Is ADHD Why I Have Trouble Taking Real Vacations?

I loved being away from my laptop, but not the guilt that accompanied it

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

Kristen Felicetti

written as Y2K Livejournal posts, inspired by hearing her on the podcast It’s a Lot by

Emily Hessney Lynch

(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.