The ADHD Diaries: It's Amazing I've Ever Accomplished Anything Because I'm Always Distracted

Even on ADHD medication, sitting down to focus and write feels impossible

Yes, that’s me in my ADHD sweatshirt I got from SundriesandSnark on Etsy

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

Rebecca Makkai

’s posts at

SubMakk

on the topic, and

Extra Focus • ADHD Newsletter

, 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.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is founder and editor of Open Secrets Magazine. Her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Glamour, Salon, TODAY.com, The Village Voice, and other publications. She’s working on a podcast and a nonfiction anthology about our relationship with our belongings. She also has a personal Substack. Follow her @rachelkramerbussel on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.