ADHD Wins and Fails

(but let's focus on the wins)

I was blown away by the response to my two pieces on ADHD late last year. First, I was amazed by the number of people identifying with what I shared. Then I started to wonder if maybe I hadn’t just described being a human. (Like, maybe everyone is more capable of writing a 400-page novel than of scheduling an appointment with the allergist?) But of course the people who didn’t relate just weren’t jumping into the comments with as much excitement. When I did start hearing from them, it was with messages like “Wow, my brain isn’t like this at allllll, but my brother has ADHD and it’s good to know what it’s like in his head.”

At last count, seven people—all women—have told me they’ve been officially diagnosed after reading those posts. A bunch more have unofficially diagnosed themselves, and if you’re in that category I really encourage you to actually schedule a doctor’s appointment, because it could change your life.

The past few weeks for me have included some big fails and big wins in the ADHD department, so I thought I’d share them here—for relatability/commiseration if you have attention issues, and for lurid observation if you don’t.

A Chicago-specific victory flag

The Fails:

My concentration has been terrible lately. I attribute this to four things:

1. It’s winter, and blahhhhhh.

2. I’ve had to cut down on my ADHD meds. I already have the resting pulse of a crack-addled chipmunk, which is why I don’t drink caffeine. My Apple watch has sent up the racing heart alert a few times lately, so at least a few days out of the week I’m trying to handle things the old fashioned way, using just panic and shame.

3. I have a large number of small, equally important things to do. This makes prioritizing any of them hard, and when I sit down to work I end up starting and pausing ten things, rather than starting and finishing one.

4. My paperback comes out a week from yesterday (2/20), which will involve a lot of travel. (Obligatory-preorder-link-so-you-can-order-twelve-of-them-for-your-book-club-thank-you-so-much.) There’s this ADHD phenomenon that when you have an event later in the day, you can’t settle into anything else because you’re waiting for that event. I think this applies to the larger scale, too. I can concentrate in individual moments, but I can’t sink my teeth into anything big when I have to hit the road in a week. Oddly, I think I’ll be able to concentrate better on the road (and, specifically, in the air).

Wins:

A new chair!

A couple of people responded to my comments about not being able to sit normally in a desk chair by recommending this very cool “meditation” chair from Pipersong, so I ordered one.

This is not me; I do not own a white blouse because I would absolutely spill food on it.

So far it’s amazing, but it does put me up way higher than usual, and my legs don’t fit under the desk anymore—which means I’m leaning forward and down to type. I’m working on solutions to that. This is very much not a sponsored post (I save those for snack foods, of course), but I do recommend this thing, especially if you have an adjustable desk.

Big cleans

It’s a lot easier for me to spend three hours reorganizing a closet than to spend ten minutes on 18 different days putting things away in that same closet. (Similarly: I can spend all Saturday cooking one elaborate soup, but am incapable of cooking something simple every weeknight.) I’ve decided to lean into this (with audiobooks and podcasts ready) and just rotate through various areas of the house when I have a free day.

Does this involve a trip to the Container Store every time I clean a room? Maybe. I see nothing wrong with that.

The recent big win: I got actual boxes to put my purses in. (To be clear, this is not a Carrie Bradshaw closet situation—I have like ten purses, most of them very cheap, some of them 20 years old—but at least now they don’t fall on my head when I pull a sweater out from under them.)

Live shot of me looking at my shoes

Accidental Dry January

By the time I recovered from the flu, I realized I’d made it halfway into a dry January, so I decided to finish out the month. Highly recommend! I don’t know that it significantly helped my concentration (see above), but it definitely didn’t hurt.

There’s a lot of documentation that alcohol can make symptoms worse (or at least frequent drinking and hangovers exacerbate brain fog). Paradoxically, people with ADHD are quite likely to self-medicate with alcohol, perhaps because it helps quell extraneous thoughts. This can mean alcohol abuse, of course, but it can also mean the way I usually drink: A glass of wine in the evening as my attention is otherwise flagging usually puts me in a more creative and energetic mood. (So, an unhelpful thought: Would a dinnertime drink actually have helped my concentration in January?)

Regardless of the ADHD link, I’ve been sleeping better and lost a couple of pounds. So I’ll take the win.

I scheduled a residency!

For every book except my first one, I spent time at a writing residency. (Often more than one; way back, I wrote this essay about the five residencies that shaped The Great Believers.) My last residency was in 2019, and I really thought that with my kids now teenagers, I could finish a novel without that separate space and time. And surely I could, but I’ve had to admit it might take me an extra year or two. So I’ll spend three weeks at the Ragdale Foundation this fall, and I can spread all my research and timelines and notes out around me and hold the entire novel in my head at once.

The wonderfully haunted living room at Ragdale

Having three straight weeks free is of course a privilege many people can’t manage, and one I never would have been able to pull off with my first novel, when I was teaching elementary school full-time. But it’s amazing if you can do it, and if not, you can maybe do like I did during Covid and house-sit for various people so you have a dedicated space to work, even if just for a few hours at a time.

The various wallpapers of Ragdale, mostly William Morris, all of them magic

How about you?

Let’s use the chat to talk about your own concentration fails/wins/hacks/kvetches/cries for help. I really want to hear about it, and if you have one of these magic chairs I want to know how you made your desk a magic desk to make it work.