u/EchoesofElsewhere42 — reddlx

▲ 104 r/SongWriter+2 crossposts

There’s an unintended cruelty in being told a solution is simple

The thing no one tells you about ADHD: you know exactly what to do.
l've made the list. I've made a list about the list!

Knowing what to do has never been the issue, it's the gap between intention and action that swallows you whole. I wrote Mind the Gap to try and explain that.

When someone chirps "just do it," what I hear is "try harder," which hits when your brain runs on interest, urgency and chaos instead of logic.

I'm not lazy, I'm exhausted.
There's a difference.

It's 1am Tomorrow's problem. Soft decree.
Signed, sincerely, future me.
Anyone else's executive function clock in after midnight?

u/EchoesofElsewhere42 — 3 days ago

▲ 1 r/SongWriter+1 crossposts

A lyric I wrote made me uncomfortable. Not because it wasn’t true. Because it was.

I wrote a song called A Simpler Life about craving less noise, less distraction, less hyper-connection.

The lyric that unlocked the whole thing was:

I thought the song was about modern life until I wrote

“Drowning out the silence I fear.”

Because if I’m honest, a lot of the noise isn’t imposed on me.

I choose it.

I pick up my phone.
I open another tab.
I scroll.
I check something.
I document the moment instead of being in it.

The realisation that I maybe I seek it out because stillness is harder than I like to admit.

I think a lot of us do.

The irony is that I ended up using the song as the soundtrack to a May memories reel. Family footage on holiday. Beach. Sea. Kids. The kind of moment the song argues we should be present for.

Have you ever written a lyric that started as observation and ended up feeling more like a confession?

Where the song turns around and reveals something about the you instead of the subject.

Maybe that’s why music has always felt a bit like therapy to me. Not because it gives me answers, but because every so often it asks a question I’ve been avoiding.

u/EchoesofElsewhere42 — 9 days ago

▲ 25 r/adhd_anxiety

Starting everything, finishing nothing.

Feeling everything too much.

Overthinking things that didn’t seem to affect anyone else the same way.

I could be the loudest one in the room and still feel completely separate from it.

Getting diagnosed at 36 didn’t fix those things.

But it did help take away a layer of shame I didn’t realise I’d been carrying.

Around the same time, I started writing at night because my brain wouldn’t switch off.

Not journaling exactly. More like fragments. Thoughts I couldn’t say out loud. I’d turn them into little poems just to give the feeling somewhere to go.

Somewhere along the way those fragments became songs. I wasn’t trying to make anything public.

It was just a way to process what was going on in my head.

But I realised I kept coming back to the same things:

The gap between knowing what to do and actually being able to do it.

Hyperfocus and the crash that comes after.

Trying to be a parent and a partner and a functioning adult at the same time.

Not really knowing which version of you is the real one anymore.

The older I get, the more I realise how many of us are walking around carrying these things and just calling it being bad at life.

I’m sharing it here because I had a feeling this community would understand it in a way most people in my life don’t.

If you got diagnosed later in life, did it feel like relief? Grief? Or some strange mixture of both that you still haven’t quite named? I definitely mourned for my younger self that didn’t know what it was but felt she had a broken brain. And also the relief from the confirmation this isn’t all in my head, well it kind of is but I’m sure you know what I mean!

reddit.com

u/EchoesofElsewhere42 — 1 month ago

▲ 15 r/adhdwomen