I recently found out, at age twenty-five, that I have ADHD. As all my mentally ill and neurodivergent buddies know, a diagnosis can be very validating; it can make you look at your habits and go, Ooooooooh, THAT’S why I do that shit! For me, an example of “that shit” includes my inability to choose a niche. And every TikTok social media manager says that, in order to blow up, you need to pick a niche and stick to it. Which sucks for me, because I can’t seem to stick with anything, and it doesn’t help that I have a billion interests, none of which I’ve mastered to the point of being marketable. They say that, in order to master something, you have to practice it for one thousand hours. And to quote one of my favorite TV shows, that’s too much, man!
If you know me, or if you kind of know what my deal is, you might say, Hey bucko, aren’t you a master of words? It’s funny because I have a literal Masters in words (hee hee ho ho!). But, like I told my therapist who wouldn’t diagnose me with ADHD because of my “academic success,” an MFA is pass-fail and much easier to attain when you have lived a privileged life as I have. Academic success? Kimberly, I bullshitted (bullshat?) my way through school without reading a whole book the entire time. So maybe on paper I am a master of words. But for someone who identifies as a writer, I sure don’t write as much as I’d like to. But I guess I’m just being stubborn when I say it’s not marketable. Still, I’m going to complain for one more paragraph.
I don’t do a lot of things as much as I’d like to. But I do a lot of things: writing nonfiction, writing satire, making music, making TikToks, tweeting, photoshopping, knitting, building with blocks, walking, sleeping, coaching softball, speaking Spanish. But I’ve barely touched my memoir since graduating; I have a dozen drafts (if you can call them that) of original songs on my computer; I took eleven years of Spanish and can’t carry a conversation. And so on.
I was talking to my comfortably employed friend the other day. She also has ADHD, so I feel safe talking to her about being a chronic dabbler. These ARE marketable skills, she said before reminding me that you can bend and twist and stretch a resume — kind of like a creative nonfiction story. (If any potential employers or any potential readers see this, I was kidding about the whole bending and twisting and stretching thing. You can take everything I say at face value.) My father calls me “compulsively honest,” and normally I don’t do too much bending, twisting, and stretching (except in the… yoga room), but I do do a lot of hating capitalism. And why not work the system that works us to death? *Thumbs up emoji*
Blaming capitalism is handy. Now, I don’t want to give any bait to boomers who call people my age lazy because we “don’t want to work anymore.” I’m just saying that, it sucks to be a creator — to want to finish my memoir or write silly satire pieces about Harry Styles or make beep-boop-bop sounds on my keyboard — but then feel like all my creative endeavors are a waste of time when I should be applying to jobs. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing in 2022 so far — applying to jobs and feeling bad about myself. I graduated with my MFA in 2021, and I was so excited to keep going with my thesis project, which would become my memoir, and I nodded eagerly at my advisers when they said I shouldn’t stop writing or else it would be harder and harder for me to pick up a pencil (I don’t write with a pencil, but it sounds better to say “pick up a pencil”), and they were right, but here I am, without a reliable income and without new chapters to my memoir. Maybe it’ll get better once I’m finally prescribed stimulants. Or maybe it won’t be better until we overthrow capitalism. I guess I’ll just be patient.
