminates much of the intimidation caused by a blank page. It lets you break your project down into small parts. You don’t have to think about writing your book from page one to “The End” or agonize about what comes next. You can just write bits and pieces and worry later about how it all goes together. It gives you the freedom to get your words on the page without letting the bigger picture paralyze you. And if you have an idea for a scene or a bit of exposition but you’re not sure where it fits in the greater scheme, you can simply park it in a folder where you can see it but needn’t concern yourself with it until you have a better sense of where to place it.

Difficultly Staying Focused

Scrivener has lots of bells and whistles, but you can hide them so you can focus on nothing but the writing. In draft mode, you can send everything else to the background and work on an individual piece without distractions on the page. But when you need to refer back to other bits of work or need to pull up research, it’s all there in your folders, keeping you from risking the distraction of rifling through files on your desk or opening Internet searches that can send you off in other directions and down any number of rabbit holes.

Lack of Productivity

Scrivener offers tools that will help you set goals and stay on task. You can create productivity targets for the entire project and for each writing session. As you write, you’ll see the total word count for each scrivening, giving you both a boost of dopamine as the numbers climb and the incentive to keep going. You can also see your entire writing history—a tally of how many words you wrote each day or each month—which might help you see patterns and determine what increases your productivity.

Many More Features

This only scratches the surface of what Scrivener can do for you. To learn more, see this list of features, check out one of any number of videos on YouTube, or explore these resources:

Scriveners’s Blog

Scrivener’s Forum

Scrivenerville

Take Control of Scrivener 3

Writing is hard. Revising is hard. And pitching is hard. If you need professional help to tell your story or craft your query, proposal, or submission strategy, reach out for more information about my coaching and editing services.

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Last year I attended a week-long writing workshop led by a well-known memoirist who did everything possible to make a small group of writers feel comfortable, never pressuring anyone to read their work, never criticizing. He’d offer an exercise, set a timer for a brief meditation, and then we’d write. Or…I should say…others wrote. Most of the time I sat like a deer in the headlights, my mind absolutely blank. I heard the pens furiously scribbling across the page and watched fingers flipping notebook pages to make room for more words, my mind absolutely blank. Two minutes went by, then three and five, and still I hadn’t written a single word.

Was it a failure of imagination? Were my fellow workshoppers just more inspired, I wondered, more creative? As the week went on, I managed to string together some sentences and paragraphs in these sessions, but all in all, it was like Groundhog Day. Each day, I marveled at the ability of the others to churn out lovely prose on command while I was unable to produce anything substantial. It wasn’t the first time I felt I was failing, that I wasn’t a real writer. It had happened often enough that I’d begun to avoid any class or workshop that had a generative component. The more I feared failure, the more overwhelmed I became. It became clear that for me, the pressure to write on the spot caused a stupefying shutdown.

I didn’t know then that what I was experiencing had a name—ADHD paralysis. If you’ve experienced it, you know it feels exactly as it sounds, like brain freeze—having no control over your thinking.

This paralysis may seem like procrastination, which, as everyone knows, is a common ADHD trait. But it’s different. Procrastination is making the choice to put off something you don’t want to do. Paralysis isn’t a choice—it’s being unable to do something you want to do.

Paralysis can take a number of forms and can stem from executive function issues, emotional dysregulation, cognitive overload, and more. And these forms can, and do, merge and tangle.

Mental paralysis happens when there’s too much stimulation or you feel overwhelmed by your situation or environment. As with my deer-in-the-headlights moment at the writing workshop, it feels as if surge in electricity has blown a fuse in your brain, making it impossible to think clearly.

Task Paralysis, the difficult starting or continuing a project, is one of the most common problems for people with ADHD, and it’s also often mistaken for procrastination. Again, procrastination is a choice, paralysis an inability.

Decision Fatigue, as the name suggests, is feeling worn out by the effort of making decisions. The more choices you have to make in a certain period of time, the wearier you may feel. Each new decision you’re faced with seems harder, and the more fatigued you get, the poorer your decisions will be. As I’m writing this post, I have to keep in mind the points I want to make and consider the order in which they make most sense. Should this sentence go here? Does this paragraph make sense before or after the next? And before I even sat down to write, I had to choose what to make for dinner, what clothes to wear to go out this evening, where to go, and whom to invite. And now, as decision fatigue has set in, each little question of grammar or word choice has taken on an absurd sense of importance and ratcheted up my frustration. The more I have to decide, the more tired I get, and it all begins to seem like an exercise in diminishing returns. If I don’t break this cycle, I might feel too stuck to move on, paralyzed by decision-making.

Decision paralysis, the key focus of this post, is the rock bottom of decision fatigue—an inability to make choices, which can lead to avoidance, procrastination, and over-researching or excessive information gathering. It’s not simply a question of being indecisive. With ADHD, the way our brains process information throws up road blocks and detours. We might get so frustrated we stop, or we go back and forth about which direction to take and never take a step. Either way, we’re stuck. We get nowhere.

Sure, if we have the impulsive type of ADHD we can make a split second decision to move across the country, drop out of school, sell everything we own, and quit our jobs. No problem. Sometimes these split-second decisions work out well precisely because we don’t overthink them, but probably more often they take us far afield from where we want to be and may get us into trouble.

I’d argue that they’re not really decisions. They’re impulsive acts, which, by definition, are made without much thought. When I dropped out of college just a few credits shy of graduating, sold my baby blue Volkswagen Superbug, drove from Los Angeles to New York, and brought a ticket to Europe, I hadn’t thought anything through, hadn’t weighed any pros and cons, hadn’t chosen between one option and another. I simply had an idea and I jumped on it. I didn’t decide, I acted. Rashly. Without considering the consequences. And there were consequences. I hadn’t thought about what I’d do when summer ended and I had no car or no money. I’d never imagined that it would take me more than 15 years to go back and finish college. And while a neurotypical person might make impulsive choices from time to time and make some effort to learn from them, for me, as for so many of us with ADHD, it was rinse and repeat. Sell all my furniture. Move across the country on a whim. Move back six months later. Change jobs. Change apartments. Change dreams. Change goals. Change coasts again. All because it was too overwhelming to sit down and actually decide what to do with my life.

Because decisions are hard for ADHDers, we often either fail to choose and so, by default, we stay stuck, or we act impulsively because it’s too painful to think things through. Making decisions involves numerous steps. But we have trouble with that kind of complexity. We have a hard time initiating the decision-making process, and executive function problems make it difficult for us to organize our thoughts and weigh the possibilities. Further, thanks to deficits in working memory, we can’t juggle all the bits of information on which a decision depends because by the time we toss one bit in the air, we’ve already forgotten what it was.

We simply can’t juggle as much information as others can. Prioritizing isn’t one of our core strengths. And perfectionism, ruminating, and overthinking—at which we excel—act as goalkeepers to keep getting decisions through the net. We can’t sift through and process all the information. On top of all that, anxiety kicks up the fear of making the wrong decision.

It’s decision paralysis, I believe, that has greatest impact on writing. Why? Because writing might be described as a sequence of decisions. Consider it: You have a huge file of ideas. Which one should you start? How should you begin? What structure should you use? Where should you begin the story? What’s the location? What are your characters’ names? What’s the best first line?”

So many question and choices! The simplest decisions may seem monumental—should you use the word challenge or the word struggle? Should you call your protagonist Marcy or Marcia? The bigger issues can grind you to a halt. Do you want to write the novel or the memoir? And the months and years go by and you’ve not written the novel or the memoir.

Every aspect of writing, therefore, is a decision. Prolonged agonizing over the bigger choices, such as what to work on, can keep us from not working at all. And difficulty making the smaller ones—word choice or character names, for example—can slow or even stall progress once we’ve begun to write.

What Helps?

As with most challenges associated with ADHD, you may not be able to prevent or eradicate decision paralysis, but with some effort you can loosen its grip. Experts and coaches offer suggestions for minimizing decision paralysis and decision fatigue. What works for one person may not work for all, and what works today may not work tomorrow. But they’re worth exploring. They’re not always easy to implement, and it’s certainly not one and done. You’ll need to work on easing paralysis over and over, and with practice, it may get easier.

Most of these tips involve efforts to reduce cognitive load—the amount of mental effort and energy need to complete a task—and thus prevent or reduce overwhelm. They work by imposing constraints and minimizing distractions and excess external stimuli.

For the bigger decisions—what project to begin or prioritize, for example—set a time limit for making decisions. If you don’t put the brakes on the process, you can ruminate endlessly, overthinking and over researching. Start with a brain dump. Get all the noise of competing ideas out of your head and onto a paper or a device. Do a quick free-writing session about your options. Then limit your choices. Having too many things to choose from induces paralysis. Without giving it too much thought, pick a few, relying on instinct and intuition, which are likely to point you toward what most intrigues you. Then make a list of the pros and cons of each.

Imagine how you’ll feel working on each project and how you might feel after completing it. Eliminate ideas that don’t truly reflect your values and your goals and ask yourself which ideas generate more excitement, which offer the most novelty. Ask yourself what got you excited about the idea and whether you can envision sustaining that level of excitement as you go forward. ADHD brains need excitement and novelty, and if you can’t picture sustaining interest in the long term, the idea is not likely to work for you. Pay attention to what excites you!

Gather the information you need to make decisions, but limit your fact-finding. I can’t tell you how many times in my work as a journalist I’ve gone down the deepest research rabbit holes when all I really needed were a few key pieces of information. You don’t need ALL the information to make a decision. We overthink out of self-doubt, out of fear of making a mistake or worse, of failing entirely.

When you find yourself overthinking and ruminating, pause. Take a few minutes to practice box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing to disrupt your runaway thoughts.

Create an accountability group, even if it’s just a group of two. Having someone to talk through your decisions with can be invaluable, especially if it’s someone who can call you out (gently) when you’re overthinking and help you reason through your options. Community with others, especially those with ADHD, can lower stress and reduce the shame of always feeling different or less than others.

Deciding means eliminating possibilities, which may feel uncomfortable, but nothing is permanent. Of course you want to avoid second-guessing all your decisions, but if you make a choice that proves not to work for you, it doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. Most decisions can be undone. If you find the choice doesn’t serve you, you can correct course and start again. But watch for the ADHD tendency, though, to jump ship on an idea for the next shiny idea that comes along. If you’re tempted to reject a decision you’ve made or bail on a project you’ve begun, give yourself some time before you consign it to the trash heap of unfinished projects. Ask yourself what’s your motivation. Are you changing course because the project is hard? If so, try to break it down into smaller parts, reward yourself for completing them, and go into the next part with the confidence of having completed a goal. Are you changing course because you're bored? Try to find ways to introduce novelty into the project.

Finally, while you’re trying to move a project forward and struggling with the minute-to-minute decisions necessary to put words on the page, resist the urge to polish. As a writer, your first job is to fill the page. Remember Anne Lamott’s advice about shitty first drafts. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” It was good enough for Hemingway, who said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” So let shit happen! String words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. Focus on doing, not perfecting. Perfection isn’t only the enemy of the good, it’s often the enemy of all motivation. Don’t agonize over the word choice or the syntax or the structure. At least not at first. That’s what revision is for. Put words on the page. If you try to free yourself from the pressure of making perfect choices, you stand a better chance of getting unstuck, of telling your story—a story you can later whittle, enlarge, shape, and refine.

As with all challenges created by ADHD, self-care matters—paying attention to diet, getting enough sleep, managing stress, and exercising. Anything that helps reduce overwhelm and lessen anxiety can help with paralysis and decision fatigue.

Confession: I’ve spent far too much time thinking about writing this post instead of actually writing it. I share that to remind you that it’s one thing to know what you should do and another to actually manage to do it. Even though I can coach others to get past their blocks, it’s not always so easy to get past my own. We will always be works in progress, always having to try harder to do what seems to come easy for others. I share this, too, to stress the importance of giving yourself grace, practicing self-compassion, and rejecting shame. Difficulty making decisions isn’t a weakness. We’re not lazy. We’re not broken. Our brains work differently, and we need to work with them, rather than wrestle with them.

If you’re struggling with the general challenges of living with ADHD, an ADHD-savvy therapist or a certified ADHD coach can help. If ADHD is interfering with your creative process, I can help.

This post contains no affiliate links or AI-generated copy. And…there will be typos.

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Nowhere Girl

In her memoir Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation, Carla Ciccone deftly blends her own story with deep research to produce a fascinating and must-read account of life with ADHD. A journalist diagnosed at 39, she, like so many others, spent years asking herself, “What the hell is wrong with you?” After living so long in shame and frustration, becoming a mother spurred her to look deeper into her mental health—a journey that led her to an ADHD assessment and diagnosis. From comprehensive research, she learned the fundamentals of the disorder as well as the fact that girls and women have been shut out of the research on ADHD for decades. She offers an excellent examination of both gender bias and its consequences to women whose symptoms have gone unrecognized until well into adulthood. For everyone “invited late to the party,” she observes, a diagnosis is validating and a relief, but it doesn’t erase the frustration, grief, regret, and anger they’ve lived with or the damage that’s been done in their lives. She stresses the importance not only of knowing the facts about ADHD, but also of acknowledging the emotions and learning to cope with them. It’s a book that will inform and enlighten, comfort and reassure.

What the Heck is ADHD?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff asks that question on her Substack Hypercurious, where she looks at the complexity of ADHD and the reason the basics are so difficult to nail down. We know what it isn’t, she begins, but when researchers weigh in on what it actually is, the result is a mash-up of opposing theories. She reviews the leading hypotheses, sorts them into four “buckets”—executive function, delay aversion, default mode interference, and dopamine models—and drills down further into genetic, neurobiological, cognitive-behavioral, environmental, and evolutionary explanations. Finally, LeCunff looks at emerging research and teases what may be in the pipeline to better explain and treat ADHD.

My Rejection Story Podcast

I recently published a post about rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) and how it can torpedo a writer’s career. And while people with ADHD often have an outsized and sometimes paralyzing reaction to rejection, it can be at least somewhat helpful to remember that all writers get shot down and it’s what they do afterward that makes all the difference. It doesn’t stop RSD in its tracks, but it offers perspective. Hosted by Alice Draper, My Rejection Story shares the experiences of bestselling authors and explores how their failures have been key to their successes. Recent guests have included Grant Faulkner and Courtney Maum. And episodes with journalist and coach Paulette Perhach and ADHD coach Meredith Carder, author of It All Makes Sense Now: Embrace Your ADHD Brain to Live a Creative and Colorful Life, look at the special challenges for neurodivergent writers. (And check out our interview with Paulette.)

ADHD Evidence Project

Created by Stephen Vincent Faraone, PhD, formerly a Harvard psychiatry professor and now a distinguished professor of psychiatry and of Neuroscience and Physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University and a leading ADHD expert, the project promotes and disseminates evidence-based information to clinicians and consumers. Learn more at its website, where you’ll find podcasts, blog posts, and other resources, and on Instagram. In a time when the media, both traditional and social, is rife with misinformation and disinformation, this rigorous reliance on evidence is more important than ever. The project reviewed meta analyses and very large studies from the last 20 years to produce the World Federation of ADHD International Consensus, which will continue to absorb new research and inform people who live with the condition and the experts who treat them.

My Chaotic ADHD Brain

More than 200,000 followers regularly get a dopamine hit from reels of goofy, clever, and relatable humor about ADHD traits from “My Chaotic Brain” on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Procrastination, clumsiness, disorganization, brain glitches, ADHD paralysis, you name it, this creator turns it into absurdity. Plus ridiculous life hacks, ADHD-fueled pet peeves, epic coping failures, and the challenges of parenting ADHD kids. But fair warning, it’s easy to go down a reel rabbit hole here.

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