Is your writing broken? Or are you bored?

One of the simple but most helpful ways knowing I have ADHD changed my writing practice

This is not at all how I felt while watching The Neverending Story.

When I’m bored, I do questionable things.

Cutting my bangs shorter than I mean to in the middle of the night, because playing with scissors is always more fun than figuring out how to fall asleep.

Cruising at 90 mph on the highway with the music too loud.

Buying more plants. And more plants. Before I've planted the other plants.

Oversharing in the middle of painful small talk, as if exposing myself is somehow going to make the conversation more interesting.

I’m trying to get better at just owning when I’m bored instead of doing questionable things.

My earliest memory of boredom is watching The Neverending Story in elementary school. It was supposed to be a treat, and this should have been a movie I liked, but then they made us sit on the hard, scratchy carpet, and I was in a spot where I could not move around much (and knew I should stay in my spot, good Catholic school girl I was), and the movie started to feel so long and so incredibly true to its name, and I thought I might burst into tears before it ended. The whole experience of watching The Neverending Story was one of trying to keep my electric self wired together, just under the surface of my skin.

I was one of those kids that made people say, “Oh, she needs to be challenged.” I’m starting to wish the message had sometimes been: “This is just very boring, isn't it?” or even “It’s ok if you’re bored.”

I wonder if girls are especially conditioned not to show or speak of boredom. As I watched The Neverending Story, I was holding it in as if it was the worst possible secret. As if my being bored (even if I admitted it only to myself, privately) would be proof that I had no self-control—that if I’m bored, it must be an excess that imposes on others. That I’m refusing to just “go along and get along.”

Maybe it's because declaring “I’m bored.” or “This is boring.” is only a couple doors down from being Obstinate and Oppositional. Bored children become troublemakers. “Idle hands” and all that...

But now it’s become one of the most unexpected freedoms in finding out I have ADHD: I can just be honest when I’m bored.

And I’ve been trying that a lot more lately, and I like it. It’s surprising how much it simplifies my relationship to my writing and my creative rhythms.

There’s no influencer Insta-therapy-talk or psychological magic behind this… it’s just the basic relationship between “uh yeah, there’s a reason you’re an intense restless ball of fire.” and “Oh yeah, that’s me. That makes sense. I can work with that now.”

Finding out I have ADHD genuinely saved my life, so this isn’t to downplay it—but there are some areas, like the basic reality of boredom, where the best thing this did for me was eliminate the noise of, “why am I like this?” And “how do I solve for this, in the most exhaustive way possible?”

Now I don’t have to assume that some complex problem is in play. I don’t have to look for challenge and then strategize with it. I don't have to invent trouble, and I don’t have to keep overthinking it. Now I can just feel that very particular kind of electricity rising inside of me and say, “Oh, I know what this is—I’m bored. I’m just so damn bored!” And meet myself there, instead of circling myself like something is deeply, seriously amiss.

As a writer, this is a small miracle.

How many times have I thought an essay wasn’t coming together, or I was ruining the particulars of an idea, or the order of my poetry book was broken… and then I’ve gone inventing all kinds of prompts and self-critical notes in the margins… or cutting and tightening things beyond what was best for the piece (like a bang trim gone awry)… when sometimes the truth is:

I got bored. Bored with the material. Or bored with the process. Or I had worked on it too long, and I was bored of thinking of the same thing, trying to work in the same universe of the same memory or the same book.

Or bored with the form I was writing in—for instance, right now I’m on a break from poetry. In the past this would have confused the hell out of me. It would have possibly led to a sort of identity crisis: how could I release my debut book of poetry and then stop writing poems?

And now I just know: I need new possibilities. New forms. Even if I took a poetry workshop right now, to try and force it (as I would have in the past), I know that undercurrent of boredom with the form would follow me.

But it doesn't mean I'm not a poet. It doesn't have to mean anything. Bored is a natural phase in the process, not an identity. (And when I call it exactly what it is, the phase doesn’t last nearly as long as I usually think it will.)

The weird thing is how much more I enjoy other projects if I admit I was getting bored elsewhere. It’s like an instant jolt to all my other work, like the projects-in-waiting hear me say “I’m bored” and take it as their cue to dance. I'm loving the work on my creative nonfiction project, and I'm letting myself have all of the good energy. I'm not stealing precious energy from one area of my writing to solve false problems in another.

I know this isn't unique to writers with ADHD. But I do wonder if writers with ADHD are more susceptible to it—and more susceptible to misjudging and over-complicating it when it happens.

Or maybe other writers wouldn’t call this boredom at all, but in the ADHD bodymind, it makes more sense to us and feels easier to deal with when we recognize it as boredom.

It’s been a little game with myself now, to figure out when I’m actually just bored. I wish I would have kept track of this since finding out I have ADHD, because it’s been pretty surprising… I’m realizing how much I’ve confused it with depression, with shortcomings in my practice, with all sorts of things in the past. I've been negotiating with this sensation my whole life, without knowing who was really sitting across the table.

I love any practice that creates a little more generosity… so much language around writing aims at tightening, refining, sharpening, etc. So many sharp edges aimed at our work, asking us to hold still and not move. Maybe befriending the boredom softens those edges. At the very least I like how it leaves more blank space in my practice—it opens the margins where I would have filled them with noise, questions, and uncertainty before.