How an ADHD Memoir Helped Me Stop Feeling Guilty About Not Promoting My Short Story Collection

Emily Farris' 'I'll Just Be Five More Minutes: And Other Tales from My ADHD Brain' taught me the connection between dopamine, burnout, and my creative work and gave me professional camaraderie

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

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

Emily Farris

’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,

Open Secrets

, 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.

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.