This column is part of Work Week, a series of essays related to work and career. Stay tuned for more this week, and see our Work section for past essays.

I returned last week from a fun, mostly idyllic week on Martha’s Vineyard, the Cape Cod island where I spent my childhood summers, on my first solo trip with my 1-year-old. Every day, we were on the go from the time she woke up around 6:30 until she went to bed, with small breaks for naps, a huge change from our mostly domestic life at home, where we generally embark on only one major outing a day.

I was so busy planning visits with family and to an alpaca farm and museum and farmers market and fair and library story time that by the end of the day, after she went right to sleep in her bassinet, I was inclined to veg out too. I didn’t open my laptop for six days, save for a friendly Zoom call, and only did on the night before we left to frantically edit an essay I had hoped to post two days prior.

During the day, I was in vacation mode, adjusting as we went to the reality of a new environment with a baby who didn’t exactly understand where we were or what was happening. I made peace with the fact that the groceries my cousin had bought for me would be given back to her. I’d fully intended to cook for my daughter the way I do at home, but she was extra clingy, making it hard to separate long enough to sauté tofu or chicken.

Instead, we got takeout, which we ate for leftovers, which gave me the chance to marvel over her happily gobbling down Lebanese baba ghanoush from Catboat Coffee Co. at 7:30 in the morning or enjoying peach pancakes while waving at a fellow toddler at the diner table next to us.

I was so busy strategizing about when she’d need a nap and keeping her from getting too much sun and how to squeeze in all the activities I wanted to do that I didn’t have much time to consciously worry about my Open Secrets inbox piling up or the essays I’d hoped to write during the trip.

But at night, after she went to bed, it was a different story. In the evenings, I hung out with my childhood best friend and her daughter, doing puzzles, playing the card game Spit, impressed that I could beat a quick-handed 10-year-old, and learning the game Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, which is too complicated to explain here but is worth trying if you like kid-friendly card games. I was absorbed in what we were doing…except for the part of me that wasn’t.

Thanks to ADHD, lurking in the very back of my mind was the idea that I shouldn’t let a whole day go without doing at least some work. I felt this way even though I’d planned for this vacation for months, it was August, when many people take vacations, and Open Secrets is my own creation, one I’m entirely in charge of.

I strive to publish a new essay every Monday, but despite that niggling feeling of guilt telling me I needed to edit that week’s essay to get it ready in time, I couldn’t bring myself to splay my MacBook Air across my lap and actually get to work. The idea seemed too daunting, too antithetical to the vibe I was trying to go for—sunny, breezy, fun. Every day of the trip, I told myself, Tonight will be the night, and every night, instead I pulled out a novel ironically titled Log Off, a nostalgic and entertaining coming-of-age story by written as Y2K Livejournal posts, inspired by hearing her on the podcast It’s a Lot by (parents of young kids, I highly recommend the pod!).

My inner monologue with my ADHD went something like this:

I’m tired. I’m on vacation. Don’t I deserve time to just have fun?

But you’ve been having fun all day. Now it’s time to get to work. Or maybe you don’t really care about Open Secrets or your writing career?

I do! I just can’t handle any more input or being “on.” I want my brain to log off.

Ha ha ha. That’s hilarious. Your brain doesn’t have that setting.

Even here, just for a week?

You’re still you, silly. Wherever you go, there you are—and so am I.

Fine, fine. Let me just read another few pages.

It’s your funeral. The more you skimp out on it, the more guilty I’m going to make you feel.

Don’t you know that rest is essential for the creative process?

Does that mean you’re actually going to get up at 5 before the baby wakes up and edit?

I’ll try.

And you think that’s good enough? If you were a real editor and writer, you wouldn’t be procrastinating like this.

We went through many rounds of this until I finally dozed off, my sleep more fitful as the trip went on. I thought about all the other vacations where I’d dragged work with me, watching adult films in Thailand in order to review them, cutting short a lovely long weekend with my boyfriend early in our relationship to rush to respond to an editor. I can’t actually remember a vacation from the last 20 years where I didn’t go into it with some kind of agenda items I hoped and/or planned to do.

Let me be clear: There’s nothing wrong with using travel and a different setting to fuel your creativity. I love when a change of scenery has me bursting out of bed, eager to scribble down a new idea that’s popped into my head, one that feels summoned from the air around me. I welcome the way stepping out of my comfort zone and the steadiness of everyday life so often sparks words I wouldn’t have conjured in that exact order if I hadn’t been in this specific place at this specific time. I’ve often thought that the act of traveling, whether by car or train or plane, jostles my mind in such a way as to shake loose sentences that have been waiting for just that kind of adventure.

But I resent having the kind of brain that insists that any vacation time should be tempered with work in order to “deserve” it. I always think that the next vacation will be the one where I’m somehow magically caught up on every single task so that I can be truly off the clock. (Yes, I hear every artist reading this laughing at the notion of every being fully “caught up.”)

That’s just not realistic for the kind of work I do as an editor here or as a freelance writer—and it’s also a dishonest dream, because I like knowing that there’s work awaiting me. It makes me feel needed and useful, something I crave, especially now that Open Secrets is my main creative project (aside from being a mom). I would just prefer the work to feel less urgent, something that I could do if I wind up with spare time, idling at a coffee shop or rising naturally with the sun, not work I feel breathing angrily down my neck.

I know that plenty of people are able to compartmentalize, to separate business from pleasure so they can fully indulge in vacation bliss, and get back to work feeling refreshed. I’m just not sure if I’m capable of doing the same, or if that’s even a desirable goal for me.

The biggest struggles I face with being fully “off” are that I know when I return, my workload will only be even bigger than it was pre-vacation, so if I was already anxious before about not having completed what I wanted to, I know that feeling will be amplified when I return.

The other reason is that I’m not stuck at a dead-end job I hate, the kind I need a vacation from. I don’t even consider Open Secrets a “job” in the traditional sense, partly because it’s yet to break even financially, and partly because I see it more as a passion project, my brainchild that I can morph and mold and experiment with. If I didn’t like editing it, I would close up shop. But I do, which is why I decided to expand our offerings starting this fall.

Because I like this self-created job, though, it’s hard to differentiate where I start and it ends, which is also the case for freelance writing, where I’m usually using my personal life as fodder. How can you separate the work of creating art from simply being human when the latter fuels the former?

Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to answer that. I think it’s one of those questions I’ll be grappling with for the rest of my days. As I ponder future trips, I’m trying to figure out how I can schedule my work ahead of time, or delegate it, so that I can take a mental vacation along with my physical one. If I can mange that, I’ll be leaving space for those artistic brainstorms that feel like they give me energy, rather than drain my limited amount of it.

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Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New Jersey-based writer, editor-in-chief of Open Secrets, and host of personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live. Her essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, TODAY.com, The Village Voice, and numerous other publications. She focuses on books, culture, feminism, motherhood, mental health, relationships, personal finance, belonging, and belongings. She hosts the podcast Finders and Keepers, about our attachments to our possessions, and is working on an anthology on the same topic. Follow her on Instagram @rachelkramerbussel and subscribe to her personal Substack. Follow her @rachelkramerbussel on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

In May, I came home from personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live feeling incredible. One thought kept going through my head: “If I could pull that off, I can do anything.” I was on a blissful creative accomplishment cloud, knowing I’d successfully run an entire daylong event, the biggest one I’d ever organized (with the help of my amazing assistant event producer Farah Faye!) featuring forty speakers that had not only sold out but had an unmistakable creative energy buzzing throughout the space.

Yes, I’d made a few mistakes along the way (my apologies for issues anyone had with finding the address on Eventbrite; now I know how to make that more prominent), but those were ones I could learn from next time, like getting a confirmation about each book title being stocked and having each speaker reply in the affirmative about the time of their panel.

I saw those errors as natural growing pains amidst a day that I knew had reverberated not just with me but with many attendees. The majority of the people I heard from afterward said Open Secrets Live had inspired them to write, which is the biggest compliment I could have received as the organizer.

But a not-so-funny thing happened in the weeks following the event; that success high soon morphed into much darker thoughts. I struggled with completing small tasks, like sending photos from the photographers to speakers and to someone who’d offered to help me promote it to the press. I still, almost three months later, haven’t inserted the drive with the audio files into my computer to get them podcast ready.

I felt zapped of both creative energy and sufficient executive function to perform basic but boring tasks, like posting about new essays on Instagram, or writing a proper roundup of the event. The momentum I’d built up heading into Open Secrets Live had seemingly disappeared, leaving emptiness in its wake. As ADHD coach wrote recently in The Dopamine Dispatch, “This is the ADHD paradox: infinite creative potential trapped inside a nervous system that treats basic administrative tasks like mortal threats.”

With that drop in mojo came thoughts I had assumed I was old enough to have outgrown, ones like, That was just a fluke. You got lucky, and, more alarmingly, If you can’t even send a simple email, what makes you think you can write a new essay, let alone organize another event? and Your best creative days are behind you. Those all too quickly became Maybe you should just shut down Open Secrets and quit writing and editing altogether. You’ve done what you set out to do; now it’s time to throw in the towel. You’ll never be able to top that event, so why bother trying?

I was also dealing with my baby starting to crawl, which, as I’d been told to expect, happened seemingly overnight, even though she’d been building toward that milestone for weeks. All of a sudden, she needed much more of my attention, which, coupled with these dark thoughts, made me marvel at the fact that I’d even run the summit at all. The idea of trying to do it again next year seemed laughable.

I’m still puzzling out the starkness of the contrast between that swell of pride, a rarity for me, with the deep descent into feeling like a failure. I’m used to the two extremes coexisting in my mind, but where ADHD is most sneaky is that it tells me that the failure side is the only one that matters, and that once I’ve fallen prey to its grasp, I won’t be able to wrangle my way out.

It’s a tricky thing to talk about, because if anyone were to try to counter my ADHD’s vindictiveness with a rebuttal about why my work matters, my ADHD always has a handy answer. Instead of improv’s “Yes, and,” my ADHD has a “Yes, but” at the ready. It’s not that I have complete impostor syndrome or think I’ll never be capable of writing something I deem worthy again, or organizing another event, or launching the podcast I’ve been working on all year.

It’s that I don’t foresee myself being able to do them any time in the near future, and the farther out that future capable me seems, the hazier and more abstract she becomes. If I don’t envision myself being able to make major progress or complete a task in the next month or two, it starts to feel imaginary, if not impossible. There’s an immediate gratification element of my ADHD that won’t allow me to pace things out, that sees incremental progress as no progress at all.

That’s what makes it hard for me to select one item from my to-do list and finish it to completion (like, um, this column, which I skipped in May and June); that one item always feels like a drop in the bucket, so miniscule and unimportant when compared to all the other things on my list that I can easily push it aside.

There’s also no reverse mechanism whereby failures start to fade away and I can envision success, or at least progress. It doesn’t seem to work that way for me and before you ask, I’m sure that there will be comments saying, You know you’re not a failure, and I appreciate every single one. Trust me, the feedback I get is deeply heartening, but the biggest problem with my ADHD is that it overrides every bit of external validation and it tells me, I know better than all of them. They might just see one outward manifestation of success but they don’t see all the behind the scenes things you haven’t done or problems along the way or post-event procrastination or the list you have that keeps being added to but nothing’s being subtracted from.

ADHD tells me that if I’m not constantly producing the same or greater output as I have at my most prolific, whether in writing or event planning or editing or earnings, then I’m not living up to my potential, and therefore should give up. I think sometimes there’s such a thrill of succeeding that my mind immediately wants to know, If you could succeed here, how come you can’t succeed here and here and here and here too? It’s like the metric of success keeps getting raised higher and higher, to the point where I spend so much time worrying about whether I can ever again graze the top of the ladder that I don’t take a single step up its rungs.

I forget that I’m trying to accomplish things in different arenas and just because you can do one thing well doesn’t mean you can do another thing well (and just because you can do one thing well one time doesn’t mean you can keep doing it, as I imagine every writer understands).

Actual failure feels devastating, of course, but sometimes it’s also comforting because when you fail or when you’re at the bottom or when you’re striving for something, the only place you can go is up. Any little win feels like a big win because you’re starting from a low point, but when you’re starting from a higher point, it can feel like unless you’re rising to that challenge again, you’re failing by default.

I think some of the fault lies with me falling for the allure of hustle culture, which certainly permeates Substack and anywhere people are showing off their achievements. I think it’s a perfectly normal human activity to compare ourselves to others, and sometimes it can help us strive for success in productive ways, but sometimes it can make us feel like, again (the theme of this essay), why bother trying? Yes, this is my way of saying that I’m happy for everyone ranked in various categories here on Substack, but also feel a pang of envy that Open Secrets isn’t on those lists.

As a freelancer, as a solo businessperson, it’s hard for me to figure out what “success” entails anyway because I don’t have the same benchmarks as I would at a formal company where there’s job titles and official reviews. I could give myself a review but my reviews will never feel real, because I’m always moving the goalposts on myself.

I never learned how to celebrate a success and then make a realistic future goal or reassess whether the goals even still make sense, so of course when I had that crash and was also dealing with a lot of personal demands on my time, I felt all I could see was, You succeeded and then you failed.

If I had one big success and then a month or two of fallowness, we could say those even each other out, but in my head they don’t; instead, it’s a net negative. That’s really what kills me about ADHD, because it’s very hard to create or brainstorm when I feel like that. Yes, I said earlier that it can be easy when you’re starting from the bottom, but I meant when you’ve never had success but have only dreamt of it. When you’ve had a taste of what you feel like success is, then it doesn’t feel like you’re starting from the bottom; it feels like you were near the top and then you plummeted and then that just feels so bad. If you could do it once why couldn’t you do it again; what’s wrong with you?

I’ve spent the past few months trying to claw my way out of that mindset, to remind myself that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that I just have to keep moving forward, even if that’s in the smallest of ways, even if it’s writing a few hundred words that may or may not ever be seen by anyone else, for the dopamine hit of having typed them out, rather than letting them sink deeper and deeper into the couch cushions of my brain, getting so comfortable there they never want to leave.

Where I’m at now is I’m trying to figure out first of all, where does work even fit into my life as a full-time mom. I wasn’t a mom at all when I started Open Secrets, and though I was when I started planting the seeds of Open Secrets Live last fall, I was a mom to a very small baby who didn’t require as much attention and planning and focus.

Now my life is very different, but ADHD doesn’t care. ADHD doesn’t factor in all the caregiving I do from the moment I wake up until a few hours before I go to sleep. ADHD just says, Let’s tally up what you did and what you didn’t do, and let’s highlight the latter in fluorescent yellow and permanently pin it to your mind so you have to see it even when you close your eyes for a few moments of peace. Why haven’t you sent out the photos that you paid for to the people in them? Why haven’t you gotten the audio posted? Why haven’t you actually launched your podcast you were so excited about yet? These are questions I’ve been asking myself on a daily basis for months, and they’re deeply draining. And if it’s not those specific questions, there are plenty more “Why haven’t you?”s waiting for me.

This column feels pretty depressing and that’s not the note I want to end on. It’s too dark, and the things I say to myself are definitely not things that I would say to anyone else, but because I’m sure that other people go through this same cycle where the high of a success can actually feel bad if you don’t stay at that level of momentum, I wanted to share this to hopefully make other people feel less alone.

I also wanted to help myself reset to not looking at my output in such a hierarchical way. The binary of success vs. failure is actually not so clearcut, when of course embedded in most successes I’ve had are mini failures or mistakes, and, likewise, embedded in failures are important lessons. writes in You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing & Creativity, a book I highly recommend to any writer, “Finding the silver lining is essential as a creative person.” One thing I loved in particular about the book is that he’s very upfront about the dips in his writing career, the times when the market for what he was producing wasn’t there, despite all the dedicated work he’d put in. It’s very easy to only highlight the outward markers of success, to make our creative lives look like they’re always sparkling, words as dazzling and synchronized as the Rockettes, with nary a stray kick or fallen sequin. Celebrating victories is important, but so is being honest about the opposite.

So finding that silver lining, and keeping going even when it’s very hard to detect even a sliver of silver, is what I’m trying to do. My conclusion, if I have one, has been that I don’t owe anyone, including past, over-ambitious me, anything, especially when it comes to my hopes and dreams for my creative life. It’s okay to have huge plans and later realize you don’t have the mental or physical energy to complete them, or that your dreams have shifted, or that you’re not sure what your plans and dreams are right now, but that you know you still long to be someone who has them. I don’t want to saddle myself with what feels like busywork that overtakes the part of creativity I actually love, so that may mean some things I’d formerly classified as “must-dos” fall to the wayside.

What I’m focusing on now is the creative work that lights me up, and frankly, that’s not all the administrative logistics, especially the things that feel stressful to me. Why it’s stressful for me to plug in a file and grab the audio and send it to my audio engineer with a one-minute intro, I’m not really sure, but it feels immediately daunting and makes me shut down just thinking about it. Maybe I’ll outsource some of those tasks, or maybe I’ll find ways to tackle them that don’t feel so overwhelming. Maybe they’ll just sit in my desk forever. Giving myself permission to adapt to my current capabilities is the only way I can move forward.

I’m not saying we should only do the things that feel easy to us, but with my ADHD, I need to complete something that feels like a win (hi, dopamine!) before I can get into the weeds of the harder things because that’s just how my brain works. It’s easy to say, Well, why don’t you make your brain work another way? I say that to myself all the time, or I say, Look at those people, they’re doing this, that, and that; you should be able to also, whether that’s churning out every essay idea I have the same day it lands in my head, or waking up at five a.m. to get a head start on the day.

I was reading a novel recently and came across this quote by actress and poet Blanche Balain (often attributed to Albert Camus, who quoted it in his journals). It was one of those reading experiences that made me pause, reread, then reread it again, grateful that someone born decades before me could speak to what I’m feeling right now in 2025:

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely trying to be normal.” Blanche Balain

What definitely doesn’t help me is berating myself for what I’m feeling, piling guilt and shame so high I feel stuck before I’ve even opened a blank page. Instead, I’m doing my best to acknowledge when tasks are hard, and either push through, or create something else instead, rather than simply fixate endlessly on the tasks that are, in most cases, only “urgent” to me. I’m trying to value the times when I have ideas and I work toward and through and sometimes around them, when I sit at the computer and get to an end (never “the end” because there’s hopefully always more to say) and grapple with them even if I don’t resolve them. Like now.

p.s. Because I’m ultimately more of an optimist than a pessimist, I wanted to add that, despite that vicious voice in my head that I quoted above, Open Secrets is here to stay. In fact, we’re expanding our publishing schedule. Stay tuned for our next call for essay submissions coming soon.

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Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New Jersey-based writer, editor-in-chief of Open Secrets, and host of personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live. Her essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, TODAY.com, The Village Voice, and numerous other publications. She focuses on books, culture, feminism, motherhood, mental health, relationships, personal finance, belonging, and belongings. She hosts the podcast Finders and Keepers, about our attachments to our possessions, and is working on an anthology on the same topic. Follow her on Instagram @rachelkramerbussel and subscribe to her personal Substack. Follow her @rachelkramerbussel on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Before I get to the column, here’s a final reminder that last-minute tickets to our debut event, NYC personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live, are still available! If you’re seeing it as sold out but really want to attend, email us at opensecretsmag at gmail.com and if any tickets are available I’ll make sure you get one.

Not to brag, but I’m an expert procrastinator. I have plenty of experience, going back to writing my college applications in the middle of the night, my baby blanket draped over my halogen lamp so my mom wouldn’t see.

You’d think that at 49, I might have learned a thing or two about why procrastination isn’t worth it, but I haven’t. I thought it was just my personal flaw, a failing that would plague me forever, and while it may indeed follow me throughout my life, I’ve since learned that procrastination and ADHD are tied together.

According to the magazine ADDitude:

You procrastinate because you’re unable to effectively regulate your own emotions — a trademark symptom of ADHD.

In the past few months, I’ve procrastinated on a lot of tasks, big and small. Sometimes I tell myself that I need to wait for inspiration “to strike,” which the above-linked article also points to as an ADHD trait. Other times, I swear to myself that tomorrow will be the day I finally tackle whatever it is I’ve been avoiding.

But once I’ve allowed myself to procrastinate once, it’s very, very easy for me to keep doing it, so that “tomorrow” becomes “the next day” and the next and the next until I either give up on what I wanted to do, I run out of time, or I finally finish it.

What’s deeply ironic is that when I’m procrastinating, I’ve never simply forgotten about what I’m not working on. I’m thinking about it every day, whether that looks like adding it to my to-do list or simply shooting an arrow of guilt into myself, one that prevents me from fully enjoying the rest of my life. No matter what else I accomplish on a given day, when I’m procrastinating and know I shouldn’t be, that invades any sense of pride I take in my work.

Today is a perfect example. There’s been a lot about Open Secrets Live, which I’ve been working on since last fall, that I planned to do to make it the best event possible. I researched dozens of companies I wanted to ask to sponsor it, but between freelance work, editing, and spending most of my time with my baby, I kept pushing that to the side. I told myself there was still plenty of time, and there was, but I never prioritized it, and then suddenly there wasn’t any time left. So while those contacts are still valuable for future outreach, I potentially missed out on having some of the costs of the event subsidized rather than me paying for them myself.

In other situations, I’m nervous about doing something, so I procrastinate in the hope that I’ll magically become less nervous one day. I’ve been meaning to try to find a venue for an informal afterparty for Open Secrets Live, but the idea of cold calling a venue (or anyone) is terrifying to me. Cold emailing is bad enough, but phone calls? No thank you.

So rather than just facing that fear and knocking it off my list, I waited until the day before the event. I picked a venue from the list of local ones I was given, called, and within five minutes, the arrangements had been made.

Of course, it’s not always so simple. I recently turned in a large project that I procrastinated on that turned out to be very challenging. I kept telling myself I just needed to carve out enough time, and once I had that, my mind would start whirring and spinning words into flowing sentences that zipped smoothly from one paragraph to the next.

Instead, it was more like I banged out a very rough draft, and then painstakingly went back and filled in a quote here, a transition there. I had to do a lot of wrangling and research and simply sitting with the discomfort of knowing that something I was excited about when I first proposed it hadn’t gotten any easier in the ensuing months, but had actually solidified into something that felt near impossible.

The sad fact I try to avoid when I procrastinate is that striving for perfection is always going to make me unhappy, yet I con myself into believing that if I just wait (meaning procrastinate) long enough, I will somehow approach perfection (or get as close as I can). Even if that were true, which seems doubtful given the vast majority of my experience, there's still the tradeoff of the mental agony of having that task hanging over my head.

Sometimes I think the solution is simply to stop planning projects or pitching things that could lead me back into procrastination mode. But I don’t want to be a coward, and while my work/life balance has changed in the last year, I still have big dreams I want to give myself a chance at fulfilling.

What I need to reckon with is the fact that I might try my hardest and still fail, or succeed on one level but still feel like a failure, because in my head, I still have some pristine vision of what a project could have been, if only (if only what, I can never articulate, but I still berate myself for not living up to my high standards).

With procrastination, I always let myself believe that the blank page is preferable to word salad tossed around haphazardly, as if the blank page has some answers I can divine from it if I stare at it long enough. That’s a metaphorical blank page, because I don’t even let myself open up a new Word document when I’m deep in procrastination mode; instead I fill my time with other tasks that I deem more urgent, lest I desecrate that blank page with work that feels subpar.

I sometimes feel ridiculous for writing this column, both because I’m baring some of my most embarrassing behind-the-scenes moments of how I operate, and because when I type it all out, it feels obvious that procrastination isn’t ultimately helping me. I both know that, and resist that knowledge, all the time.

I’m scared that by stating so publicly that I’m a procrastinator nobody will want to work with me ever again because that’s all they’ll see. Part of the reason I’m writing it, though, is the same reason I’ve written about anything I perceive as problematic or embarrassing: in the hope that by taking it outside of my own brain and all its scurrying machinations and putting it into the public eye, I’ll feel more beholden to a power outside myself next time I’m in that situation.

Will it actually work? I’m not sure, but I know that the past few months living in procrastion hell have only made me miserable, so hopefully I’ll use the memory of that challenging time to help me make smarter choices next time.

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Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New Jersey-based writer, editor-in-chief of Open Secrets, and host of personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live. Her essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, TODAY.com, The Village Voice, and numerous other publications. She focuses on books, culture, feminism, motherhood, mental health, relationships, personal finance, belonging, and belongings. She hosts the podcast Finders and Keepers, about our attachments to our possessions, and is working on an anthology on the same topic. Follow her on Instagram @rachelkramerbussel and subscribe to her personal Substack. Follow her @rachelkramerbussel on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

I wrote this essay last spring, but never published it, so in this spirit of Women’s History Month, I’m sharing it here with a few tweaks to make it current, because it’s still relevant and I think will be helpful for others with ADHD. The concept of dopamine as it relates to my work and enthusiasm for new projects was a game changer for me, as you’ll read about below.

I’ll be covering other aspects of my life with ADHD in coming columns, including how I get things done (hint: painstakingly!) and motherhood and ADHD. Have suggestions for what I should cover in future columns? Email opensecretsmag at gmail dot com with “ADHD column” in the subject line.

By the time my erotic short story collection Lap Dance Lust was published on February 13 of last year, I was already over it. I was burned out from two decades of book promotion, actions that recently had felt less like proactive marketing and more like vain, futile exercises in trying to inflate my self-importance.

Ever since my first erotica story was published in an anthology in 2000, I’ve pulled out all the stops in getting my name and my writing “out there.” I helped organize a reading for that story at Lower East Side bookstore Bluestockings, thrilled when Time Out New York listed it, beaming at the large crowd. When I started editing my own anthologies for a variety of small presses (and one HarperCollins imprint) a few years later, I tried everything I could think of to get them noticed, spending thousands of dollars of my money (with no contributions from my publishers) in the hopes I’d recoup them in royalties.

Some of the book promo tactics I’ve undertaken for the over 70 anthologies I’ve edited have included: Throwing book parties, ordering custom book cover cupcakes and cookies, organizing in-person and online readings, advertising on celebrity and other podcasts, placing print and online ads, working with a virtual assistant to take photos and make Canva graphics, doing sticker giveaways, running a reading series, purchasing balloons spelling out the initials of my book series’ title, posting multiple times a day on multiple social media platforms, and hiring a publicist who sent out a press release with a typo and performed only a small fraction of her promised obligations. Once, I sponsored a giveaway at a huge book-related website, only to have someone ask me on Twitter why her friend had received four of my titles in the mail.

By 2023, the year I was turning in my manuscript, I had come to the conclusion that not only were these activities stressful, time-consuming, and energy-draining, they also likely hadn’t done anything to substantively bolster my book sales. I’d only seen a sales spike immediately following the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, which had nothing to do with my efforts.

Yet even though I knew I couldn’t continue to put the same pressure on myself to always be posting or plotting or researching new promo tactics, I’d spent the months leading up to the release feeling guilty that I wasn’t more enthusiastic about it. When I scrolled social media, I saw other authors posting color-coordinated promo images about their titles with glowing blurbs and book tour events, each time struck with a pang of regret and the thought: I should be doing that. Yet for this milestone publication I’d pitched to honor 25 years of writing in the erotica genre, I hadn’t asked any authors for blurbs or scheduled a single event.

My guilt was tempered by relief. On the one hand, I felt like I was failing Author 101, but letting my book land in the marketplace with the bare minimum of effort also felt completely right, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. It wasn’t until the week prior to my release, when I started reading ’s memoir in essays I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes: And Other Tales from My ADHD Brain on a flight to Austin for vacation, that I started to both forgive and understand my resistance.

Farris’s book, while firmly memoir and not self-help, was a source of major insight to me. As I read about her travails as a professional creative with ADHD, I saw so much of my younger days reflected back to me. She freely admitted that she moved on from projects and gigs when she got bored, but instead of attributing that to an inherent flaw, as I’d always done with my similar behaviors, she saw it as a result of her neurodivergent brain. The more I read about Farris’s quest to keep finding novel leisure activities, home design projects, and jobs to feed her brain’s need for dopamine, the more I experienced contentment around my lack of ambition around Lap Dance Lust.

I felt so deeply seen, embraced, and forgiven by her story, and far from alone in my struggle. Bells of recognition pinged with almost every chapter. There was nothing wrong with me for being grateful that my pub day was almost behind me. I could stop pretending to myself that I’d come through at the last minute with some elaborate social media campaign just to say I’d done it.

I’ve spent the last decade working hard to combat my ADHD tendencies, such as procrastination, blowing deadlines, and losing paperwork and possessions, sans medication. I thought I’d done all I could in that regard, but Farris’s story offered me revelation after revelation.

It was as if she had reached out from the pages of her book and told me, “It’s the dopamine, stupid!” I didn’t hate promoting my book because I hated myself or my writing; I hated it because the high peaked for me when I got the contract. I was proud that my publisher had deemed it a worthwhile title and that I’d written enough stories to be able to choose amongst them for a career retrospective in book form, but once I turned it in, I was mentally focused on my next project—and my next career move.

By my release date, I’d decided that after submitting the final two erotica anthologies I was contracted to edit (featuring other writers’ work), I was ready to step back from the genre because the thrill was long gone. I felt like I was doing busywork with a diminishing law of returns, both creatively and financially. Sales were dwindling, but more importantly, I wasn’t passionate about the genre the way I’d been in my early twenties. The creative equivalent of new relationship energy had run its course.

The prior year, having to abruptly become a caregiver for my mom made think a lot about mortality and aging. I’m not wealthy enough to be able to pick and choose all of my income-generating work. I have a part-time copywriting day job that pays my bills. Beyond that, though, I wanted to spend my limited time on earth putting words out into the world that truly meant something to me.

I’d set aside various writing and editing dreams because I didn’t have time for them while constantly jumping from one erotica anthology to the next, but my literary heart had moved on from fiction to my first love, nonfiction. I’d started an online personal essay publication, , delighting in coaxing forth revelations from some of my favorite writers, and had found an agent to represent an essay anthology about our emotional attachment to our belongings. Those projects invigorated me the way erotica had way back when.

It wasn’t until I read Farris’s memoir that this switch felt like a peaceful transition instead of an abandonment of the career I’d worked so hard to build. Just as I’ve proven a hideous actress ever since I faced away from the audience in my first and only experience onstage as a child, I similarly couldn’t fake enthusiasm for a creative project that, while bearing my name, felt in many ways like it was written by my ghost, not the person I see in the mirror. The me I was when I conceived of the book was no longer someone I recognized, which made it challenging to summon my past self when I attempted to whip up a cheerful Instagram post.

While there are plenty of moments where Farris berates herself for her actions when she drops the ball personally or professionally, as I have done every time I’ve flubbed a career opportunity, the theme and ultimate message of her book is that she—and by extension, presumably, others with ADHD—isn’t to blame for the ways her neurodivergent brain operates.

It's a sentiment that’s easy to agree with when another person claims it for themselves, but a lot harder for me to embrace when it comes to my own shortcomings. Yet when I finished Farris’s book the next day while on the treadmill, I stepped back onto the non-moving ground of the resort where I was staying feeling more centered and grounded.

Now that a few months have passed, I can appreciate that my book is both an accomplishment and an endcap to a particular period of my life. I don’t have to force myself to flaunt my book online or pretend to be more obsessed with it than I really am. I can be glad it exists while also moving on to new endeavors.

I’ve found tranquility in no longer treating my royalty statements like report cards, with the specter of a failing grade constantly looming over me. That mindset is like a casino game I’m forever doomed to lose, because, as I’ve learned, the urge to explore every possible avenue for reaching readers can become an all-consuming quest. In my most manic self-promotional years, I brought a copy of my latest title with me whenever I traveled in case a beautiful vista offered a pretty photo op. In the back of my mind, there was always a drumbeat urging me to see what holidays were coming up that might tie into my books, or brainstorm which influencers to reach out to, or any number of other opportunities to pursue. The cumulative mental overload of this way of thinking eventually drained all the joy out of the editorial process.

I’m far more comfortable striving to attain an editorial brass ring that feels out of reach than going for the sure thing that no longer holds my interest, and grateful that I no longer feel bad about following my own ADHD brain.

Read past The ADHD Diaries columns.

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Hear Rachel at Open Secrets Live May 3

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New Jersey-based writer, editor-in-chief of Open Secrets, and host of personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live. Her essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, TODAY.com, The Village Voice, and numerous other publications. She focuses on books, culture, feminism, motherhood, mental health, relationships, personal finance, belonging, and belongings. She hosts the podcast Finders and Keepers, about our attachments to our possessions, and is working on an anthology on the same topic. Follow her on Instagram @rachelkramerbussel and subscribe to her personal Substack. Follow her @rachelkramerbussel on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

I’m writing this at 6:42 a.m. on a Saturday; I’ve been up since 5:35, not by choice, that’s just when my body decided it was time to greet the day. I’m hoping to get this post finished before my baby wakes up, which could be any minute.

Welcome to my new column, The ADHD Diaries. Warning: It’s going to sound like it’s written by someone with ADHD, because it is. With most of my other writing, I try to sound more polished, rather than how I talk, jumping from one topic to another. But since this is a column about ADHD, I’m not going to try to mask the real me.

Which means I also must confess that this column was supposed to start in January, and is supposed to run on the second Wednesday of the month, since other columns are running on the first, third, and fourth Wednesdays. I decided on that cadence to ensure accountability for myself, but clearly, that didn’t happen last month or this month.

Part of me thinks: It’s okay, you have a baby and are a caregiver to multiple people and having paying work that you need to prioritize. Plus, nobody else even knew you were launching the column unless they paid minute attention to your personal Substack Notes, so the pressure is off.

Except with me, the pressure is always on. Since high school to some degree, but especially for the last approximately 20 years, when I’ve been juggling multiple freelance projects, I’ve woken up with a to-do list running through my mind. I would be okay with the to-do list if it was an energizing force, a practical tool to help guide me in what I need to do next.

But the to-do list that scrolls across my internal ticker isn’t made up of neutral bullet points. Instead, it has a scolding, angry font, and a voice that lives in my head and delights in roaring its message: You are behind, you will never catch up, you are hopeless at managing tasks, you might as well not even start that column/essay/book proposal/project because it will never be good enough.

That voice overrides the rational part of me knows that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that yes, maybe I take on too much, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get at least one thing done per day. That voice, which I haven’t given a name the way Lily Burana gave her depression a name (Bruce, after Bruce Springsteen), but which I know intimately, pervades my life in ways I’m ashamed to admit. I’m admitting them anyway because I’m sure some of you can relate.

Back to my morning. Instead of cracking open my laptop right after I determined that I was awake and not going back to sleep, I did a bunch of other things. Some are my usual morning tasks, like checking my bank account, inputting any income or expenses into my accounting software, and playing Wordle.

Others could have waited, but for whatever reason, they clamored to the front of the line. I made an email draft of all the speakers for Open Secrets Live (I can’t resist a plug and here’s a discounted ticket link - May 3! NYC! Jane Pratt, Minda Honey, Deesha Philyaw are are keynote speakers! Editors from Another Jane Pratt Thing, Electric Literature, HuffPost Personal, Narratively, HarperCollins, and Random House will be speaking!), which I thought I had handy but wasn’t sure if I had everyone listed. That seems like it would take mere seconds, but the way I did it took more like 15 minutes, because I copied and pasted the list of names and descriptions in plain text, then had to go through and delete all the extra info so it was just a list of names. Then the plain text formatting did a weird thing and smushed the end of one line together with the beginning of another, and in the process of fixing that, I deleted some names, so I had to double check them all.

Then I went through two sets of emails I sent to all the speakers, divided up lest my missives be released to spam, and marked down relevant information for the summit, like who agrees to be recorded for audio. I started to gather speaker bios, which I’ll need to send to my designer for the program, but I only got through a few before realizing that was a pretty easy copy and paste task I could do when I had more energy later in the day.

I also ordered some books, one for research for a potential article, and two by Karen Walrond, who I heard on a recent episode of the podcast Everything Is Fine, and was so taken with her approach to activism and staying focused and caring for ourselves during an administration intent on destroying so many people’s lives and leaving anyone with an ounce of empathy emotionally exhausted and devastated. The episode is called “how to *really* deal right now” and as someone who spent a very late-night hour touring the most hateful part of X out of morbid curiosity the other night and then slept poorly, I needed it.

I encounter the focus issue multiple times a day, so often that I actually am amazed I’ve ever gotten anything done that takes more than half an hour. Almost all of my personal essays have been written relatively quickly once I sat down to write them, usually taking less than two hours for the first draft. That’s deceptive, though, because usually by the time I start typing, my mind has been cogitating on the topic for days or weeks or months or, in some cases, years. I talk myself out of starting essays all the time out of common fears that I advise students to push past but am not so good about myself: fear of the work not being exactly perfect the way it is in my utopian vision for it, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings, the fear of starting and getting halfway through and feeling stuck and unsure of what to say.

Today, while taking care of my baby and also my boyfriend, who’s either on the cusp of getting a cold or similar illness, or, hopefully, has nipped it in the bud, I’m also doing a monthly family Zoom and taking a class with writer Theo Nestor, for which I also paid extra to have her critique an essay of mine that I still haven’t written.

I’ve gotten so used to the pace of my professional life basically being chaotic that I sometimes forget that I can choose to slow down. I can make a schedule and stick to it. I can edit, say, one Open Secrets essay a day, until I’m caught up on the ones I know I want to publish but haven’t made time to edit. I can use the Pomodoro technique and write for 25 minutes and see what happens.

I know for sure that when I think about the lessons I want to impart to my daughter, a big one is that I want her to be at peace with how she spends her time. I want her to have a work-life balance that leaves her fulfilled, not frantic. I want her to be able to turn off her work brain and have fun in a way I’m not actually sure I’m capable of, because as a writer, there’s almost always at least some part of thinking about whether this is a moment to pause and savor and return to on the page, and as someone with ADHD, I struggle to be fully present when I’m doing anything.

My baby has helped with that to a large degree. I try hard to turn off the to-do list scolding voice, or even its more casual cousin that is more of a bullet-pointed agenda, when I’m playing with her and singing to her and watching her. I’ve had to push that voice aside when I’m driving her places, an act that feels far more foreign and unnerving and scary than any other aspect of being a mom.

I have no idea how to conclude this column, and I definitely didn’t intend my first column to be so chaotic. I pictured serving up a measured, thoughtful take on how and why I finally started taking an ADHD medication (Qelbree) on a sustained basis, and have future ideas around an ADHD book that blew my mind, and ADHD and motherhood.

But it’s also fitting that this column is probably the most real-life version of me than almost anything I’ve written, me uncensored, my brain unfurled onto the page without fanfare or finesse.

I welcome suggestions for future topics, commiseration or ideas from those who also have ADHD or care about someone who does.

I wish I were summing this up with some grandiose conclusion I’ve had about how to work while your brain is distracted. I recommend ’s posts at on the topic, and , and welcome further suggestions. I just ordered the Extra Focus book but, as you might imagine, I also have two other ADHD books I bought in the fall and haven’t prioritized reading.

If I can offer any kind of takeaway as the opposite of an expert, but as someone who has actually accomplished a lot of things, and who’s also given up on a lot of projects because I let my fears and perfectionism rule me, I will say this: Doing something when you feel the urge to create is better than doing nothing. Literally, even one minute of typing to get you started, even if you don’t know what to say and are just typing something along the lines of “I’m trying to start, but I don’t know what I’m doing,” is at least a step in the right direction, as Karen Walrond discussed on Everything Is Fine.

So that’s what this belated column that I’m not going to go back and try to clean up and tame is: A start. A promise to you and myself that I will continue, hopefully every second Wednesday. And an acknowledgment that ADHD doesn’t have to always be in the driver’s seat. Sometimes I can steer my ADHD brain where I want it to go, even if the results are messy and uneven and all over the place, just like me.

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Hear Rachel at Open Secrets Live May 3

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New Jersey-based writer, editor-in-chief of Open Secrets, and host of personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live. Her essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, TODAY.com, The Village Voice, and numerous other publications. She focuses on books, culture, feminism, motherhood, mental health, relationships, personal finance, belonging, and belongings. She hosts the podcast Finders and Keepers, about our attachments to our possessions, and is working on an anthology on the same topic. Follow her on Instagram @rachelkramerbussel and subscribe to her personal Substack. Follow her @rachelkramerbussel on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.