ADHD and rethinking everything
Is the one thing I've relied on for healing actually the thing holding me back?
“If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to.”
Anna Nalick sings one of my favorite songs called “Breathe.” Deep in my soul I feel the lyrics: “If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to.”
For me, writing has always been a means of healing. It’s helped me process the world around me. The traumas, both large and small, that I absorbed into my body seemed to exit only by way of my words. As someone with late-diagnosed ADHD, nothing really ever made sense to me unless I worked it out on paper.
An increasingly massive fear of mine is that the writing I’ll leave behind after a lifetime of trauma processing is nothing but the yucky stuff. I worry the breadcrumbs of my life sprinkled for my loved ones to gather in my absence represent quite a sour loaf. Will they know it wasn’t all bad?
…………………………………………………………..
I manage my day-to-day with the help of years of cognitive behavioral therapy and ADHD skills classes, but I recently realized the need to go back and heal some parts of me that still feel a little… broken.
Someone needs to tell my nervous system that we are no longer in emotional danger, and I think that someone has to be me.
I decided to look into trauma psychotherapy, specifically something called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy or EMDR, and in doing so, interviewed some potential therapists. One of them said something to me that I simply cannot shake.
When she asked what I do for a living, she let loose a knowing snort and said, “I find it interesting that you’re a writer because what we choose to write about is what we reinforce in our minds. ”
I selected another therapist, but I can’t get her words (or her snort) out of my mind.
Is there something to that? Did she work with a lot of writers? Is it impossible to be both a writer and healed? Can writers, by our very nature of ruminating, reviewing, retelling, replaying, and reliving, never really leave our stories behind?
Spiritual teacher and author Eckhart Tolle writes in his book The Power of Now that our minds unconsciously create problems, and when we create problems, we create pain. He says:
“Some people get angry when they hear me say that problems are illusions. I am threatening to take away their sense of who they are. They have invested much time in a false sense of self. For many years, they have unconsciously defined their whole identity in terms of their problems or their suffering. Who would they be without it?”
I’ve admittedly stalled on a memoir I’ve been writing for about ten years. Its focus has evolved over that time, but its focus has always been the problems.
As a healing ADHDer, I’ve had to reframe what I always viewed in myself as “laziness”, “quitting”, or “whimsy” as I avoid finishing things I start. I recently took a memoir-writing class for neurodivergent (ND) people taught by Cindy Robinson - who I just adore - author of Bright Girl, Lacks Focus: A Neurodivergent Memoir. She offered the perfect reframe for this behavior:
NDs don’t work toward goals in a linear fashion. We orbit goals. One day, we’re barreling toward our goal at a million miles an hour, and all is well. The next, we’ve blown past the goal, and we’re off looking at all the other shiny objects in space. That may look like learning to paint (for me) or starting any number of side projects. This doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned the original goal. We’re off exploring things that may inform the next step in our process. We will orbit back around once we’ve gathered what we need.
I think the very reason I’ve stalled on my memoir is that I’m still figuring out my story. I thought my ADHD diagnosis was the end point of my healing; it turns out, while it explained A LOT, it didn’t explain it all. This new trauma therapy has already started unlocking insights for me that challenge my long-held beliefs. Especially negative ones about myself.
I’m rethinking everything.
In the meantime, I thought I’d pose my first question(s) to my readers as I celebrate surpassing 100 subscribers (Wohooo!!!! Thank you!!!):
Tell me: Do you think being a writer makes it more difficult to let go of pain and heal our inner wounds? Does writing help us or hurt us when it comes to that work? And finally, who are we as writers when we no longer identify with our pain?
Besides being a means to heal myself, I felt like writing was a way to make it all matter, to put my pain to work for others like me. I’m finding this might also be the wrong way to look at it.
In The Power of Now, Tolle also says:
“Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven’t realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it.”
Maybe one day, once I’ve uncovered my full story and healed the parts of me that my writing never could, I’ll get it all down on paper. And it’ll be for no other reason than for the love of the art.