Sorry I can’t be perfect
I’ve been asking myself why I find weekly newsletters such a struggle when I wrote one newsletter a day for thirty days and found it easier than weekly writing.
I mention this less because of my constant state of agitation about not meeting my weekly writing goal and more because you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t struggle with consistency too, so this may be applicable to something in your life.
There are, I think, two reasons.
The first is that because I have never been able to settle (indecision, again!) on what day this should come out, I don’t have a hard deadline to meet.
And because of that, I have an almost-audible voice that tells me “perhaps this would be better on another day.”
- Monday is the start of the week, you should send it out then.
- Wednesday is “humpday,” people will be more likely to get something out of it on a Wednesday.
- Thursday is funny, because there’s that Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quote you appreciate about Thursdays.
- Saturday, because people need something for the weekend… and so on.
And then I’ll get the feeling that whatever I have is too slapdash, and there’s a bit of breaking news that I really should add, and the indecision really spirals.
I have decided to fix this by allowing you to decide when this newsletter comes out:
The second reason follows from the first: If I get the smallest inkling that I’ve done something wrong or let someone down, that’s it for the task. I get very all-or-nothing; all I want to do is avoid it or fix it.
If there’s something else that seems urgent – or merely something sufficiently distracting – then I have another great reason to avoid it.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that I feel bad about not posting for two weeks! But luckily I found a good reason to climb out of my funk:
The weirdos are coming for ADHD
There is a bit of an online kerfuffle amongst ADHD folks arising from this deeply stupid article (🏴☠️link), by one of those newspaper columnists who – mysteriously! – has superior knowledge to any qualified expert in whatever subject they feel like writing about that week. It has already been roundly debunked, but I still think it’s worth keeping an eye on.1 These people, hand in glove with far-right fossil-fuel think-tanks, are who gifted us the Culture War on Trans People, and now they’re coming for ADHD.
But if we’re being properly skeptical, we might ask: does the article have a point?
The answer is, as is so often the case: it’s complicated.2
Firstly: the article is a keyboard interview, so don’t take it seriously, but do take seriously the fact that culture warriors have turned their attention (lol) to this topic.
Secondly: there is a surplus of online influencers who have discovered a profitable niche in ADHD and are churning out ultra-relatable, extremely non-evidence-based content which is only tangentially related to ADHD, which may be convincing people who do not have ADHD that they do have ADHD (and, conversely, may be pointing out to people who didn’t know they have ADHD that they indeed have ADHD)
Thirdly: whether or not you find online content relatable has no bearing on whether or not you have ADHD, and dickhead columnists aren’t the ones who get to tell you if you have it or not. That’s what doctors are for
Fourthly: we are beset by apps and devices designed by the smartest people alive to divert, monopolise and fragment our attention, which can give rise to ADHD-like symptoms in even the most neurotypical people
Fifthly: ADHD people may be more susceptible to said apps and devices and may suffer more from their deleterious effects
Sixthly: ADHD and autism exist on a spectrum, goddamn it, a fact that is only objected to by weirdos and gatekeepers (and is almost always embraced by neurodiversity advocates). Yes, you can be more or less ADHD/autistic, or be ADHD/autistic in different ways. Yes, autism and ADHD can be profoundly disabling, and it’s important not to be flippant about that, or use labels as excuses, much like it’s insulting to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder to say “Oh, I’m just so OCD about (trivial thing.)” But this doesn’t invalidate a diagnosis. Just because an autistic person is verbal or an ADHD person can focus on things they find interesting does not make them not autistic or ADHD. And the increase in diagnoses bemoaned by agenda-hucking weirdos is primarily because of greater understanding of the breadth of the spectrum. Yes, your train-obsessed granddad who ate the same thing for seventy years was probably on the spectrum, no he wouldn’t have been diagnosed in 1942 because we have had a fair bit of medical and scientific progress since then. Scratch the surface of almost any reactionary columnist’s shallow rantings and you will find, almost inevitably, that they are bemoaning the notion of progress itself, and setting their own arbitrary definitions of what “counts”
Seventhly: neurodiversity advocates are not trying to proscribe people through “labels;” they are celebrating and advocating for the diversity of human experience (the clue is in the name) and understanding that there may be a mostly hardwired reason you are the way you are can be empowering instead of limiting
Eighthly: of course people use labels as a way to be special and/or annoying on the internet. This is not a new thing. The world contains men who put MAGA in their bio and wonder why it makes them undatable. People who get all hung up about labels would put “no labels” in their bio and not even clock the irony.
Ninthly: the set of understandings, tools, tips and tricks developed by the ADHD community to survive in an informationally-hostile world can be incredibly useful to people who may not fit technical definitions of ADHD but who, due to device proliferation and and information overload, find themselves feeling ADHDish. Go ahead and use them, if you want! No-one is stopping you! You don’t need an ADHD license!
Tenthly: no-one does more wondering if ADHD is real than people with ADHD.
Cool tools
Distraction-free writing
I really like distraction-free Markdown editors for writing, even if I occasionally get distracted by trying to find the perfect distraction-free Markdown editor.
For now I have settled on Typora because it does what I need it to do and I already owned it for some reason. I really liked iA Writer, but it was $99 which I can’t justify.
If you write things and want a distraction-free writing environment, give Typora a hoon. It is inexpensive and it works (on every platform). It’s what I’ll be using to write for the next however long.
Write on schedule
I will be writing in an upcoming piece about how useful time estimates and time-tracking are for ADHD folks, and anyone else who finds themselves attentionally challenged, but for now I’ll plug a tool I have just started using and am already finding incredibly helpful: Super Productivity. Ignore the mildly toxic name: it’s free, open source, and actually works – an escalating order of rarity in software.
This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
– Douglas Adams
Enjoy whatever day of the week this finds you. Thursday is a state of mind. And brace yourselves – Christmas is coming.
If this email has found you well, or even if it hasn’t, please leave a comment. Comments are the best.
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DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyThanks, as always, for reading. As a reward here is one of the worst songs to come out of the 2000s.
- Especially given the Wall Street Journal has started to bang the culture-war drum about ADHD “overdiagnosis” as well. ↩︎
- But mostly, no. ↩︎
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