Hi, welcome to adult-diagnosed ADHD for women, where today you’ll learn that:
While scientific evidence is still emerging about how changing hormones can impact ADHD Janine feels the link was undeniable. Oestrogen helps to modulate the release of dopamine in the brain. When Janine’s level of oestrogen began to drop as she entered perimenopause, the ADHD symptoms she had been able to manage became much harder to deal with.
I was today years old when I learned that. You might not have been masking intentionally. Your ovaries were doing it for you. As their function declines, so does your dopamine supply. An incidental cruelty. Aging isn’t a punishment, it simply is, but that doesn’t make it easier.
Might explain why I recently got back into Drum & Bass. I’m rather a connoisseur of dopamine stimulation (within the boundaries of my enduring motion sickness and terror of deep water) and there’s something about playing a belting dj mix as I rocket around my empty kitchen at 5 am that helps the rest of my day run smoothly. I’ve already invoked some chaos, gleefully triggered some joy. It’s a smooth run from there.
[edit] Look, I don’t mean for this to sound like a complaint, a “I did a cool thing and no one noticed, boo hoo” entitled little sulk. I’m just baffled. I haven’t had *crickets* in ages, maybe never. So let’s stir the pot. Will someone go back and read this?
Interestingly the post had a lot of meaning for me. The next day, I tossed together a stream of consciousness poem and posted it right away, and boom, views. And you would not believe how common that is across the creator-sphere: the thing you pour your soul into gets barely a glance, and the piece of fluff you made for a laugh goes viral. Which is really justification for making as much art as you can. Who knows what will get noticed?
The Post FKA: “The Ides of March? Never Met Him. What’s He Like?’
Three years ago, I self-published my first short story.
Two years ago, I had fourteen titles on sale, was writing a few novels, and felt like I was figuring things out.
Last year, I went over the edge.
Any old edge will do. How about this one? (photo by Alan Tang on Unsplash)
Up till then it had felt like I was doing everything right. I don’t think I knew how depressed I was, which is something my mother said in reference to the same time in her life.
Taking medication was me making a sensible choice for a goddamn change. A grown up, self-disciplined decision to rein in my worrisome habits of thought and behaviour and become (what the hell was I thinking?) a productive member of society.
The results were predictably bad. You may recall that I am manifestly incapable of doing anything directly. Plans adjust themselves, reality reorganizes, and my intentions never end up aiming at my goals. I must approach all challenges and opportunities sideways: improvise, adjust, create new ways in the midst of living them. This is a very durable feature of my personality, and it affects everything I do, including taking medication to regulate my brain function. I’m sorry, but my brain function is a bratty queer with a glitter gun and the first six rows of the audience *will* *get* *wet.* Trying to rein this in leads to wildly unregulated emergent behaviour, and it was bad.
While high on legal speed, I did not buckle down and focus on my writing, which I was suddenly unable to do. Nor did I get really organized and plan my next year, down to the hour. No, in between the bouts of tremors and sobbing into the carpet, I decided to start another blog, devoted not to writing but to (honestly, what the hell was I thinking?) historical menswear.
I swear it made sense at the time. A distraction from the stress of a publishing career and encouragement to do more sewing, and if I was lucky, a back door into being known for anything at all, which somehow optimism and fairy dust would turn into a book career. It became one more task looming over me, one more chore to neglect. I needed to write books, not faff on about cravats on a blog no one would read without me promoting it like crazy.
I took the medication for a week. I quit when they wanted me to up the dosage. Once I recovered from my inadvertent meth bender, I wrote a novella in which a doctor gets punched. I’ve done plenty of drugs under my own recognizance, and if I’d paid a schemy 22-year old in a nightclub bathroom for a pill that did to me, I’d hunt the little shit down and get my money back.
The blog lasted six months.
edit: This blog? This blog I do nothing to promote, that doesn’t sell my books, that does nothing for anyone? It’s coming up on two years. 152 posts. See? It’s just like I said. Sideways or not at all.
You’re not going to believe this, but I learned a lot about writing from reading this article about, er, recording and mixing pop songs. But what does an interview with one of Beyoncé’s sound engineers have to do with writing a book about kissing?
I write genre fiction, the pop music of the literary world. And before you sneer at that, consider that romance novels make up 40% of the entire global book market. Your literary stream of consciousness debut novel is a free-rider on our sales (you’re welcome.)
Pop music has to get its point across in three minutes. Less, ideally, because if the first fifteen, twenty seconds don’t slap, no one is going to want to hear the rest. And by slap I don’t mean bombast. I mean that the opening has to suggest a big payoff is coming. A fat beat, a mad drop, some crazy vocal run that make your hair raise. The money shot, if you will. The Big Fight at the end of the action film or the last kiss at the end of the romance (where we always promise a happy ending.)
But again, what does that have to do with writing books? It’s all about Stuart White’s commitment to the first take as being the truest. Understand that this first take he’s talking about isn’t a demo. When Queen Bey walks into that sound booth, it’s already planned what’s going to happen when she starts to sing. Hours of thought and setup, years of training and experience, all come into play in creating a perfect moment, where singer and song unite at an instinctive level, the way they ideally do onstage. Everything after this first take is fine-tuning.
Similarly, by the time I write my ‘first draft’ of a book, I’m ready to deliver a great performance. Even though I call it a ‘zero’ draft (gives me permission to let it be bad) I go into writing a book with a full synopsis, and all the scenes I’ve collected since thinking of it all nicely laid out in order. With chapter headings. Ready to write. What’s missing at that stage is the feelings. And those can be planned for but not plotted. That’s what I deliver when writing a chapter from my notes, the emotions of the scene, which register in my body* while I’m writing. I don’t want to stop and figure out which character is sitting on which side of the bed in the middle of getting them into the bed. If all those bothersome details are plotted, everything else just flows.
Your results may vary, but this is my system and it’s what my high-diffusion scatter ADHD seems to like: wild ideas, usefully structured, with a flowchart of operations and a minimum of attractive nuisances i.e. side-quests my characters don’t need to go on.
What my dang brain hates is editing. The rewrite, the do-over, the second take. A rerun of the same creative form that strives, and often fails, to improve on the first instinctive attempt. And for my busy little enterprise, a massive time and/or money sinkhole.
I despise writing words that I’ll have to delete, and that’s what happens when I write without a plan. Being very (problematically) imaginative, I can take a story in any of a dozen directions if left unsupervised. My plan is therefore my supervisor, and they’re a hard-nosed bitch who I hate to disappoint. Speaking of, they’re looking meaningfully at me over the imaginary cubicle wall. Time to clock in.
*This is why I hardly ever watch tv or movies and am very selective in my reading. By the end of the day I’ve had So Many Feels that I don’t want to have any more, and certainly not most of the feelings that ‘broadcast entertainment’ wants you to feel: jealousy, confusion, revulsion, futile anger at the establishment (I have that to spare, you want some?) When my day is done, I want real people. Or sleep.
It’s taken me until this many years old to understand my brain enough to keep it focused on things it needs to do. In this time I’ve gone through countless planner systems, from hand-held Filofax style books in the 90s to Google Calendar to several writer-specific planner systems I’ve trialed in the last few years.
Setting up any such system (let’s not dance around it) fucking sucks. I’ve abandoned enough of them to have some perspective.
What falls apart for me is the transition from Planned to Achieved. Which is a fancy way to say that just because I put an event in my planner doesn’t mean I am going to follow through. I have shunted certain tasks down the line for months. Years, even. There’s no accountability if I don’t do a thing, other than I screw up my own plans. I can pass a buck indefinitely. This is a very dysfunctional situation, and I hope I’ve figured out how to amend it.
I have two planners now. Both of them paper. Emails? Notifications? I can ignore those for months. So it’s got to be paper. One book is for planning. The other book is for WRITING DOWN WHAT I ACTUALLY DID. Caps for my own need, because I am the kind of smart that needs this level of reinforcement.
The thing with having only one planner is that every time I don’t complete a vital task, I need to shove it down the line. For those who don’t have my particular form of high-twitch ADHD and are therefore good at //doing what they set out to do// lemme just say that this is not a sustainable system. I spend more time rearranging my schedule than I would spend just doing the dang work.
But like I said, I’m the dumb kind of smart. It’s taken me until now to figure this out.
Now I have two planners. One that records what I intend to do, and the other that records what I actually achieve. To-do lists aren’t enough for me. I need to keep track of my Didn’t Do’s, so I can make sure they become Done.
I’m not one of those meek, retiring kinds of ADHD. I’m of the “you wanna start some shit?” variety, with high scores for Defiance Disorder and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, meaning I’m always on the hunt for a bridge to burn. I’ve quit jobs to make sure I had the weekend off.
I also think magic is in a way very real. Not that handwavium, turn you into a frog/newt/beddable-monster movie type of magic, but the kind where you deliberately reprogram your own brain to perceive reality in a different way. Practitioners might believe they’re reprograming everyone’s reality as well, but as the only reality you have access to is the one that your brain creates inside itself, I find this a bridge too far for even me to burn (see above.) Let’s just say that the world contains more information than any brain can compute, and if you point yourself at different parts of it, your experience is often that of having created something from nothing. The opportunities were always there, you just maybe weren’t looking directly at them.
So when I see the rise in popularity of “manifesting” to reach one’s goals, I suppress my inner cynic who says it’s a bunch of neo-hippy woo. As a pantheistic pragmatist with a taste for Spinoza, why should I care how people do their magic, as long as they’re getting results? The crystals, the candles, the Burning Man vibes, the binaural beats: my only objection is aesthetic, as in I don’t like cottagecore and my high flicker rate ADHD has *issues* with delta drone.
I’d be a sorry sort of Discordian if I gave anyone lip over how they conducted their spiritual business. Heck, I routinely beg my deity NOT to intervene: “lemme have this one, ‘kay? You can do what you want with me after.”
This never works, by the way. What we want and what The Universe wants often has nothing to do with each other. I find myself infested with its merciless directives, seething with manifestation, which in my case takes the form of my favourite characters from my books taking up permanent residence in my head. I can’t complain, because (ahem) I get results. Their energy, their imaginary love for me sustains me as if they were real people standing beside me, even when I’m at my worst. They both are and are not real. What matters is that it works.
So I will gleefully cling to my belief that no sane person holding a quartz while they meditate seriously thinks the rock is doing anything other than being something to pay attention to. That’s all magick is. Paying attention like never before. Paying so much attention to some stupid shiny rock in your hand, glowing in the flicker of beeswax candles, that you don’t notice everything you’ve ever wanted sneaking up behind you, waiting for you to properly open your eyes.
(who wish they were maybe just a bit more inhibited now and then because really, saying yes to everything is sometimes a bad idea)
Part Two of our ongoing series of semi-sarcastic but functional drink choices for people who are trying to reframe their relationship with alcohol, caffeine, and all the other complicated molecules that so radically affect how we think and act.
The low- or zero alcohol drink that tastes like booze that you drink when you’re already drunk and want to keep drunkening further but know you cannot, for your health and manners. Best served fizzy.
The Cold Front
Whatever medication you say you’re taking so your pushy relatives stop asking you why you aren’t drinking at Christmas. Please pretend to consume responsibly by faking a minor ailment that won’t lead to a ton of questions.
(All recipes by The Fixer, some fairly insignificant rights reserved)
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