A vulnerable post but, first, a writing history:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
By sixth grade, I realized people were paid to write books and I knew I wanted to be An Author. So I started writing<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In my twenties and early thirties, I won Nanowrimo multiple times, back when Nano wasn\u2019t taboo due to AI use, always hitting that lauded fifty-thousand word mark\u2026only to stop before fifty-one thousand words. I meant to get back to it those stories. I just never did.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 By the middle of 2023, I had sold my first story.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 (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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to 2025: in the fall, I hit perimenopause loud and clear with symptoms I won\u2019t 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\u2019s. Suddenly, I wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve made it this far and haven\u2019t figured out what has been holding me back, it\u2019s ADHD. And anxiety, but<\/em> mostly ADHD. I got my ADHD-Inattentive diagnosis, a few weeks ago in May of 2026.<\/p>\n For the first week, it was a relief! I wasn\u2019t lazy! I really do want to write! It\u2019s just the dopamine and the norepinephrine and other complicated brain-chemical-stuff I don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n And now I\u2019m 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<\/em> the writing I could have done! THE WRITING I COULD HAVE DONE<\/strong>).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re 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\u2019ll find some other writer out there who is dealing with ADHD the same way I am, and that we\u2019ll both feel less alone.<\/p>\n On that note, if that\u2019s you, I\u2019m looking for someone (or more than one someone) to be my accountability partner\u2014and vice versa\u2014to check in on word counts and trade manuscripts and cheer each other through that stupid stubborn wall in our minds.<\/p>\n FIN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[55,6],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-adhd","tag-writing","post-preview"],"yoast_head":"\n