Imagination Gone Wrong: A Poem About ADHD, Creativity & Anxiety

Creativity and anxiety: two sides of the same (very large if you have ADHD) coin?

Photo by Miki Fath on Unsplash

As an ADHD coach-in-training, I’m going to say something controversial. Over the years, while therapists and coaches have undoubtedly played an instrumental role in my healing, no one has helped me more than the poets and autobiographers—the truth-tellers. The ones who have gone so deep into themselves that they unearth something ancient and universal, holding it up for the rest of us to see. Their words, a lighthouse - guiding us back to what is real when we find ourselves lost in life’s stormy seas.

Whether it was Rumi writing about the ecstasy of divine love or Andrea Gibson daring to speak about the taboo feelings many of us carry but were taught to hide in shame, their words have given me something to hold onto when I’ve lost sight of my own light.

If I’m honest, my reverence for these great truth-tellers comes from a place deeper than gratitude. Something in me has always longed to join them on their quest. To be so connected to Source, in such flow with Truth, to ride my imagination to the deepest, most unconditioned parts of myself and shine light on the shadows, putting words to it all in hopes that one day others might find refuge there amidst their own storms.

A quest, I’ve learned, that is a little easier said than done.

In my first post about writing hacks for ADHDers, I described the often uncomfortable reality of being a writer with ADHD: exploding with ideas but unable to converge my thoughts into one cohesive stream, leaving me feeling like a shaken-up pop bottle with the lid screwed on tight.

And that’s me on a good day. Most days, over the past few years, it’s felt more like an empty bottle rattling around aimlessly. No ideas in sight.

Caught between knowing I’m called to tell the truth and feeling like I’m so often pumping from a dried-up well, I found myself wondering how I could possibly craft a career from my unreliable bursts of creativity. Then I stumbled across advice from one of my favourite truth-tellers, Liz Gilbert. In her book Big Magic, Liz warns against burdening creativity with the weight of survival. “Marry stable,” she says. Find work you enjoy and that sustains you. Then, in your spare time, have a passionate love affair with your inner artist.

So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Except my artist is playing hard to get.

We’ll connect for a while, create something magical, and then—poof—she ghosts me.

No calls. No texts. Nothing.

The other morning, as I sat in meditation, I heard these words:

“Your artist isn’t ghosting you, Laura. You’re ghosting her.”

Pardon me?

“You’re ghosting her because you’re terrified of her.”

I am not following.

“Your ‘inner artist’, this part of you that homes your imagination, the maker and teller of stories, is the creative genius behind all your stories. What is your anxiety, your deep-rooted painful self-concepts and your shame spirals if not really good stories?”

No…you’re telling me my wonderful, creative, playful imagination is behind my anxiety and depression?

“She’s one and the same—two sides of the same coin. Creativity is imagination used constructively. Anxiety is imagination gone wrong, the nice kid who fell in with the wrong crowd and picked up some bad habits”

Not realizing they were the same, I had effectively been trying to lure my imagination in while simultaneously repelling her with a 20-foot-high brick wall. It’s like I’de been hiding in a castle surrounded by a moat filled with sharks, shouting, “what’s taking you so long?”

In my defence, an ‘ADHD imagination that fell in with the wrong crowd’ is a terrifying thing. You see, the ADHD brain is incredibly powerful — equated to a “Ferrari engine with bicycle breaks” - a wonderful thing when you are going in a good direction! But when it gets going with a painful thought, good luck trying to stop it. And the ADHD brain loves getting going with a thought, any thought, because thoughts are stimulating and the ADHD brain loves stimulation. It doesn’t discriminate either - bad thought? Painful thought? All stimulation is good stimulation according to the ADHD brain. And don’t get me started on the ADHD brain’s tendency to rely on shame and self-criticism for sources of motivation!

Given all of this, you could say I was (understandably) sending my imagination some mixed signals.

And so, we’ve been stuck—estranged and mistrustful, each afraid of the other.

But the other morning, she came for a visit. We wrote something together about our messy, tangled, and deeply connected bond.

We hope you enjoy :)

- Laura & Maggie

Long Lost Friends

I call her Maggie
the girl who lives in my brain
she’s an Artist, through and through
paintbrushes and half-chewed pencils spill from her oversized overall pockets
Her notebook of stories never not in her pencil-smudged hand

Maggie and I go way back
she conjured the make-believe worlds of my childhood
co-wrote the love songs we came up with at age seven

Maggie designed the chalk-drawn houses
I called home in the summer of 1999
she was president of the fan clubs and grocery stores 
run out of my parents’ basement closet under the stairs
(to this day, Mary-Kate and Ashley fan club members are the only ones allowed inside
according to the sharpie-marked beams
though my Mom, an honorary member, 
is permitted once a year when she needs to fetch the Christmas bins) 

needless to say, Maggie was busy
she was good at what she did
so good that she caught the eye of another girl who lived in my brain

we’ll call her Em
Em arrived in the early 2000's
when school was getting hard for me

you see, grade three is no joke
when you’re living with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD
because you’re a high-masking, perfectionistic, people-pleasing little girl
—not a little boy who can’t sit still at his desk
which was apparently the only way to get a diagnosis
(shout out to the patriarchy.)

all I knew was that school was hard
and that I was different
and all Em knew was that different was bad

so Em had a plan: 
hide the struggle
keep everyone around me happy at all times
and make sure no one questioned whether I was smart and capable

to pull this off, she needed some help
she needed to create stories scary enough to keep me in line

she turned to Maggie for her storytelling
her knack for turning fiction into something so vivid it felt like truth

so Maggie, ever the team player
was pulled from the joy of our childhood creations 
to form the other half of what would become 
'The Anxiety Network'

Maggie became a full-time show-runner for the network
the flagship series was a long-running success:
“I Guess I’m Just Lazy and Stupid" 
aired for 23 seasons straight

it was a smash success
—convincing, binge-worthy, and utterly immersive
I watched it all day long

until one day I managed to peel my eyes from the screen 
long enough to read an article 
about ADHD in girls and women
it was as though my entire life had been typed out
every struggle—there it was

perhaps I wasn't lazy or stupid? 

the article was the first crack in the façade
a pinprick of light that broke through Em's narrative
poking holes in the plot
each new piece of knowledge widened the gaps
until the story collapsed in on itself
like a punctured balloon losing its shape

last year, the show was finally cancelled
sometimes, though, I still find myself 
reciting the lines I once knew by heart
before coming back to my senses and remembering
—those lines aren't any more real 
than the plastic credit cards 
my parents used to shop at
my grocery store with

eventually, the network was shut down
and Maggie suddenly had a lot more time on her hands
so we’ve been hanging out 

today she told me she was looking forward 
to creating something other than horror 
for the first time in 23 years

“do you like poetry?” I asked her

she leaned forward, eyes glinting with mischief
and snapped her notebook shut

“step into my office,” she said

I followed
ducking under the sharpie-marked beams
my fingers brushing over the letters we scrawled all those years ago
Mary-Kate and Ashley fans only