How Writing Saves My Life Every Day

This past week has been stressful. I had a flare-up of back pain that became so bad I couldn’t walk properly, which led to neck stiffness and horrible headaches. I had a bout of stomach pain. On Friday I was due for some day surgery; the same surgery I’d had in 2017, which led to an infection that seemed to have a run-on effect I’m still dealing with.

My surgery was a quick little procedure that went well. The hospital staff were lovely. I was moved into the second recovery room and sat there, dopey and wrapped in a warm blanket. I was the first in that morning, so I listened to the other women being woken up, then shuffled in to sit nearby and slowly come back to the world.

But just like last time, the nurses kept me there a little longer than the others, because I’m one of those people on their own. No-one was coming to get me. I’d caught a taxi to the hospital and I’d catch a taxi back home. A little bit sore and feeling vulnerable, I watched as the other women were greeted by their partners, heard the jokes the nurses made as they left.

‘What did the doctor say? No housework for two weeks? Three?’

Gentle laughter.

I felt a bit sorry for myself.

The first taxi never showed up, even after two phone calls. I called another company and got home to my empty flat. My brother dropped in after work to check on me, because he’s recently moved to the same town. The pain wasn’t bad and I decided to forgo pain relief. I drank lots of water, determined to flush the drugs out of my system. I slept okay.

But because I’d had this stressful little week, I decided to take the weekend off, to recalibrate, to throw out my usual weekend routine. I would, I blithely told myself, chill.

But the ‘chilling’ quickly led to a kind of mental freefall.

I have unmedicated ADHD, and not by choice. I just can’t get medicated. I can’t get treated or supported in any way. I’m poor and live in a regional area. I’m not a child who can be ‘saved’ and go on to live a productive life. I’m a 50 year old woman whose been discarded by the workforce and not worth helping. Frankly I’d get more love if I was a sad-looking dog someone with an Instagram account found on the side of the road.

So the ADHD, which wasn’t picked up until my forties, tends to run rampant if I let it, and this weekend I discovered just why I’ve come to love, and strive for, routine.

I thought I was able to stick to a writing process because I'm passionate about becoming a working novelist, which I am.

I thought it was the one thing I was able to do somewhat well because I’m determined to make a life for myself. A career, even, if I may be so bold. I thought I was able to do all the other stuff on the weekends—cleaning my flat from top to bottom, meal prepping and making sure my small backyard is looked after, because it allowed me to focus so heavily on writing during the rest of the week. Which it does.

But I never realised how my daily routines kept me anchored until I stopped doing them for no particular reason other than I’d decided to veg out on the couch with the half dozen distractions that were encased within my phone, my laptop open to my WIP, because I can’t help myself, and the television.

My ADHD gobbled it all up like rocket fuel.

But instead of helpfully turning me into Ruben Fleischer’s ‘Venom’ I just became a slightly more frantic version of myself who wasn’t making sure I ate well or on time or at all because time had lost all meaning. 10.45pm felt like 5pm. Midnight felt like 5.30pm. I no longer cared about eschewing pain relief and tossed down tablets. I wasn’t weaning out the the hyperactivity in my mind with walking and yoga and focusing on the first draft, while alarms gently dinged throughout the day to tell me to ‘stop doing that and now do this.’ The hyperactivity scattered, switched on ALL the radio stations, and I was lost in the static.

Writing is something I’ve turned into a job. I go get a coffee and I’m at my desk at 9am. I have a quick break at 10.30am— I go outside and re-fill the birdbath, water my potted tomato plant, get some fresh air and sun — and then I’m back at my desk until 12pm. I take a two hour break to have lunch and do any grocery shopping and admin, and try to get back to my desk by 2pm, and then write until 5.30pm, at which point an alarm tells me to unroll my yoga mat on the floor beside my desk, where I stretch out the day’s kinks and breathe. I make tea and watch some telly.

Its not the most exciting life, but its mine.

Without my routine I quickly — frighteningly quickly — find my formerly-leashed mind wandering loose. It feels disorientating and upsetting.

If anyone is unlucky enough to cross my path I cling to them, moth-like, because when you’re adrift anyone can be an anchor. Yesterday when my brother arrived to check up on me I kept him there for hours, talking and talking. Of course I was still post-surgery and a little scatty, but when my mother came by late this afternoon I did the same thing. I haven't really talked to my mother in months. I stopped letting her into my home. I was tired of being hurt and let down. I was tired of not being believed. So I shut her out to protect myself. But today she was pulled into my neediness, and listened to my scattered talking as I tried to empty out some of the noise from the radio stations that were playing all at once. By the time she (escaped) left, I was losing my voice.

I can’t pretend ADHD doesn’t negatively affect my writing process. Of course it does. Its a fucking disorder. But none of us are perfect or unscathed, and ADHD is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. I do what I can with what I have, just like you, and every other person out there in our scattered and disparate little worlds. With writing, I take a lifetime of being rejected, and bullied, and abused and disbelieved, years of being one of the isolated, and I turn it into something sweet. I try to write stories that are warm and humorous. I write rural romance, where love is honest, dogs are loyal and grandmothers give sage advice. And I write middle grade fiction because the world you inhabit at that age is magical. That nondescript pony in the sale yard could be a unicorn, and my eleven-year old heroine knows it.

But always in my pretty, fictional homes there are ghosts lurking; leaving the faint trace of perfume in hallways, the smell of rising bread in the kitchen. And that pony isn’t a unicorn at all, its a dragon. And instead of taking an entire day to write an article and spending half the night editing it and finding the right image, I write this piece in an hour and throw it out into the world, because sometimes an unchained mind can be beautiful, if you let it off the leash in small increments.