Dispatch #7: How not to write

Lessons from the time my brain broke

Heavens. Friends. How is it Wednesday already?

I have broken with my months-old tradition of posting on Tuesdays for several reasons – most of them very boring, to do with Volume of Life Admin Exceeding Current Capacity For… Adminning? – but also, more interestingly, to test whether I actually… could?

Let me explain. Part of my reason for honouring Tuesdays so faithfully was to help rebuild trust in myself. I had been working as a writer for many years before experiencing, in 2021-2022, a more or less total collapse in brain functioning – a case of what I would later learn was neurodivergent burnout – brought on by the cumulative impacts of a lifetime of undiagnosed, unmedicated ADHD (plus a pandemic and a marriage breakdown to boot).

Like many other undiagnosed adults unknowingly battling symptoms like impaired executive function, unreliable focus, horrendous time management and a brain made skittish and overwhelmed by its inability to filter the constant barrage of sensory information that is Living and Working in the 21st Century, the 10-15 years leading up to said burnout were characterised by a whole suite of coping mechanisms I’d subconsciously adopted in my attempts to hoodwink the world (and myself) into believing I was a Reliable, Responsible and Definitely Not Struggling Adult Woman.

Easily the most damaging of these mechanisms was using stress as a motivator to get things done. Executive dysfunction can make it almost impossible to start (or finish) anything mentally taxing without a tremendous effort of will (which will inevitably be paid for later, hangover-style), which leads many undiagnosed ADHDers to use deadlines as last-ditch spurs to bully their brains into compliance for as long as it takes to get the task done.

This works well enough when you’re young and resilient – around exam time, when essays pile up and parties beckon and your parttime job can’t give you any days off. It works less well when it becomes your main means of getting important things done in adult life, not just in end-of-term flurries but week in, week out, year-round, for years on end. Eventually, the cycles of self-punishment and exhaustion, stress and shame and frustration, become impossible to sustain, and the brain says no more.

By the time I was diagnosed, my relationship with writing looked much more like self-harm than sustaining creative practice, and even once ADHD meds transformed my functioning in other areas of life, I felt unable to write for so long that I wasn’t sure I ever would again.

In a strange way, the physical illness that followed a year or two after the burnout may have helped to heal that relationship. For all the grief and frustration engendered by protracted sickness and immobility, I think it gave my brain a kind of rest that it dearly needed. Even with the brain fog, I am now finding a joy in writing I had forgotten was possible.

Anyway, that was a long-winded way of explaining why publishing these dispatches every Tuesday has been so important to me: to nurture habits of using deadlines (even self-imposed ones) as creative inspiration rather than stick to beat myself up with.

However, the demands of the past week have tested my illness-fogged brain to the limits, such that not posting on Tuesday felt like by far the healthier option. And lo! I have not spun off my axis, lost the motivation to ever post again, or (fingers crossed) caused all my subscribers to unsubscribe in disgust.

I shall leave you with a puzzle! This one’s called Five of Squares, and it’s a love letter both to five-letter words (…Wordle, anyone?) and playing card design. Hopefully it’s fairly self-explanatory: the middle letter (highlighted in black) from each of the 5x5 grids (read L-R, top-bottom) forms the answer to bonus clue 6 (or should that be 25…) Answers next week, as usual.

Sorry again if, like me, you don’t own a printer. Eek.

Until next time,

Marion

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