How ADHD Turns Success into Failure

I returned from organizing personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live thrilled, and then sank into a huge creative slump that left me totally demoralized

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

Kelly Banks

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.

Brian Gresko

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.

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.