An ADHD Content Creator

What’s hilariously depressing about this post is that I’ve been thinking about this for almost a year and, thanks in part to ADHD, I’ve never actually got around to doing it. In fact, I wanted to do a video on it for my YouTube channel but here we are, making it a blog post instead for the blog I’ve struggled to maintain.

I’ve also decided to write this on my phone, because my desire to sit in front of my own computer lately, or ever really, has been minimal.

Starting My Journey

Look, I’ve had plenty to say in my life and no drive to say it. This blog has at various stages been a low effort outlet for a lot of that, but has also been difficult to keep momentum on simply because once the medication runs out, concentration leaves with it.

I made the decision several years ago to start a YouTube channel, when I still lived in Melbourne. You can see on the channel creation date how long ago that was. What you can also see is how long between that and my first actual video was.

Well, it was a year before that when I actually wanted to start making the channel. So it took a year to even register something on YouTube that wasn’t my own personal account.

I work full time. Have for, well, ever. My energy and the hours that I can concentrate for thanks to medication I put in to, well, maintaining that employment. Because money. Have bills to pay. Ain’t changing.

So projects like this blog, my channel, the stuff I do on my channel, they all take a back burner. For most people, they’d do this after hours, create, blog, whatever.

But not me. I get to make a choice.

I get to use a bulk of my high performance hours to keep the money coming in. What’s left of them are then divided out to doing dull adult shit like shopping, organising life stuff, and finances. If I have any left, well, then maybe I’ll find time to do something creative.

Also keep in mind that the medication itself is taxing on me. Pushing energy out to make me act like an adult. Keep me going. When it runs out, so does the energy, and my ability yo concentrate on tasks is just a little worse than my normal already terrible baseline.

Some weekends I like to not have the medication in my system. It lowers my stress levels but it comes at a cost. And that cost is productivity.

So I get to choose how to use my limited productive hours each day. And it fucking sucks.

Sacrifices

My choices plus ADHD mean I get to make sacrifices. I can medicate on weekends which means sacrificing relaxation, and often sacrificing my mood when I’m around friends. Or I can not take medication and just not be productive.

One of the bigger sacrifices is when I have to step away from personal projects. Finite productive hours means finite time to do anything.

Right now, I’ve got a number of little projects going on that are all things I’ve partially recorded and worked on specifically for my YouTube channel. Lots of them were supposed to be quick-ish but interesting (to me) things that I really wanted to do and share with the world.

But then things have gone wrong. Unforeseen issues, problems, things that need extensive troubleshooting to continue. Most people could make time for this. To resolve the issue. Get past it.

But this isn’t something I really can do. There’s a couple of issues. Firstly, it takes away productive time. A project that should take days becomes weeks. Weeks that I need to use those precious hours to keep going on with other activities.

Then there’s reengaging. Maybe I’ll find the time again to work on these projects again once I’ve ticked off other stuff, but the ADHD brain struggles with this reengaging.

Sitting next to my desk is my shelf of abandoned (hopefully temporarily) projects. All potential future content, and all just sitting there waiting for me to find the time and the willingness to reinvest in all of these.

Ideas Come, and Go

The next struggle is an organisational one. It applies both to my blog and to my channel. Creative ideas come at strange times. I don’t need to be concentrating to have them come up. They just happen.

But outside of my concentration hours that I have free, these ideas come, and then are soon forgotten. I come up with something brilliant that I’m dead keen to do, but much like my car keys, or wallet, I just forget about it and struggle to recall it again later. It’s fucked.

So the idea just disappears in to the ether. I know I could maintain a list, put it on my phone, or even create a spreadsheet. Actually, I might work on that after this blog post.

Whether I remember to use it or not is another thing. It’s annoying. It is all significantly more difficult than it should be.

Celebrating Neurodiversity

I didn’t know whether to put this in. There’s a lot of pushing forward to celebrate and accept neurodiversity these days. Don’t get me wrong. I support anything that helps me and my neurodiverse friends become more accepted and receive more help.

But as for my own neurodiversity. I hate it. I don’t feel like it’s something to celebrate. I feel like it’s a burden and a disability and right now I don’t feel like it is helping me.

Look, it probably is. But writing this today, I just don’t have the mood to think about it. I fucking hate having ADHD.

I hate that I can’t seem to get a grip on some simple goals like being able to have some consistency in the content creation I want to do. I hate that I’m struggling with projects that I want to do, and despite my best efforts, not being able to share them.

I feel so helpless in it all sometimes. Especially today. I feel like I let people down so much sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong. This won’t stop me from trying and continuing to drive my blog and my channel forward. Because when I get successes it does make me feel good. I just wish I was better.