We overcome our fear by creating a disaster

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Did you ever have a teacher or professor offer to look over a rough draft or outline of an assignment? Did you ever accept this offer? No? Me neither.

I might have wanted to. I recognized it was a good idea. But my reality was that my papers and assignments, in school and in life, usually came together at the last minute. My first draft was my final draft.

ADHD folks like to say that we work well in a crisis. The adrenaline jolt of an emergency gives us the motivation and clarity that we were missing.

I found this line in the book Everybody Writes by Ann Handley:
"Much of writing paralysis is the result of expecting too much of ourselves the first time out."

So it makes sense that ADHDers would experience writing paralysis, creativity paralysis and procrastination in general — because we are always working on what feels like the final draft (or close to it), the draft that we'll have to present to the world. There's no room for mistakes. We won't have time to come back to fix them. I realized that I'd been thinking of "writing" as "getting it right."

We use urgency to generate motivation to get the work done, but we never get to explore what our creative process would look like if it wasn't always the last minute.

There are different kinds of editing?? A piece of writing can have three, or five, or ten drafts??

It might be to our detriment that we can pull off the last minute work. It can be good work! But I always knew it wasn't my best work. It was the work I could generate when the fear of not finishing overpowered the fear of not getting it right.

When we're done, we're exhausted, maybe disappointed in our compromises, and unlikely to revisit what we have made. Once we've rested, we're ready for something new.

And the cycle repeats.

With each next thing and next thing that we finish in the nick of time, we never get to explore what our creative process might become if we had — not more time, but more space to get things wrong.

What would it take for us to show up and create a shitty first draft that no one will ever see, and trust that we will come back to edit it?

The question is — how do we find the motivation that isn't urgency, and trust that it will sustain us through a project? What might this look like for you?

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