This post is a reflection on Geraint Evans’ “This is how an ADHD person actually writes.” I’d start there first!
I’m a terrible writer.
Or, at least, I’ve convinced myself of that my whole life. The things that I write flow awkwardly, and I never understand all the rules of writing and the way to make things sound immersive and natural. My writing ends up awkwardly verbose and tends to wander a lot. I tend to mix tenses constantly.
I never understood why I write the way I do, until I discovered at the beginning of the year that I have rather severe inattentive ADHD.
Coming across this tweet was pretty mind blowing for me. It was like someone speaking to the way I write for the first time in my life. Then seeing tons of replies under it validating the way ADHD people write I realized I wasn’t alone in this. Honestly, you should probably just go read Geraint’s article “This is how an ADHD person actually writes.” instead of reading this, but I’ll do my best to share my thoughts on top of it.
In his article Geraint calls out four main points in his concussion, so I’ll use that as a starting point. (And sorry if this structure doesn’t make sense… You know. ADHD ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Here are the four points:
- Impulsivity – “Impulsivity & rushing through tasks - I need to say this now!”
- Attention to detail - “Yeah, probably fine, ill just post it.”
- Being socially inappropriate – “Sorry, why do I have to change how I communicate when you clearly understand what I mean?”
- Feeling Misunderstood.
We’ll dive into each separately.
Impulsivity
Gotta go fast. Having my special flavor of ADHD means a mind constantly full of ideas at all times. You know that expression “drinking from the fire hose”? It’s like that, but 8+ hours of the day, every day (before completely running out of energy and crashing, but that is a topic for another time.)
A lot of ideas
Even trying to sit down and write this out, it’s hard to move to the next because there are 18 different ways I could continue this sentence, and 14 of them probably involve a complete topic change.
Each idea feels like it is so incredibly pressing, and the entire world should hear about this – only to be frustrated after tweeting it out to the world, bugging a coworker or talking to my partner, and finding no interest at all in it.
Writing with ADHD means TONS of edit passes on even a few paragraphs because often I’ve shoved so many ideas into a small space that it feels overwhelming and disjointed to read. It ends up being hard to follow because I’ve left out a bunch of the in-between framing context that is in my head that I forget others can’t follow.
Overly passionate
Often having this volume of ideas, and an immense, fast burning passion for a topic means things are often oversold, or phrased incorrectly.
I remember once writing an email to a director at my then-work flagging that a product decision was “unethical” because I believed strongly we were making the wrong decision. In reality, while it was a bad decision, unethical was both the incorrect framing AND severity. Would both craft and inclusivity suffer from this decision?
Yes. However, was this a decision that was any more or less severe from the thousands made at the company every day? No, not really. In the moment though, it seemed like the most important thing in the universe, and my passion was dialed to 11.
Luckily, this person was highly empathetic, and explained to the email chain what I likely meant (and why I was over-reacting) without condescending. It was really eye opening to me, and I always remember that. (Aside: Stick with the people who will call out out in a loving way! These people will help you grow immensely.)
Because I feel like I’ve explained absolutely nothing here, that seems like a great time to move on to point two!
Attention to detail
This one’s short description nails it on the head: “Yeah, probably fine, ill just post it.”
This pretty much captures my whole sentiment here, and really conflicts with the last point, Feeling Misunderstood, yet some how coexist.
How this often manifests is either 1) writing for hours, attempting to get things right or concise or understandable and eventually getting frustrated and hitting post, or 2) blasting some writing out in 30 seconds and pressing send without even reading it back.
I was never able to write papers in school because if I tried to edit a long piece of writing, rather than editing it I would just end up rewriting the whole thing on each edit pass. In the end I defaulted to writing a few hours before the deadline so I wouldn’t have time to fret over the contents or writing style. I call this “Deadline Adrenaline.” I found I got better grades and responses often with just throwing something out there on the first pass than trying to write in a way others would understand easily (because, of course I couldn’t do that. My brain doesn’t work that way.)
Deadline Adrenaline
An aside – deadline adrenaline is something that I’ve come to lean on as an ADHD person throughout all parts of my life. I’m not sure if this is strictly and ADHD thing, or a me thing.
Deadline adrenaline is roughly leaving something so late to the last minute that I’m basically fucked if I don’t finish it in X hours. School papers, project deadlines, even packing a house or submitting some documents, many of these things in my life get done this way.
Often tasks that seem impossible I’m able to pull off with ease leaning on this, but it means it can be difficult to worth with others effectively. My managers are always terrified and then shocked when in a day I turn around an entire project, or complete what seems like an impossible amount of work in a short time.
This process I go through is part of the ADHD cycles I experience, which I’d love to write about more later.
The super TL;DR is when not on medication I experience pretty severe cycles on both roughly a daily and monthly basis. These cover energy, creative output, focus and more.
It makes it extremely difficult to work with others if a creative or energy high doesn’t align with where others are at the time, but also when my cycle highs align with a project or collaboration people are often amazed at both the volume and quality of my output (and then probably confused why a week later I can’t seem to create two screens.)
Err, we went on a bit of a tangent here though, so lets get to point 3!
Being socially inappropriate
This one is pretty straight forward for me. Let me say this first, I recognize I’m VERY, SUPER privileged to be able to work this way.
I don’t work with people, companies, etc that require me to do anything in a certain way. Need to dress a certain way? That is a nope. Talk or write formally? That is a nope. Maybe seems messed up, but it’s how my brain works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am fortunate that I’ve been able to find a career path that I’ve been able to design a way to create that works for me, and brings people value, but I think many ADHD people’s potential is never even given a chance to shine because they can’t engage with the world the way the world wants them to.
I was blessed with some incredible teachers and mentors that saw the value in me despite my “weirdness” that I was never able to define until recently.
I think we leave a lot of great people behind because they can’t or don’t work the way the world wants them to. I’d be still in my parents basement if my only options were suit & tie or on my feet at 8am in retail. (Y’all are the unsung heroes, doing some of the hardest work with completely unjust levels of compensation. Thank you, and I hope we can improve the way you all have to work in my lifetime.)
To wrap up this section: I’ve always done the worst when I tried to fit myself into the mould of the “Normal.” I end up coming off just as a slightly ok-ish designer. I’ve found resounding success in the past few years when I’ve leaned into the me unapologetically, even though I recognize it can be hard to work with and around.
I have the utmost respect for managers and leaders that can utilize the odd-shaped puzzle pieces like myself and figure out where they fit.
Feeling Misunderstood
Moving on to the biggest one – Feeling misunderstood. This is the root of almost all social issues that ADHD brings for me personally.
Feel like someone didn’t understand what you said – here comes 10 minutes of exposition to try to explain that one statement I said, meanwhile the whole group is slowly edging away to get away from this odd guy.
Post a piece of writing online? “People will pick apart every statement.”, “Don’t post that, people won’t understand what you mean.” The amount of self-censorship you do from fear of being misunderstood is both socially crippling, and highly career negative.
When I worked at Facebook, one thing I always struggled with is there is this idea of as you become a more senior designer you build more of a public following, and begin to have an impact on our industry. This was always crippling for me to even think about, because of the fear of doing or saying something wrong and then being outcast.
The feeling of being misunderstood to and ADHD person is TERRIFYING. I still have a thousand minor slights or social awkwardness I’ve committed that I think about weekly, and am just begging in my head to be able to go back and explain or correct.
Wrapping Up
Even as I start this wrap up, I basically feel like I just wrote a bunch of stuff that people won’t really get anything out of because of it being highly disjointed.
But I’ll throw it out there since I’m trying to get better at challenging my assumptions and learning more about myself and my ADHD through sharing with others and getting feedback.
This meandered a bit from just focusing on writing, but writing is HARD for ADHD people. I’m trying to do it more to get better, and identify how the above things affect me and my writing and how I can improve it.
I one-shot this writing, so apologies for any issues, spelling, flow or otherwise. I’m always open to talk about design, ADHD and more. You can reach me at iamnbutler@gmail.com.
Hope this is interesting or useful to someone!
Nate 🌱