You’ll often hear me say that writing is part of life.
It usually comes up because you’ve just told me, on the one hand, that you didn’t do the thing we’d planned to do and on the other hand, that life has intervened in some way – often in some major way – so you actually couldn’t possibly have done it no matter how hard you tried.
You’ve told me things like:
- I had covid for a month and I’m only just now beginning to recover
- My spouse had knee surgery and I need to drive them to rehab four times a week while working full time
- My dad died and my mom just moved in with us
- My kid came home from school with chicken pox
- I’m supporting my parents as well as my own household
- My spouse just upped and disappeared with all the money, and left me with a mortgage and bills and 3 kids to raise on my own, and I need to work 2 jobs just to keep up
You tell me these things almost in passing, as if you take these challenges for granted, as if they’re in one bucket, your regular life is in another, and your writing is in a separate bucket altogether.
You believe you “should” be able to do better, to “overcome” these challenges, to just push through and crush those distractions and meet that impossible deadline!
But it doesn’t work like that.
In my experience, it’s actually not helpful to try to force yourself to push through your writing as if life isn’t happening, especially if you’re neurodivergent. In fact, pushing too hard can tip you into overwhelm and burnout.
If you’re neurodivergent, you’re already facing more challenges than most, both in daily life and in writing. ADHD in particular affects writing in surprising ways, not just with distractions and rabbit holes and trouble maintaining focus, but things like trouble summarizing, deciding what’s important, organizing both your time and the content of your writing.
As for daily life, well, let’s just say that neurodivergence and an uncommonly complicated life often seem to go hand in hand.
These complications are what you take for granted, normalizing a life that would be overwhelming for most, even for neurotypicals, but expecting yourself to still function “normally.”
But you can’t. And it’s cumulative. So you end up burned out and essentially in survival mode. When you’re in survival mode, your body’s ancient wisdom kicks in and tries to funnel all your energy into the big muscle groups so you can run or fight. This effectively short-circuits the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning. You end up relying on instinct, with not much fuel left for high-level thinking and decision making.
Writing takes high-level thinking and decision making.
No wonder you’re exhausted! No wonder you have trouble keeping up, getting organized, getting focused, staying focused, even getting yourself to your writing spot!
It’s not you. It’s not about motivation, procrastination, disorganization, inability to focus or pay attention. It’s your life piling in on you.
That’s not your fault either. Sure, maybe you said yes when you badly needed to say no, but why do we do that? Post-industrial capitalism is built on voluntarism and unpaid labour or underpaid labour. Of course there’s pressure — internal or external — to say yes to baking muffins for the school fundraiser, to going back to the office when you’re not fully recovered from covid, to looking after an ailing family member, to looking after everything and everyone before yourself. You barely have time to shower, let alone write that article, essay or report with anything like the focus it needs.
So that’s why I say your writing is part of your life. It’s not separate from life.
Your writing is interdependent with your life. How could it not be?
NEXT TIME: IF I DON’T PUSH, HOW DO I GET ANYTHING DONE?
