Tag: adhd

This post has been transcribed from handwritten. 

It’s not writer’s block. It’s ADHD. It’s hormone deficiency. It’s perimenopause. It’s my brain either exhausted or wired, sludge at one time of the month, then running at full speed for a few days somewhere in the middle.

EXCEPT-EXCEPT-EXCEPT-by the time I grasp that my mind is actually functioning and catch up with enough (chores, errands, responsibilities) to feel like I might be able to write with out all of those things nagging at the back of my mind, weaving in and out of the story I’m trying to tell—it’s on the downswing again.

As I write this, the back of my brain is literally chanting, “I bought this green pen at a dollar store in the mountains.”

Maybe I should try to write with music, find some lofi wordless hum, but then I worry that my ADHD brain would want to [stares off into space for a full minute] spend a bunch of time picking out the ‘perfect’ music to write to {my perimenopausal brain keeps wanting to spell ‘write’ as ‘right’ and it’s pissing me off}.

I love that I have an answer for the reason I lose interest in writing projects and interrupt people and [stares off into space again] have to put my keys and wallet in my purse and always hang my purse here {mental picture of the black hook on the coat closet door} or I’ll lose it.

I hate that there was a slim to none chance of me being diagnosed sooner.

I despise that I cannot tell my mom this diagnosis because she’ll say ‘no you don’t/it doesn’t exist/you were just a weird kid/I hope you’re not taking those stimulants.’

I loathe that all the stories I started and never finished were probably because my brain was done getting dopamine from them. {Here’s looking at you, all the Nanowrimos I ‘won’ by getting to the 50k word deadline, only to quit writing, mid-story somewhere between 50,000 and 51,000.

–I’m using synonyms to work on by brain power—

I’m scared I’ll never write again because there is no deadline/deadlines I give myself aren’t good enough to make the brain go/I can’t get someone else to give me a deadline (publisher agent professional0 without proving first I’m good enough to deserve a deadline.

I know all my short stories are novels waiting to happen.

Should I write more short stories? Should I rewrite my goblin novel and make it more horror? Should I just keep writing it as-is, even though it doesn’t feel write (goddamnit) right to me, tone-wise? {I love the concept}. Should I just give up and lay down and say I wrote a bunch of short stories and a first draft of a novel and got published a few times and just give up?!

I DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP.

 What I want is for some semi-successful writer I admire—someone I would feel beholden to through sheer admiration—to magically appear and give me a deadline and a minimum word count and agree to read a chapter if I make it all the way through writing a whole novel.

I want to not have ADHD.

But, if I didn’t have ADHD, would my brain make the what-ifs that have allowed me to tell so many wonderful stories {if only mostly to myself}.

[stares off into space, then back at the notebook, then—you get it]

I slept from eleven-thirty last night until six-thirty am, and then took a nap from eight forty-five a.m. to ten a.m. and then drank coffee and cola and it’s close to eight in the evening now and I’m tired. So tired.

If stimulants allow me to focus and write, I don’t care if there is an evening crash. My brain already has them anyway.

{This—being ADHD—explains the late nights I spent most of my life having [Hey did you know I taught myself to tell stories in my head and/or listen to the background music in my skull—Radio JMFM—rather than my racing throught in order to fall asleep at a decent time?]}

I hate when I get the words wrong now. It feels like time is ticking down to when perimenopause/menopause or dementia or old age are going to steal my prized words [mental picture of Gollum in the cave with the ring].

Precious, not prized. My precious words.

I write this like my brain thinks.

I wonder if anyone would want to read it/if I should transcribe it.

The act of physically writing + listening to the cat’s drinking fountain has kept my brain busy {calm?} enough to focus.

I wonder how long after I stop until the music kicks back in—

–ope, there she goes [strains of “My Name is Jonas” by Weezer play from the backrooms of JM’s skull].

FIN

A vulnerable post but, first, a writing history:

I was acting out fanfiction on the playground in elementary school thirty years before I even knew what fanfiction was. My best friend, Justin, and I pretended to be characters from movies we liked and acted out entirely new stories on the playground. He would be King Triton and I would be Ariel, sent on an adventure that had nothing to do with some boy up in a castle. We would play invisible baseball with our monstrous imaginary friends, Beetlejuice, Drop Dead Fred, and Maurice. I wanted to tell stories even before I knew that was a job you could have.

By sixth grade, I realized people were paid to write books and I knew I wanted to be An Author. So I started writing

Weirdly, though, I had a hard time finishing what I started. I would write a chapter or two and go back and edit, edit, edit until I lost interest. If I did happen to get farther (I once filled nearly an entire notebook with what I realized, years later, was Interview with the Vampire fanfic), I would lend it to a friend for feedback and lose interest by the time I got it back.

In my twenties and early thirties, I won Nanowrimo multiple times, back when Nano wasn’t taboo due to AI use, always hitting that lauded fifty-thousand word mark…only to stop before fifty-one thousand words. I meant to get back to it those stories. I just never did.

Then, the pandemic came, and the literal threat of death made me realize if I did not take writing seriously, I would never be a published writer. Mid-2020, I started churning out stories long-hand and piecemeal between dealing with two young kids in virtual school, then typing them up later.  By the middle of 2023, I had sold my first story.

The next year, I told myself I would write a book. I wrote the whole thing longhand on half a dozen legal pads, but got off track around 95% done. I fought myself for months to write the ending. I knew what I wanted to write, but every time I wanted to sit down and do it, it was like walking through sludge or trying to press myself through a brick wall. When I finally talked myself into it, it took a handful of hours and added up to less than 3,000 words.  (I typed it all up in 2025, and have spent the first half of 2026 telling myself I’m going to pick it up and start cleaning it up).

By this point, the vaccines had rolled out and less and less of my friends and family went out masked, so the urgency to write-or-die waned. The kids were back in school. I still wrote down my story ideas and wrote a story here and there, but it was becoming harder. I still wanted to do it, more than anything.

Fast forward to 2025: in the fall, I hit perimenopause loud and clear with symptoms I won’t bore (or disgust) you with, and suddenly everything I wanted or needed to do became more difficult by the day. I had always kept lists for the grocery store and a planner with to-do’s. Suddenly, I wasn’t remembering to write things on them. Whatever hormone had given me the urgency to do the laundry or dishes or pickup drinks from Costco before we ran out–let alone write a story–has started only showing up at certain times of the month.

If you’ve made it this far and haven’t figured out what has been holding me back, it’s ADHD. And anxiety, but mostly ADHD. I got my ADHD-Inattentive diagnosis, a few weeks ago in May of 2026.

For the first week, it was a relief! I wasn’t lazy! I really do want to write! It’s just the dopamine and the norepinephrine and other complicated brain-chemical-stuff I don’t understand.

And now I’m in the grieving period. Realizing thirty years have gone by that I could have been writing and actually finishing things if someone had caught it. (Yes, other things I missed out on, but god the writing I could have done! THE WRITING I COULD HAVE DONE).

I am about to travel the road most ADHD adults travel: finding the right medication and lots of therapy to deal with what I lost. In the meantime, I am also trying to find my way into writing daily again, mostly by journaling what I am going through.

If you’re interested in reading about that experience (there will be lots of em-dashes, italics and parentheses and NO AI), then, please, follow along. I am doing this partly for myself but, also, in the hopes that I’ll find some other writer out there who is dealing with ADHD the same way I am, and that we’ll both feel less alone.

On that note, if that’s you, I’m looking for someone (or more than one someone) to be my accountability partner—and vice versa—to check in on word counts and trade manuscripts and cheer each other through that stupid stubborn wall in our minds.

FIN.