Understanding
the ADHD Mind

I walk past it maybe fifteen times a day. I've picked it up, held it, and put it back down again more than once.

In those same weeks I built and launched five things and ran two businesses.

That is the sentence I could not explain to myself for thirty years. I can build a business. I can't book the NCT.

And it isn't sitting there because it's hard. It's sitting there because it's boring, and somewhere along the way I worked out that for me those two things are the same.

That reminder has company.

There's a bill I didn't pay on time. Not because the money wasn't there. The money was there the whole time. I remembered it at some ridiculous hour, days after the fact, and lay there feeling that specific hot wash of frustration that comes with knowing you had everything you needed and still didn't do it.

There's a message from a friend I like. A good friend. It's been sitting unanswered so long that answering it has turned into its own event, something I'd need to sit down and do properly rather than just fire off. So now it isn't a message anymore. It's a small ceremony I keep not scheduling.

And there's the ordinary daily stuff that doesn't even qualify as a failure, it's just weather. Leaving the house, going back in for my keys, noticing the fridge door is open, closing it, heading back out, and realising on the doorstep that I still haven't got the keys.

That last one still makes me laugh, most days. The others don't, quite.

None of this is dramatic. Nobody's life fell apart. That's actually the thing I want to say first, because the version of this you see online is usually much louder than the real one. There's no rock bottom in this chapter. There's just a slow, quiet accumulation of small things that didn't get closed, and the low background hum of knowing they're there.

And I should say one more thing early, because I know something about who picks up a book like this.

Parts of what follows are hard. There were years I would not want back. But I am writing this from a life that works most of the time, with a marriage in it and work I chose and a fair bit of ordinary contentment, and the NCT is still not booked in the middle of all that. Both of those things are true at once.

I am not writing to you from the bottom of anything. It just took me a long time to get here, and nobody told me what I was dealing with.

Now here's where it gets confusing, and this is the bit I couldn't explain to myself for years.

In the same period that reminder has been sitting on my counter, I built and launched things.

I run two businesses in Limerick. Revival Float Rooms and Revival Harmony. Floatation tanks, sound work, courses. There are staff, there are clients, there's stock, there are rooms that have to be ready when someone walks in the door at ten past six on a Tuesday evening.

I did a mindfulness course years ago and I've practised it ever since. I'm not a mindfulness teacher and I don't run mindfulness courses, but it runs through the sound sessions and the cacao sessions I do run, and through the courses I teach for sound medicine practitioners. It changed how I work more than anything else on this list.

I'll let that sit for a second.

And in one stretch of about two months, I wrote and made five things. A book of a hundred and ten lessons. A guide to cacao. Three separate planners, one of them specifically designed for people who can't stick to planners.

I'm not listing that to sound impressive. I'm listing it because it's the contradiction at the centre of this whole book, and if you've got any version of it in your own life you'll know it doesn't feel impressive at all. It feels like being two different people who share a diary.

One of them is trusted with other people's wages. The other one cannot be trusted to book a car test.

For a long time I assumed my problem was focus. That I didn't have enough of it, or that I'd used it all up somewhere.

That never quite fitted, though, because I can focus. I can vanish into something for hours. I once sat down to spend an hour updating a website and stood up twelve hours later having rebuilt the whole thing from scratch, having eaten nothing, having genuinely enjoyed myself. I've disappeared into the history of floatation tanks while a room in my house sat half-painted.

So it isn't that the attention isn't there. It's that I don't always get to choose where it goes.

The description that finally made sense to me isn't about noise. A lot of ADHD writing describes a mind that never shuts up, twenty voices talking over each other, and I'd read that and think, well, that's not me either. My mind can be quite quiet. I meditate. I can sit in silence without it being a struggle.

What I have is ideas. They arrive out of nowhere, one after another, and the problem isn't how many there are.

The problem is that they all turn up wearing the same badge, and the badge says: important, do this now.

A new course idea arrives with exactly the same urgency as the NCT. Actually, no. It arrives with more, because it's new and the NCT isn't. So the idea gets the afternoon, and the reminder gets another day on the counter, and neither of those was a decision I made. It's more like watching the wrong thing happen from slightly behind my own eyes.

I've heard people describe an ADHD mind as having fifty browser tabs open. What I'd add to that is that half of them are playing music and I can't find which ones.

I need to say this part carefully, because it isn't only my story.

My wife works with me in the business. She's good at the things I'm not, and some of the work simply lands with her because she'll do it properly and I'll do it three weeks late.

There's a thing she does that I didn't have a name for until recently. She'll sit beside me while I do the boring stuff. Emails, forms, stock counts, the returns. She isn't doing it for me. Half the time she isn't even talking. She's just there, and somehow that's the entire difference between the thing happening and the thing not happening.

I'll come back to this properly later on, because there's a real mechanism underneath it and it's one of the few things that reliably works for me.