2024, ADHD & Me

What are my goals for 2024? Every year people ask me this. Every year I ask myself. Truth is …I don’t know. I never really know. I have dreams and wishes I guess but never really worked on things as a “goal” even though I say it out loud like “my goal is to lose weight” then the week after New Years, people stop asking me my goals and even I forget what they were on December 31st…Last year I had a goal to write my stories and share them - so I signed up to Vocal - I wrote ONE. Just one short haiku. Then life got in the way. The Writing and Actor strikes happened, I lost my job, I didn’t know what to do next and kinda spiraled.

I was told I “pretty much” have ADHD by my therapist last year which was a hunch I already had. “Pretty much” because therapists aren’t really supposed to diagnosed it and she was just using the quizzes as a tool to help me deal with it all at the time. But I had always known. I stray off in tangents to tell one story. I can’t sit still. I get bored really easily. I have so many ideas. I have so many half finished projects…the list goes on.

Anyway the point of this - when you have ADHD you may have “multiple tabs” open in your brain and you have many to-do lists - some get ticked off, a lot you forget and the rest gets to overwhelming that and you don’t know where to begin…so you just shut down. Well that’s what I have anyway. I get so motivated with new year resolutions and goals and will make many a list. But, without the accountability or external motivation which someone like me needs... I don’t get much done. Six months later, I would remember the goal I had and would get depressed about it and forget to look at the advantage of having “multiple tabs” - that is; I did chip away at a lot of different things I ought to be proud of. One of which being; my boyfriend and I wrote a novella together! “Dante’s Homecoming: A Human Experience”, wasn’t a goal Chris & I had but when we finished, we were shocked how well we wrote and flowed together; we had to publish it on Amazon to share it with the world.

This year, my Vocal goals are to write more and do at least one challenge a month. I have a hard time with procrastination- when you have ADHD, you can do 8 hours of work one day, 40 hours of work in the next day and then 0 hours of work the following day… the thing is when you wake up - you don’t know which day will be which? So, I’m learning more about how my brain actually works and am going to put that in to practice this year!

I’m also going to take it easy and not take challenges too seriously either but use them as inspirations or like journal prompts to get train my brain to focus on one specific topic at a time.

My impact on vocal? I hope to be more open and vulnerable and maybe inspire others with neurodivergence to write and hopefully finish their piece too! Boy, I know how hard it is to actually FINISH something and be proud for just finishing. This challenge will be the first writing piece I FINISH in 2024 and hopefully not the last.

May 2024 be a year of you finishing what you started too!