Hi friends,

When I tell people I have ADHD they usually look really surprised.

I don’t act especially hyperactive. Ok, I talk quite quickly and I am known to fidget, but I can stay seated for long periods of time and mask well enough to project a general appearance of being calm and in control of myself (I, like so many neurodivergent folks, am an Oscar-worthy masker).

My hyperactivity primarily takes place internally, in my ol’ brain, where my thoughts whizz bang at a mile a minute with no let up whatsoever. There’s newsletter ideas, work stuff, what’s for dinner, how are my pets doing, what’s on my lifemin list, do I need to buy milk, why does my back hurt, what’s that noise, why is the world so awful and much, much more, all day, every day, no breaks.

It is absolutely exhausting.

Wave after wave of thoughts (hence my newsletter title). Each wave coming at me all at once, and I lack the brain space to parse what is and isn’t relevant or a priority.

It’s a bit like mental arithmetic. I’m terrible at it. I can only ‘do maths’ with a calculator or a pen and paper. To decide what I need to do next, I need to get all my thoughts out of my brain and onto somewhere to look at them. Leaving them to swirl in the soup of my mind leads all the thoughts to congeal together into one big mass of anxiety.

This method of getting thoughts down on paper usually leads to extensive, over-the-top, intimidating-looking to-do lists. Although I feel relieved that all of the thoughts swimming around my noggin are now on paper for safe keeping, they all look equally important still. What is priority? I have no idea.

All I know is I have papers and lists and apps and all kinds of systems to try and help my brain settle, yet there are so many times when it feels like nothing works.

There’s so much to do and I don’t know where to begin, so I just freeze. I have too much whelm. I am so unbelievably whelmed, you could say overwhelmed.

I’m stuck on the sofa scrolling my phone, hating myself and wishing I could just pick something to do and get it done. The negative self-talk comes out to play and calls me a lazy good-for-nothing twerp who reaps what they’ve sowed and they’ve sowed nothing. It gets nasty.

I can’t pick a task, I can’t focus, I can’t get a plan together, and I don’t know where to start. Hours pass by. I can lose entire days to inertia. The guilt consumes me. “I should be doing something.”

My own internalised ableism whispers in my ear that my neurodivergence isn’t that bad and I’m being a drama queen and I should stop whinging and just get on with it.

I notice that a lot of those names and phrases I use against myself are the names and phrases used against me when I was a child. In these moments, I try to remind myself that my internalised ableism is a liar. It invalidates my experiences because it thrives on my insecurity which is bolstered by a world that views human worth by how much a human can produce or contribute to society.

I work everyday to rid myself of internalised ableism.

The reality is that some days my head is going to be filled with scrambled eggs. Some days I can’t get the thoughts to make sense. I can’t figure out what the first step is.

I’m not a productivity machine. I’m not a robot. I’m a human being with a wavy brain. My inability to see the wood from the trees some days does not make me any less of a person.

The ‘ADHD tax’, the deadlines we miss, the fees we accrue, the things we don’t get done, will always be there. No matter what super-complex system I put in place to get everything sorted at once in a big burst of energy, it will inevitably lose steam and I will lose interest. That’s ok, I thrive on novelty but yearn for consistency.

I will never find a permanent fix for this quandary and I need to make peace with that. Luckily, my natural curiosity and thirst for life drives me forward to look for the next system that can corral my thoughts into a useful formation, albeit temporarily.

ADHD gives me so much creativity, but it can also suck so bad. Yet I need to remember that for every day that I lose to inertia or overwhelm, there are the days where I make cool stuff, write newsletters that make people laugh, or simply move my life along with my own small actions.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier newsletters, I think the ADHD in my AuDHD combo is the motor that propels me forward in life. Sometimes it gets stuck and I can’t find the bite point but when I do, away I go.

A teacher I had in primary school once told me, exasperated that I was such a prissy perfectionist who would cry if I smudged the ink in my exercise book, “You need to learn to take the rough with the smooth.”

A quarter of a century on and I’m still learning.

I hope you liked this one!

Take it easy,

Ren

(PS. If you liked my crappy illustrations please let me know.)