The Rain in My Brain: Writing with ADD (Patreon)

Greetings, darlings! The tulips are coming up, the air is no longer harmful to warm-blooded things, there’s mud everywhere, like four whole flowers, the construction sign on a major thoroughfare in our town got hacked to read “Fist Me Daddy” and didn’t get fixed for ages, and spring is grumbling about having to show up for class. NEW ENGLAND, MY DUDES. 

This month, I’m going to talk about the elephant in my room. I’m getting back into the swing of working and I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a struggle. I’ve never had such a long gap where I didn’t write fiction or poetry in my life as the end of my pregnancy and maternity leave, I’m trying to balance baby and book and a lot of other nonsense, and my confidence is shot because of that dreaded gap. Turns out, you kind of need to believe in yourself to create like, an entire world, and that’s been thin on the ground for me of late. My mental health is not superb.

SO I HAVE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT THIS MESSED UP BRAIN I GOT. 

Because the other factor in my struggle, which is, as the kids say, real, is that I have ADD, have had it my whole life, on top of depression and anxiety WHICH IS WHAT WE CALL A TRIPLE THREAT IN HOLLYWOOD. I am not, as the grown ups say, neurotypical. I’ve never been in the same hardiness zone as neurotypical. I have been off my meds for 16 months now due to pregnancy and nursing. I’m just now getting back on my regimen, which means that I get to be myself again 3-4 days a week and still a goddamned mess the rest of the time.

Yet, despite having ADD, I have produced a rather large body of work before my 40th birthday on Sunday, a body of work readers seem to think is occasionally complex, which is a thing many people assume a person with ADD cannot do. I’ve talked to kids in my school visits about having ADD, hoping that it might help some of them realize that it doesn’t mean you’re not smart or capable, so I thought maybe it might do the same for some of you if I get into the weeds about this. And maybe it will help me.

Because look. Writers aren’t often normal in the brainmeats. What we do is weird and non-linear and inward-facing and the most bizarre blend of introvert and extrovert, social and asocial, logical and intiuitive. We have a higher incidence of non-neurotypicality than the general population and I can’t see how it would be any other way. It takes a certain strangeness. 

But I didn’t think my own strangeness-recipe was strange until I was 31. I thought I was just an asshole.

I used to make this joke when people asked me about writing books in 30 days, how I could do that, why and could I teach them. I always said that my entire work ethic was just a workaround for my terrible personality. I lost confidence and interest in a project quickly, I’m always trying to outrun my self-doubt and disorganization. 

You would think after making this joke a hundred times I would consider that I might have ADD.

But I didn’t. Because I believed a bunch of comedians and sneering, self-satisfied culture commentators about what ADD even was. I wasn’t physically hyperactive. I could sit in a chair for long periods. I could finish reading books, I could write books, I learned two languages in college, I wasn’t running around at 100 mph all the time like kids with ADD are supposed to do. I was never that old joke where the comic goes on for a sentence about airline food or whatever, says they have ADD, and then shouts OOH A SQUIRREL to illustrate said disorder. Also fuck you and your squirrel.

I’m also a girl. 

ADD is massively underdiagnosed in girls for this very reason. Many more of us have ADD (inattentive type) rather than ADHD, and the socialization of girls means that tons of us are more than capable of sitting still and looking like we’re paying attention. We’ve been forced to do it since we could walk. It’s ladylike. Fold your hands. Boys will be boys but girls will be ladies. My stepmother said once that I never had it when I was little. I reminded her how smart I always was, how much I knew and how well I could do on tests—and how horrendous a mess my desk and locker always were, how easily I forgot assignments or lost them, how much I talked out of turn in class, how many academic issues I had because I simply could not self-organize. I remember so clearly writing in-class exams in college. My thoughts would run ahead faster than I could write, and I would forget what I had decided to say by the time I caught up to the paragraphs I’d already written in my head. 

I don’t shout OOH A SQUIRREL. But while you’ve been talking about the latest in local traffic sign hacking, I saw that squirrel and have invented an entire life for it, with hopes and dreams and a sizaeble nut portfolio she hides from her acornoholic husband. I’ve constructed a magic system for squirrels and a history of their kings and queens. Then I moved on to thinking about Malabar Giant Squirrels and how awesome they are and how they are probably the best at magic but don’t like to share power, and whether flying squirrels would be outcasts or gods, and by the time you’re done talking and waiting for me to respond, I will have spun up an ancient hatred resulting in centuries of war between the squirrels and the possums, and though I look like I think that sign was funny and may even have made the right social sounds in response to your bon mot, I am knee-deep in the cruel and bloody history of the possum kingdom.

So that is part of what ADD is like for me. You can see how it might be something of an advantage for a writer—my brain goes at full throttle most of the time, leaping between subjects, and the strange connections it makes can become books. You can see that I am capable of hyperfocus—that’s how anything gets written or done at all. I wrote books in thirty days. I read novels through the night because if I stopped I might not start again. I learned languages out of sheer passion and constantly cramming. But you can also see that my hyperfocus gets spent on fucking squirrel kings and possum wars, so my house is still a mess and I can’t remember my appointments to save my life and my social skills are like plate armor made out of crochet—looks mostly like it’s supposed to but something is definitely wrong, and in the clinch, we might all be deeply and dangerously disappointed in what I brought to the field. I’m sure it’s exhausting to be around. I get snappish and short when my thoughts are interrupted because dude I might not get that back it could have been important yes goddamit the plight of the vengeful possum lords is important. Sometimes in social situations I end up pulling an in-class exam and talking too much or at the wrong time because my brain is running faster than the conversation and also my own dumb mouth. And then my anxiety will make me pay for that later, wondering if everyone hates me because of my social performance. This is super great for conventions. IT’S A TRASH FIRE IN HERE I TELL YOU.

But one of the biggest aspects of ADD that gets elided by the very name of the disorder (attention deficit) is not an advantage to anyone ever. The dreaded executive functioning. If you’ve never had a problem with it, you probably haven’t even heard the phrase. And it’s a huge issue for a writer, because writing is, enormously, an issue of choices. You choose to begin a story here or there, to make this or that character a protagonist, names, plot twists, structure, hair color, eye color, gender of this character or that, whether a scene takes place in the morning or at night, outside or inside, during action or outside it, where the exposition goes, titles, chapter titles, right down to the individual words in every sentence. They all represent choices and ADD fucks with your ability to make any of them. 

Executive functioning means being able to make a plan and follow through on it, make choices definitively, and move on from those choices. It’s part of being “an organized person,” which I could never be. The idea of making organizational systems for myself was just another equally important task to overwhelm me, and if I did it, I could just as easily lose my notebook or files or whatever and never remember to look for them. This is what I mean when I tell people I never took notes while writing The Orphan’s Tales. For me, then, there was no difference between keeping notes and writing the book. Both equally hard, equally important, equally daunting. So I just wrote the book. I couldn’t sell notes to a publisher. It’s not admirable, it’s just that I couldn’t do both.

Funny thing about executive functioning: studies show that everybody burns out on it, however their brain is assembled. You only have so many choices a day before you just stop being effective and caring about it. Some people have a lot before they hit that point, some a little. On heavy workdays, when I finish my wordcount, I have made so many choices, large, small, and infinitesimally tiny, that I can’t choose what food to eat or pajamas to fall into or whether or not to sleep. I’m just spent. It’s only a semi-functional way to live.

Because for me, it’s the same with a house as a book. I can know everything that needs to be done in my house, and know how important it is to do it, to do it quickly, even by the end of today, and still be paralyzed because there’s so much and it’s all equally important even if it isn’t. In my head, putting laundry in the wash is as important as paying a bill that’s due today and will incur fees if not paid, and without medication, I can just sit there in tears not knowing which to do first until the day is gone and neither are done. For fuck’s sake, my baby is seven months old and I havent’t finished the thank you notes and birth announcements yet for exactly this stupid reason. 

Just that way, I can feel the whole of a world, a story, a character, and know what I want it to be, and see a thousand ways to get there, all of which seem equally correct, even if only one actually is the right choice. It’s a constant claw machine game where I never know if my mind will have the tensile grip to bag the prize. But it does, more often than not. I just always think it will slip through my grasp. The danger is always there to give up and not try. Sometimes that wins, sometimes it loses, and I’m old enough now to accept that I will be fighting that battle on one level or another forever. And that has to be okay, because there’s no other option.

This is why to-do lists and outlines rarely help me. Yeah, I know all that. But in what order? By what method? And that would be without the anxiety telling me I’m incapable of doing anything and the depression telling me there’s no point to any of it. 

SO FUN. 

When it comes to a book, I have always tried to just barrel through choices on intuition without questioning myself, because if I stop to question, it’s all over. This is why I have never been the kind to write seven drafts of a book. I would just give up. I edit as I go, because I have to believe that THE END is actually the end on some level. I am constantly fighting myself not to give up. One of the benefits to getting on medication in my 30s was that I could slow down and reflect—as long as I didn’t do it too long and get lost. But that’s what I go up against every day when I sit down to work:

1. Squirrel Kings

2. Everything I write sucks and everyone actually hates me but won’t say anything

3. Life is a grey and pointless void

And in order to make more book, I have to compartmentalize all that away. With medication, I can do it in bursts. Without, well. I used to have a whole series of coping mechanisms. I would write in cafes that had no wifi access with noiseless headphones. I would write while I had tv shows or movies I’d already seen on (it sort of peeled off layers from my hyperactive mind so I could get under the noise and focus) I’d just hide for weeks and do nothing but write so that those three horrid little bullet points had no space to get in. I have always done my best when I was just playing, writing fast, not overthinking, just throwing glitter around and not worrying about what sticks. But getting into that place is so difficult. It is what I am always chasing, the glitter room. Writing, attentive, absorbed writing, is like falling asleep. Sometimes you just pass out the minute your head hits the pillow/your fingers hit the keys. But more often you have to toss and turn and count zombies and get up for a drink of water and rearrange the blankets and take a pill and go try again on the couch. You envy others who seem to have no trouble, snoring away peacefully. You share techniques for getting to sleep online or in person, you try different things, and every night you just hope it happens easily. When it does, it’s a miracle. When it doesn’t, you stare at the clock thinking: if I fall asleep now, I can get 4 hours. 3 hours. 1000 words. An hour. 

But you still have to do it every day or you’ll start falling apart.

Of course, I can’t hide for weeks anymore. Some of my old sleep methods have been forcibly removed from me now. I have a child and a spouse and public appearances and all that, all of which needs attention all the time. So I’m trying to find a new way to be. Only without my meds, that proved impossible. Medication, for someone with ADD, doesn’t get us high or power us through exams like it does for people without it. It just makes us nearly normal. Calm and nearly normal. Possibly capable of making a to-do list. Of doing the things that keep others on task. Making a few choices. Putting the exposition in chapter three instead of chapter one. Naming the love interest. There’s a ton of shame out there about ADD meds specifically. People seem to think Adderall is some kind of mix of meth and magic, and it sort of is, for people who actually have this disorder, but the potential for abuse among those who don’t means the rest of us get a lot of grief over the thing that makes us functional. 

When I was pregnant, for the first time in my life, I would just stare at the screen and nothing would come. I would know what I needed to write, but nothing was there. It was far worse after having been medicated for so long, knowing what I used to be capable of, and finding it gone. ADD meds work on your serotonin receptors, among other things, and I don’t think my brain remembered how to make much on its own. It was terrifying. Horrible. Blood with cold thickening. And the day I went back on my meds, the words were back. I am still having trouble with choices and those three bullet points, but I’m clawing my way back. I can manage the first bullet. I’m still working on the second and third. 

You can write with ADD. And depression. And anxiety. These things do not bar you from the page. They do present a thicket of briars around that page that you have to hack through. I honestly don’t know many people who have a totally healthy relationship with writing. It is parent and child and lover and therapist and frenemy and rival and everything in one, while not being anything, also a job, and one most people think is a hobby. Plus the briars re-grow every night and have to be torn up again every morning. Medication gives you a sharper sword. But even without, you can learn to cope. To fall asleep. To swing a sword. 

The thing I always have to keep in mind is that I have only so much focus, so many choices, so much correct behavior to give to a day. I must be careful what I spend that focus on. If I start in on social media, there is a real danger that that’s all I’m doing that day. If I start cleaning, that might be it, too. I once decided to knit up a quick toy for a friend’s kid before diving into the book for a day and ended up spending all day making a menagerie. It was a disaster for me—less for the kid. Whatever I start doing first, like a magic spell, is what I will be doing. So I am insanely careful about my mornings when I’m on deadline. I have to know the truth about myself—which is that I’m constantly on a tightrope and a little shove will tip me off the straight and true. That sometimes I will need help. That what is ordered and disordered in me is not a joke or an affectation, but a very real mess that must be managed, and which I have never been able to entirely manage on my own. This is why I started out writing fiction with Nanowrimo. A structure imposed from the outside, by someone else, was the only thing I could hold onto back then. The same way I worte papers the night before they were due, because I needed the pressure to perform. I chased things like that for awhile—contests and challenges—so that I could hold onto that until I had real deadlines from real publishers. Anything that would force me, that would make the executive decisions for me. And that’s a totally valid approach. Whatever produces work is a totally valid approach (and it harm none). 

So here I am and here we are, all of us trying to shout into the void in a beautifully structured novel format. I want you to know, if you struggle, that I do too, that many of us do, that a line of lovely books on a shelf is in some ways a lie. They look orderly and organized and deliberate. But each one encloses a snapshot of a mind at a point in time, a wild wind of work and need and longing and failures and triumphs that looks tranquil enough in the final draft, but never was in the making. 

None of this has ever gotten better the more books I write. It’s just part of the process. It’s all part of the process. Every day is a first and final draft, because you never get to revise it. It is what it is on the first round. Which is terrifying, yes, obviously. But part of the secret upside to writing is that on some level you can revise that day. You can smooth and blush up and re-write the words you made on that day, the moment you crystallized, the time you captured in words. Each page, each chapter, is time and hours made solid, made story, made a kind of life more malleable and forgiving than real. 

That only works, of course, if you wrote today.

So you’d better. 

And so had I.