On Steadiness, and the Writing

For the past few weeks I have not felt steady.

I kept assuming that the more I understood myself, the more solid the ground would feel. It has not been that simple. Learning about my ADHD, sitting with myself, writing, processing what I feel, sharing it: some of it has helped, and some of it has not. I have worried more. I have read too much into small things, so that a silence, or a message left unread, can move a whole day. I have felt intense highs and lows. But I have also come to know myself more deeply and more honestly than I ever had before. I have been able to name parts of me I could not see clearly until now, like the Judge. I have begun to understand how my brain is wired, and how that wiring has quietly shaped so much of my life, for so long. That is the part I am still coming to terms with, and I think it is what I have struggled with the most.

There are other layers stacked on top of all of it, too. How I come across, trying to take off the masks I wear in person and through my writing. How my friends and closest relationships see me. Home repairs. Money. Things at work I do not seem able to resolve, however hard I try. Any one of these on its own I think I could carry. It is the weight of them together, arriving while I am also trying to understand myself, that has left me feeling so overwhelmed of late.

The writing is mine first. Before it belongs to anyone, it is the place I go to make sense of what I feel. That part I am sure of.

I think a lot of people are afraid of writing. They imagine it takes great effort, and thought, and care, that the words have to be arranged just so. I have found the opposite to be true. When I stop thinking so hard, and stop worrying, and simply let my mind move, the truest things arrive on their own: the things I always wanted to say, and even the things that could never be said out loud, to anyone, in person. The page is where they are finally allowed to exist.

I did not come to any of this on my own. A friend, the Hare, told me to write, and at first I resisted. What would I even think? What would I want to say? What would I write? He told me not to worry about any of that, and simply to put down whatever thoughts arrived. Some would be mundane and some would be good, and it did not matter which, because a mind left to wander drifts on its own, from the small and ordinary towards the things it is really trying to work out. It might begin as a diary. It slowly turns into the things you need to sit with. All it asks is that you give yourself permission to stop for a moment and think. It is a little like meditation, I suppose, except that instead of trying to silence everything, you empty your head onto the page and let it go. I have found writing to be a deeply cathartic way of doing exactly that.

The hardest part is not the writing. It is the starting: the willingness to pick up the pen and begin. That is something I have written about before, because it is something I can do again and again. My brain seems wired to begin. Though I will admit it was difficult for me too, at first. So if you do not know where to start, this is the only advice that has ever helped me: do not try to write well, and do not try to write the whole thing at once. Just begin, badly if you have to, in the middle if you have to, and let it come out raw and unformed. Whatever ideas and thoughts pop inside your head, let them out. The shape can come later. Beginning is the only part that cannot be skipped. And it is not only willingness that holds people back. There is also the worry that writing will swallow hours you do not have.

The way I do it now, which a friend first showed me, is simple. I pour my ideas in, raw and unshaped, and let an AI help me give them structure and shape. But the ideas, and the words I keep, are always mine. I never let it invent something that did not come from within me, and that matters, because then it is not the machine talking, it is me. I shape and reshape every line until it says what I really think, feel and mean. And it answers that worry about time, too. It is far faster than you would think. When you stop holding on and simply pour out whatever is arriving, a great deal of what you think and feel reaches the page very quickly. I wrote more than a hundred and forty pieces, over 140,000 words in the space of a few weeks, most of them worked out while walking my dog. I poured myself into each piece with a relentless ferocity and a deep sense of care.

And once you have written a few things, you may find yourself reading them back, or wanting to share them. Do it. You might notice a lot of negativity in what comes out, and that is all right too. Sometimes seeing it laid out on the page is exactly what moves you to write something more hopeful, because you find yourself reaching for a little balance. And in those lighter thoughts, every so often, you will write something that could make another person happy. A journal does not always have to be about yourself. Sometimes the truest thing you can write is about someone else.

But when I share a piece, I am hoping, quietly, not always willing to admit it, that it will land with someone I care about and be received correctly, with the intention I had behind writing it in the first place. And because I put my real self into it, more of myself than most people ever put anywhere another person can see, it does not seem to land lightly. When it lands, it seems to land somewhere deep. And when it does not, that costs me in the same measure, because I have handed over so much and I am left holding the question of whether it was too much.

There have been times the writing was a gift. It has made people feel warmth. Some of my friends and family have cried tears of happiness reading what I wrote. Sometimes it has done the kindest thing writing can do: it has said me too to someone, so they knew they were not alone in what they were carrying. Sometimes it has held a mirror up to someone so they can truly see the good in themselves, through my eyes, that they might not have believed was there. In those moments I understand exactly what the writing is for.

But there are other times. Mostly the silence. When I send something and do not know how it was received, the not-knowing costs me. And in those times I have to admit something I would rather not: that a piece of writing is not always a gift. That handed to the wrong moment, or handed too often, the same thing that is my truest way of reaching can become a weight rather than a warmth. More than someone was ready to be handed.

Only about a third of what I write has been made public. The rest stays with me. Some of it because it is too personal and I am not or may never be ready to share it. Some because it was written for one specific person and belongs to them, and some because there are other people held inside the pieces, and it is not my place to expose them. I am willing for my writing to expose me. My own vulnerability is mine to give. But it is not mine to give away someone else's.

I once read that people with ADHD often love receiving lots of text: long messages, whole paragraphs, something with detail and clarity to sink into. I recognised myself in it completely. I would love that. To be handed something heartfelt by a friend, written with me in mind, something to read slowly and more than once. But it is not something I really receive. I am nearly always the one sending. And that is the quiet ache underneath so much of this: that the way I would most want to be reached is the way I am most rarely reached at all.

It has happened, though. A friend wrote something for me, and then, within a few days, wrote me another. I have read both dozens of times. They have helped me more than I know how to say. I keep them the way you keep things that cannot be replaced. And I think the reason they have held me for so long is exactly how rare it is: in all this time, one person did the thing I am always doing for others, and turned it towards me, not once but twice, within a few days of each other. That same friend gave me more than the two pieces, too. He is the one who taught me how to do this at all: how to pour ideas out and give them shape, so that the starting, and the writing, and the doing were never as hard as I had first assumed they would be. Two pieces of writing, meant for me, have held me up more times than I can count. That is how much they are worth. That is how much I would give to be reached like that again.

Maybe naming all of this is part of trying to stand on steadier ground. Ground that does not depend on whether a piece lands, or a message is read. Just ground of my own. I am not there yet. But this piece, unlike so much of what I write, I do not mind sharing. It is not reaching for anyone in particular to catch it. It offers something instead: a little of what I have come to understand about the writing, and the starting, and the slow work of knowing myself. And maybe that is the surest sign of steadier ground I have found so far. A piece I can send out into the world without my footing resting on where it lands. Writing it down, and being able to let it go, feels like a small step back towards it.