Tag: ADHD

Neurodiversity in Queer Romance: the anthology

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Let’s start the year with something exciting! Well, I find it exciting, but it’s rare to be asked to write a story where a character’s neurodiversity makes a difference. 🏳️‍🌈

The Neurodivergence in Queer Romance BookFunnel Promotion aims to increase accurate, authentic, compassionate, and respectful representation of the vast and varied neurodivergent experience.

Discover brand new novellas celebrating neurodivergence in queer romance, now available for free! All stories are by a queer neurodivergent author and feature various neurodiverse and queer representation. These are only available to download until January 31.

There’s something for everyone — authors you know and love, authors sharing their debuts, stories from many subgenres, and a range of angst and spice levels.

My book ‘The Worst Boss in the World’ is an enemies-to-employee-to-lovers romance about a strangely compassionate supervillain and the desperate, dangerous man he can’t resist.

Despised by his criminal family, rejected by the law-abiding, Leo Blofeld needs a break. Like a job as a wealthy supervillain’s personal assistant. Not just for the paycheck but for the chance to get his hands on Desmond Desolate’s assets, his wealth, his obliviousness. Just what Leo needs to show up his arrogant family while he puts his plans for vengeance into action.

New to the villainy game, Desmond didn’t realize when he hired an assistant that he was getting a nervy, angry, savage little narcissist with a hunger for submission and an overpowered vendetta. A hatred based on nothing, at least from Desmond’s point of view.

Someone broke Leo, made him hate the world. Made him distrust everyone. Even himself. Something’s making Desmond want to patch him back together.

🏳️‍🌈 Learn more about each book at https://tinyurl.com/ndiqr-info

🏳️‍🌈 Download all of January’s books at https://books.bookfunnel.com/neurodivergenceinqueerromance/f1vshns6ec

And look for another announcement in February for even more original books in Part 2 of this amazing event.

End Times

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

when I reach

one hundred poems

will I stop?

burn them

on a stony beach

in midnight solitude

or shall I carve them in my skin

to walk through the streets

bleeding my truth?

one hundred thoughts too strong

for conversation

we hide in poetry

its sense of song

protecting us from our uncertainties

our unformed faith

eulogies for our forgotten hope

we let these words convince us

that we have done all we can do

this line

these lines

the limit

of belief

——-

My sixth post of the year and might be my last ever on this blog. I don’t have the time, motivation, or audience to make it worth keeping up, and an abandoned blog seems worse than one that ceases to exist. This won’t be the first site I’ve deleted. This is my content and I don’t want it laying around, training AI without me granting permission.

WordPress is a very good backbone for websites and not much of a vibe otherwise. The whole Meta suite is an exhausting grind (even Threads, which I loved for six months.) X is a toxic wasteland, the other platforms (Bluesky, Mastodon) too convoluted. Social media in general is not the paradise we deserve.

Maybe I’ll open a MySpace account…

This Explains Everything

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, I’d like to make you aware that I have autism.

Just a little. What we used to call Asperger’s Syndrome but don’t anymore because Asperger was a nasty little fascist and his aim was to determine which autistic people were socially valuable and which were, you know, expendable.

So fuck that. Thanks to a host of diagnostic tools* I am now confident in saying I have autism.

The kind where you can still have relationships and conversations but it comes at a high cost, demanding more of your cognitive capacity than neurotypical people expend on the same activities. The kind you figure out you have when you’re in your forties and are worn out from decades of trying to do what everyone else does, and failing. The kind that seems really trendy now, as if it’s a fun way to cook eggs or tie your shoes that we learned in a TikTok. What’s really happened is that the criteria for autism has been revised, and now represents a broader and more accurate picture of how it presents.

I don’t want to say ‘syndrome’ or ‘disorder’. That sort of language is itself part of the problem. I am not a bad or broken person, not incapable and in need of repair. I am simply differently endowed, and for the most part lacking context in society, which tends to flatten difference in the name of general harmony.

Ant the truth is, the real truth, the reason I’m writing this blog, is not because I feel a deep-seated need to reach out to you, this small group of strangers who will read these words, but because I put the word ‘blogger’ in my fucking author bio, and it’s been so long since I posted that it feels like a lie.

————-

*please do not come at me re self-diagnosis, the available tools are the same as what they use in clinics.

Course Correction

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

To give oneself in service

Seems a holy act to me

Words are mere escaping breath

It’s deeds that must define you

And in my unreflected state

I mistook deeds for love

You can’t fake your way through

This tidal wave of mishandled years

As it crashes on the shore of memory

Obliterating all those fragile structures

Built by the ego from the detritus of time

Those scaffolded shadows dragged from

Cold and bitter caves where we once dwelled

Look! Look! The water rises faster

Is this an ending or beginning?

Child, there never were such things

The sum of our endeavours

This human wrack and thunder

A single dancing mote upon the beam

(23/12/2023)

Poetry is concealed truth. Poems are true, but they are best when that truth sidles into your understanding without you needing to directly perceive it. When they leave feelings and questions that linger in your mind and in whatever it is we call a soul. Writing poetry has helped me say things about myself that I don’t know how to say, which is why I rarely give context for my poetry. A good poem tells its own story, but sometimes we must defy convention.

After laughing way too hard at too many autism memes, I did a self-assessment.

Well shit….

This hit so much harder than finding out I have ADHD (and before you call me out for self-diagnosis, know that this is a questionnaire that clinicians use.) I haven’t felt grief like this in decades, as if someone died. That someone is the old me.

I am shaking as I write this. My understanding of myself has been radically altered. That’s why all my books are full of desperate, rootless young men dying to be seen, be accepted, be useful. Human behavior has always been opaque to me. I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what people think of me. If I can be of service to them, they’ll want to keep me around.

As a consequence I am superb at masking. At shielding myself behind a radical aesthetic that is itself a hyper-fixation, giving the world a curated version of myself. My aesthetic is a form of service, for one of my aims is to be the most interesting thing someone sees that day. But I’m not fully out to everyone close to me, so I am always consciously performing. Why not come out? Because honesty is terrifying.

I need to know that I can be wholly myself with the people I trust. To know this, I have to trust that when I show up as myself they will accept me as I am. To find safety I have to plunge into the abyss. Again.

But I’m tired. Tired of not saying these things, tired of faking it. Sometimes no matter how hard you fake it, you never will make it. But maybe you’re trying to make the wrong thing. Maybe you can just be yourself.

I’ve been with my spouse for almost three decades and I’m still convinced he’s going to decide one day that I’m too damn much for him and leave me. Like, calm down. But expressing this to him seems physically impossible. When I’m emotional, I can’t speak. I can write (I say as I’m crying into my keyboard) which sort of makes sense because speech and writing are controlled by different parts of the brain. Autism impacts the speech centre.  If I want to say difficult things to my husband, I have to write them down and read them off a script.

So be it. If that’s what it takes. There’s no shame in it. We make life more difficult than it needs to be. If you think life is unkind, start being kinder to yourself. If you keep falling short of your target, move the target closer. If you don’t know what to do, try writing a poem.

Try. You are stardust. You have galaxies of time embedded in your every cell, meteorites in your veins. Become what you are. You are infinite.

Crunch Time

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I owe the world a novel in 70 days.

I see no reason why this can’t be done.

Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.

Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.

And yet…

On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.

Baby…I don’t do speed.

I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.

So…fuck you.

Fuck this.

Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.

There is no right way to do life.

I’m trouble, but it’s the good kind.

Line Poem 7

abstract painting: a figurative image of three silhouettes of faces overlaid in shades of blue and white. From the main figure's head, swirling circles of light and shadow suggest otherworldly yet shapeless imaginings.
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

punished

by

data

and

I

want

to

ask

why

but

no

one

will

ever

answer

the

phone

chop

the

wood

boil

the

water

return

return

return

return

remake

rejuvenate

restore

your

native

hope

your

soil-grown

wantings

your

endeavours

reach

down

and

know

your

self

(2023)

What am I doing with these line poems? They say so little, tell so much, but I believe there’s a balance between poetry that is born of long thought, and that which tears through us, that grasps a mere tenth of our feeling yet makes it manifest in a form that others can see.

I want to work harder. I want to burn. I want to push and push and push until I reach a lie, then push beyond. I want you to break when you read them. I want you to be reborn.

Just Eat the Cookie

A chocolate chip cookie with one bite missing sits on a white tabletop scattered with cookie crumbs. Although maybe those aren't chocolate chips but raisins. This is why I have trust issues.
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always thought of myself as unable to resist temptation.  As being too desperate for dopamine to not eat the cookie, not buy the gift.  I always eat the cookie. But I don’t always buy the gift.  

And I realized my problem isn’t with reward systems, it’s with gamifying food.  

Consumer capitalism has a terrible relationship with food.  It’s used as lure, camouflage, dumping ground, flag to wave, and whip to beat ourselves with.  It’s a popular brand of mayonnaise declaring over a 90s grunge pastiche soundtrack that it “will not tone it down.”  It’s a food that has never once in its existence contained fat declaring in block letters on the label that it’s “fat-free.”  It’s thinking almond milk is virtuous without considering the operations of the almond farming industry (not pretty, if you ask a bee in California.)  

Dieticians and specialists in early childhood will both tell you that using food to reward or punish children makes food a battleground and plants in them the seeds of lifelong eating disorders. So why would I do that to myself? If I eat a cookie, it’s not because I have “allowed” myself a “reward” of a “bad” food that I would ordinarily resist.  It’s because I wanted a cookie, and I happened to have some.  I might treat myself to a more expensive meal for a special occasion, but I don’t like tying food to performance benchmarks.  I’m not a seal, bopping a ball with my nose to get a fish. I’m a person with an oven and a working knowledge of baked goods, and sometimes having a cookie is the only thing that makes me want to do my job. Let snacks be snacks, I say.

Gifts, though…I resisted building a Lego set for almost a week until I’d hit a word count goal.  The unopened box sat on my desk for days, taunting me a little, but more inviting me to reach my goal.

I now have this nice reminder on my desk that I can get what I want if I stick to it.  That cookie, or cake, or 700 calorie whipped cream and coffee thing? Long gone.

But don’t let me stop or shame you.  Everyone is wired differently. I don’t want to attach moral significance to snacks.  Excuse me, I’m going to go eat a cookie. 

Pearls

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I stock up on dopamine* in the mornings by dancing, sometimes singing to my favorite songs.  These range from So Whatcha Want by The Beastie Boys to the opening of the 2013 Tony Awards as sung by Neil Patrick Harris (thanks, internet, for all your flaws, for bringing me this ode to excess.)

Being a stage performer, particularly in musical theatre where you might have to be singing, dancing, and acting all at the same time, is tremendously hard work.  It is physically demanding, often debilitating.  Lots of musicians bring the same energy to the concert stage, not just in rock but across the board (it’s Britney, bitch.) 

It’s not just the dopamine I’m chasing but the calorie burn.  So I’m not ashamed to say I had to bail out about two minutes into the Talking Heads’ performance of the song Life During Wartime in the seminal concert film Stop Making Sense. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVHNwBbkSj4

IDK what David Byrne was eating those days (looks like nothing) but he never stops moving and neither do the rest of the band.  If you don’t regularly exercise, you’d never keep up, because they are beasts.  MF, they are playing their instruments while running in place and has Gen Z seen this shit yet?  This is a TikTok challenge waiting to happen, amirite?

So I thought, what a great candidate for a stupid goal. To be able to do David Byrne’s bit in Life During Wartime.

Get delusional, isn’t that what the kids say?  This is a theme for me right now, after a post I made about impossible goals to a lively group of professional writers blew up, getting a few hundred comments from writers at every stage of their career.   Why not carry this energy into everything I do?

I need delusional goals.  Ordinary ones don’t seem to motivate me.  So why not try something ridiculous?  Absurd and not wholly useful except that it spurs me to be more active.  A chance to score a symbolic victory over my human tendencies—taking the easy way out, hoarding calories in case of famine, anxiety about my appearance and social rank.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

We have so little time on earth, and there’s so much that we might do that we’ll never have the time to even read about in someone else’s words.  We’re dying the minute we’re born and I think if more people understood that we might as individuals and as a civilization use our time better.

I’m old enough to feel this in my bones.  They say youth is wasted on the young because it’s only the accumulation of years that make you understand time at the cellular level.  There is no solution to death.  I don’t know that I’d choose eternal life even if it was offered.  All we have is today, this hour, this second, this heartbeat, this blink of the cosmic eye, our every breath one more pearl strung on a thread that grows shorter and shorter.

Do it now.  The thing you always wanted.  Do it now because there is only now.  Only this moment, this breath.  This.

Photo by Alex Turcu on Unsplash

Disorderly Conduct

scrabble letters arranged on a plain white surface to spell the words "life will not wait"
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I told WordPress to notify me twice a week that it was time to post something.  I began immediately to resent this, and have ignored several notifications.  This is me all over. It doesn’t matter if an event is in a calendar, on a chart, in my phone, in an email.  As soon as I’m told to do something I’m not already happily doing, my RSD and defiance disorder go on high alert and I start deliberately, some might say belligerently, ignoring the notifications.

Which is why I have yet to discover an author business planning system that sticks.  No matter how carefully I craft my quarterly plan, my weekly schedule, I just don’t do the dang work.  I’m so good at ignoring important things that I started asking myself if I have Asperger’s.  I so often refuse to do what’s best, even when it’s obviously what’s needed and would be really easy to do, though I genuinely do like myself, in a compassionate, c’mere you dumb-ass kinda way.

I think and think and think and in truth I probably just spend too much time alone.  I can overthink anything, which can be good when you’re doing big vision work, and much less helpful when you’re trying to pick a task and stick with it until you can call it done. 

Because I have so many things to do, it’s a struggle to prioritize.  Everything feels like a priority, and I don’t want to spend all my time planning, but I’m not achieving much with the time I have so maybe what I really need is to get the heck over myself, sit down and do the work *I know* needs to get done, and let the rest fall into place.

The place where I get all of it right is just over the horizon. I have a flat tire and I’m fucking hungry, but if I can get this wheel back on, I can start rolling again and get to where I want to be.

Do you use a planner? Google calendar or similar? What works for you?

The New Kid

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Schools I have attended:

Nursery school

Montessori preschool

Komoka PS

Montessori grade school

East Elementary

St Nicholas Catholic (lies, lies, I’m not even baptised)

St Matthews Anglican (more lies, mom?  ok…)

Riverside PS

Oakridge HS

some defunct Niagara District school for the arts for a single semester that felt like an episode of Degrassi Junior High, complete with cliques, fake IDs, sororities, achingly cool transfer students, and dating a boy who was testing if he was gay (spoiler: he was)

Oakridge HS again

flunked out

Beal HS

dropped out again

That one summer school English credit I needed to finally graduate

The funny thing is…I went to my high school graduation (Oakridge #2.)  I don’t know if the system is it’s the same now, but grad was held before exams.  So it was totally possible to go to the ceremony, get your fake diploma on stage, then go to the prom (if that was your thing,) and then fail.

The funny thing is…of all my classes, I hated English the most.  Taking six weeks to read a book?  Uggggghhhhh.  “Academic” level classes were even more plodding.  As a child I was such a reader I devised a way to read while getting dressed for school that involved holding the book open with my toes.  In high school, my highest mark in English was a 72.

In a perfect world* this should have been when someone asked if I had ADHD.  But this was (oh god I’m old) 30 years ago, when it was still called ADD, and all it meant was a boy who couldn’t sit still. 

I was merely inattentive, a dreamer, not applying myself.  Unable to focus on the tasks at hand because the tasks were cripplingly dull.  So I just didn’t do them, or did them lazily at the last minute, then shrugged when the teacher asked why. 

Oh, the shrug.  The blankness.  The weaponized indifference of a clever teen with a revolutionary’s heart.  The number of times I met my mother’s concern, her anger even, with a shrug.

Dissociation’s a hell of a drug.

Like this post: I started with the list of schools but I don’t remember what I wanted to say.  Maybe nothing, other than remind myself that my path has never been smooth.  There are no straight lines in my landscape, only curves and slopes and tunnels, backways and side-ways and unexpected turns.  I’d like to end on an optimistic note, but maybe the hope is simply in knowing this, knowing that I can’t get there from here without going this way and that and a few other places.  In this game, the side-quests are mandatory.

*Assuming your perfect world includes compulsory education.  Mine includes dragons.  What, you said perfect, didn’t you?