Loving My Brain, WIP Edition

September 11, 2023

I could look at this pile of half-finished blogs with aggravation, to be sure. If I let them pile up for too long, that will inevitably happen as I struggle to find what I’m looking for in the folder. But when I see this backlog in its early stages today, I remind myself of the actual goal of my project: To be genuinely myself and learn to accept and love myself, ADHD included.

This is a classic example of how my brain operates. When I look at the titles of these posts, I see that several of them were started when I felt enthused about the subject, e.g., the Tarot reading I did on September 6, which I was so sure I’d blog about that I even tweeted my intention to do so. Maybe I even wrote most or all of my thoughts at the time, but the rest of the day didn’t lend itself well to the time commitment of finishing, publishing, and sharing the post across various platforms.

So, basically, my intentions were good: share a moment of my day. But the actual day itself was busy with any number of things. Since my WIP folder goes back about two weeks right now, I can confidently say I was busy. Between regular life responsibilities, spending time with family, working on my writing, and keeping myself alive with food and sleep, there was not always time for blogging. Writing fiction takes priority to this blog, and querying agents is my main job right now. Not to mention that I can’t physically spend all day at a desk or staring at a screen without physical and mental side effects; I’m not a robot, I need to take breaks. And at times, other creative ventures that I want to lean into to reward my ko-fi supporters and generally expand my audience are going to hold my entire attention.

Honestly, this WIP folder is a reminder of how my brain works. I can sometimes take a few minutes to rough a blog post when the subject is suddenly all I can think about. I’ve been known to use voice transcription when I step out of the shower because I just have to get some ideas into a document before I forget. Sometimes, I can go straight to my desk and polish that into a finished entry. But at other times, I will just be going through too many things in a given week to get back to the subject within the relevant timeframe.

I don’t love this about myself. Far from it. I would usually look at this list of documents and feel very aggravated. I would easily tell myself things like, “I should have worked faster on this since I knew I didn’t have time that day.” Is that a reasonable thing to say? Honestly, not really. I guarantee that whenever I’m working on something, I am going as “fast” as possible. There are already plenty of times that my brain is going too fast for my fingers to keep up (and I type at a pretty respectable words per minute).

Maybe I would say, “Why am I like this? If I finished all of these and published them, I would have 4 or 5 more blog entries right now.” It doesn’t help to ask why, of course, although it’s definitely my nature to do so. I just am like this. And what does it mean to be “like this?”

It means I have ADHD and some highly-sensitive traits corresponding to the spectrum of neurodivergence. 

It means that neurotransmitters in my brain struggle with dopamine and norepinephrine, so things I want to do for logical reasons often don’t provide me any neural feedback to reward me for doing them. I have to find ways to get those “happy chemicals” through other tasks before I have the fortitude to plow ahead into work that feels like a chore.

It also means I’m highly aware of many details, either in my physical surroundings or the mental map of my connected thoughts, usually more than I can express in words. Those details can spin into tangents upon tangents in a fraction of a second, like watching a spider move in fast-forward.

It means more than that, of course, but my ability to move through all these interests and build multiple skills simultaneously could work to my benefit, if I let it. I’m capable of swapping between different projects throughout the week and learning about many things that will enrich my life or improve my writing.

Furthermore, I often have mini revelations when my mind connects more and more pieces of the web and provides me with an unexpected new perspective. When writing fiction, this is invaluable, and I hope to reach the point where my novels are published, and this ability of mine is shared with the world. I have had some incredible moments this year where I could suddenly comprehend the past, present, and future of my characters, how their actions will ripple through each others’ lives and the way those things can resonate with the readers. I’ve had countless moments of suddenly “seeing” the whole book laid out before me and potential ideas beyond that end, layer upon layer, all unfolding in my mind while I’m simply driving or showering.

This is how I ended up in the position of having finished five novels without wanting to stop and focus on the question of publication. I find amazing joy and satisfaction in writing with the long view of how it will all pay off (or lead to new dilemmas!), and it’s proven impossible to replicate that with anything else. The only similar mind-expanding experience I’ve had has been when therapy and reading have shown me connections in myself that I couldn’t see without the proper perspective. (This was transformative, but not the point of this post; suffice it to say I support therapy for everyone.)

It wasn’t until reading about the neurodivergent spectrum of experiences that I even began to know the language to talk about these things. A huge part of myself was kept to one side, relegated to “useful for writing,” and never prioritized because the writing itself was not my main focus. It was always on the side until this year. 

By putting myself out there as a flawed, creative person who loves a lot of what I do and struggles mightily to wrangle it into the requirements of society, I hope I can continue to come to terms with myself. If I have a pile of blog posts about Tarot that I haven’t gotten to, that doesn’t invalidate my entire existence, although I would previously have used it as a gateway to severe self-judgment. If I don’t always pay attention to my social media except for some stories on Instagram or videos on TikTok, that’s okay. I’m still taking strides in many ways, even if I’m climbing a dozen mountains at once instead of just one.

I don’t even wish that I was only climbing one at a time. I would be an entirely different person if that was a switch I could flip. I love my multitasking brain, at least a lot of the time. I want to love it more of the time. 

This entry will be posted on my blog after the move to jmecannon.com has been finalized. When it launches, there will also be some ongoing pages, about ADHD and resources that have helped me, linked at the top navigation. I’ll talk about them more in separate posts as I finish sections of this long-term project, but they will be live pages even if they are not perfectly polished. Since ADHD is a huge part of my life, and I’m learning more every week about how to manage it and how to love myself, these resources will be central to this site and continue to evolve along with me.

For more timely updates, I encourage you to follow me on FB or Instagram because those are the easiest to update with multimedia posts, and on Ko-Fi, because I will post quick updates there whenever I update this blog, my shop items, my membership rewards, and so on. There’s a lot in progress, believe me!

Now, I’m going to make another folder-inside-a-folder to put all my older WIPs into a parking lot where I could perhaps revisit it at the end of the year to see how often I started and didn’t finish an entry or if they were all a certain type of blog post. And, of course, I hate to delete things, but these retrospective insights have helped me a lot this year, so I’ll save them for now and see if I need them later… while keeping my workspace a little less cluttered.

A little less cluttered, I said!