How To Start a Blog When You Have ADHD

2/2/22

Step One: Hyperfocus on choosing a template & choosing your domain.

Step Two: Experience Rejection Sensitivity when the launch doesn’t immediately garner a mass following.

Step Three: Start an Accelerated Master’s Program that you totally have bandwidth for.

Step Four: Forget the blog exists.

Step Five: Get married.

Step Six: Achieve a 4.0 GPA in the first term of Grad School.

Step Seven: Start the second term & discover that the new professors missed the memo about the dangers of overloading students with too much homework.

Step Eight: Neglect your child for half a week in an attempt to convince yourself that you can totally manage a workload of 7 chapters of textbook reading + an entire book + two papers + discussion posts — half of which is due by Wednesday.

Step Nine: Have an emotional meltdown tinged with self-loathing over the fact that you have failed to keep of the metaphorical balls in the air.

Step Ten: Withdraw from the program before you get billed for the second term.

Step Eleven: Lament the fact that you just spent several hundreds of dollars on text books that you can’t use.

Step Twelve: Get billed for the second term anyways.

Step Thirteen: Convince yourself you’ll finish the program once your son is in elementary school.

Step Fourteen: Become consumed by managing an array of medical specialist appointments & therapies.

Step Fifteen: Catch up on all of the household duties that fell to shit when you were trying to convince yourself that you could totally handle Grad School right now.

Step Sixteen: Remember you started a blog, consider coming back with a post about how difficult it is to complete bureaucratic tasks such as a legal name change during the pandemic that never ends.

Step Seventeen: Make 4 trips to the DMV, two to the (Closed) local Social Security office, and half-a-dozen calls to various Social Security Branches in fruitless attempts to legally change your name & track down the marriage license that is being held hostage by Vogons.

Step Eighteen: Receive marriage license back in the mail — without any notation of explanation… let alone the replacement social security card you applied for.

Step Nineteen: Thanos your own Discord Server.

Step Twenty: Return to the blog, masking your embarrassment behind a tongue-in-cheek listicle post that pokes fun at the way your neurodivergence makes it challenging to start and complete tasks — despite the fact that your brain is constantly churning out new ideas at a zillion miles per minute.

Elevator Pitch:

Disney+ original series where the family Madrigal work through traumatic events as a team according to the strengths of their roles:

(Black Sheep, Scapegoat, Golden Child, Hero, etc…)

Generational trauma isn’t so simple that it can be solved in a singular musical finale… it requires ongoing work.

Lots of folk could benefit from having constructive strategies for conflict resolution modeled for them by characters they identify with.

Just sayin’ 🤷🏻‍♀️

Call me Gracie

Hi. Yes. Hello there. Welcome to this space. It is very much still under construction. In a random stroke of space-weather induced insomnia / neurodivergent hyper-fixation, I have decided to return to my content creation roots by way of blogging.

Awkward Beginnings

Way back in the year 2004…. Before TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or even MySpace…. before I had completed my Communication Studies degree, (certainly before the development of my prefrontal cortex and the common sense to keep my dirty laundry out of the public sphere…) I used to be a small-time blogger.

I was a young writer, still technically a teenager.

At the time, the goal was to streamline the archives of my compulsive therapeutic journaling habit into something that took up less physical space and/or muscle-power to store & transport.

Somewhere along the lines, it became a positive social outlet compatible with my social ineptitude introversion.

The original blog had a small, but fiercely loyal following of around 30 consistent daily readers. (Granted, some of those readers were hate-follows, but that’s not the point.)

Embarrassing Evolutions

After a few years, that blog fell by the wayside when I was confronted with the consequences of my poor life choices learned about setting, holding, and respecting healthy personal boundaries surrounding privacy. There were several attempts to reboot my blogging “career”, most of which were abandoned due to rejection sensitivity and/or distractibility.

By this time, Facebook and Twitter had turned me into a digital junkie enthralled me with quick hits of sweet, sweet dopamine convenient short form content hosting and shady psychological manipulation tactics groundbreaking marketing strategies.

5 years of therapy later, I still find myself hopping from hyper-fixation to hyper-fixation. The difference being, these days, I’m trying to give myself more grace about it, by accepting that this is just how my brain works (instead of believing it to be some sort of moral failing worthy of a self-destructive shame spiral.)

Friends, Followers, & Fans

I have been “hashtag blessed” on this particular stretch of my personal growth journey to be accompanied by a TikTok following of nearly 10,000. (Granted, half of those are likely men who mistook my page for a thirst trap account, but that’s not the point…)

For reasons that I still struggle to fully grasp, there are people in the world who enjoy the way in which I string thoughts together with words. Ever so much more than thirty.

It is my intent to use this particular web space as a digital hub for all of the mediums & subject matters in which I dabble… This includes (but is not limited to) long form writing, poetry, microblogging, short form video, podcasting, & photography. Bookmark & follow along for infodump rants & reflections pertaining to current events, special interests, personal growth, and other neurodivergent nonsense.

An Alliteration Affinity

The fact of the matter is, stringing thoughts together and putting them into words SOOTHES me. I don’t always have the bandwidth to mask perform as expected in social settings. This makes it quite difficult to tolerate being visually perceived without inducing a phase of debilitating inconvenient doom spiral rejection sensitive dysphoria.

Writing, on the other hand, grants me the freedom to organize those thoughts with a degree of asynchronous flexibility. This is incredibly helpful for me when it comes to pushing past creative blocks & conveying my intended message in a way that helps me find friends who “get it” and meet my social needs on my own terms.

Welcome & Warnings

Questions, writing prompts, productive conflict differentiation & other content suggestions made in good faith are quite welcome in my comment section.

Banned Behaviors

Shit-posting, trolling, competitive conflict escalation, racism, classism, ableism & all other forms of bigoted fuckery are NOT welcome here. Engaging in this type of behavior will get you comment banned and/or IP blocked, with or without warning.

If you made it this far, you are hereby entitled to a high five and/or gold star, which may be collected in the comment section.

Take care, and don’t forget to subscribe!

~Gracie