Waves In The Mind: Adhd and Creativity
The hydraulic energy of medication
I started this page to reflect upon the relation between art and neurodivergence, specifically how my Adhd could inform my relation with art and creativity in general. It proved harder than I thought. There are always confused feelings of entitlement and shame attached to these diagnoses, especially when one masks easily, and is not–dramatically–impaired professionally and socially by it. Nevertheless, the necessity of coming to terms with how much I camouflage to myself and others, and how much power I miss for not engaging with it, took me here this evening, unexpectedly prompted by this quote at the beginning of the wave in the mind, Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, a collection of non-fiction texts by Ursula K. Le Guin (2004, Shambhala Publications).
I’ve always had an inexplicable affinity with the temperamental sea of a certain beach. Then I read about a man who described himself as “a man raised by a river”, and I found the words to explain it. I instantly drew a parallel with the rhythmic patterns of the seven waves at “my” beach, which in Portugal we call “o Sete-the Seven”. So, I’m a person raised by an ocean–intermittently watched by a distant lighthouse atop a vertiginous cliff–held by an extension of thick sand.
The sea has always sustained me in its power, the ceaseless unfolding of a million versions of itself, spraying the air, releasing the heavy scent of its creatures. It has taught me the viscous quality of attraction. That desire is only complete if it has a smell, but once it does, it overpowers and suffocates. That’s why you need patterns in devotion. Contact, release, adherence, withdrawal, deliverance, retreat, and so on.
Beyond these teachings (and so many more), the ocean has a unique effect on me. It’s the only element I can go back to, over and over, and still experience the same rapture. The pattern of love.
It’s also the only place where the continuous trains of thought, and the songs repeatedly playing in my mind, stop. That’s one of the few places where I can experience stillness.
I’m extremely active but it doesn’t translate into visibly frantic activity such as it does for people mainly on the hyperactive side of the Adhd spectrum (I’m on the inattentive one, which could not be more poorly named). My hyperactivity is so mentally focused that it reduces the scope of my body’s activity during the day. I’m bound to my racing thoughts, which luckily pertain to work. I will happily spend days on end in my office because I can behave eccentrically without fearing people’s curiosity. And the most astonishing thing about all this is that I’ve never been fully aware of these intricacies until today. How well we do to hide our idiosyncrasies is measured by the levels of anxiety we live with…
In my workspace, I rotate between reading three texts, labouring over two complicated emails, exchanging quick text messages, producing notes about a future meeting and writing the first ideas of a text. I’ll do the “pillow dance”, which is to press a pillow onto my lap, then place it between my back and my chair, then holding it against my belly. Once, I readjusted my pillow on my lap while I was on a call, pulling it too high, at camera level, and felt embarrassed for weeks.
Restlessness has always been an issue that I’ve kept under control with different methods, and mostly unacknowledged by others. But these disregulations increase with age and now going to the cinema fills me with anxiety because sitting for two hours is pure torture, as I need my ritual of the “pillow dance” and it almost physically hurts not to have it. The pillow makes it easier to be still, therefore, I become extremely aware of having to change position every five minutes and imagine that I’m disrupting the enjoyment of the film for everyone around me.
The sea tames the mind because it replicates its movement without words and thoughts, rippling through matter in infinite ways, but in a narrow frame of possibility. It’s a lot of the same, as opposed to a heterogeneous myriad of flows unraveling before you. The sea delivers the pattern of creative continuity.
When I first encountered Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, I had to pick it up. Its flow is maritime. I’ve read it a few times since, changing my allegiance from character to character. Surprisingly, the last time I was enthralled by the lady of the house, Mrs. Ramsay, worlds apart from my own experience - and yet. But the first time, I was so wrapped up in it, that I went on to read Mrs. Dalloway where an encounter between her and her old flame is described as wind, from memory.(I have huge sensitivity to wind and it drives me a bit insane if it’s too strong; if it’s just about right, it almost feels like the sea, but on the skin, like a whispered, molecular caress.) I couldn’t extricate Woolf’s plots from my inattentive memory, but I can tell you how the words and the flow become quick brushstrokes or even transubstantiate into elements. Each character’s thoughts are at the edge of their consciousness, and the way we move from one to another is like wave patterns, intricate and edged with foam, but fated to disintegrate. It’s a book about the stillness of self and the violence of social, intimate, political change mostly brought about by the patriarchs and their martian satellites, and stoically endured by the women.
When I finished reading To The Lighthouse for the third time, I’d swallowed the ocean. I no longer depended upon it. I’d found my inner tides, the words, the art, the work weaving relations between them, but always as a tempest.
Another book eerily titled the wave in the mind, by Ursula K. Le Guin, joins this list of oceans, external or swallowed. Reading her now is a ridiculous tardiness, which still fills me with rage. I discovered her too late and I only had time to read one of her books of fiction so far. Too busy. I’m picking up the wave in the mind for the second time, and again I have a feeling of extreme adhesion, as if I’m encountering my ideas’ parents in a dream, with a lucidity I don’t yet possess.
But it’s the first time I notice the quote by Virginia Woolf (above). This evening Woolf’s words arrested me, because while describing creativity, they also could, with a few changes, explain my Adhd mind:
Adhd is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong moments. But in the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than wants. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes realities to fit it; and in living, (such is my present self) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with willpower) and then, as it breaks, and tumbles in the mind, it makes actions to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.
This is what I’ve felt all my life about everything. (And the twist, at the end, of inevitable change is the bane of my existence - only the ocean, and the ones and the things I love (many, now that I’m nearly fifty) are stable harbours). I’ve only had a decisional and creative rapport with my environment, from the fastidious tasks of the day, to the most relevant endeavours of a person’s development and duty. I have to wait for the wave in the mind, all the time. There are no automated tasks or habits. Only obsessive routines of pillows, and hair twisting, and eating the same meals. Because my Adhd mind is constantly crammed with lists, clever solutions to political issues, shrewd plans, rimes, writing and the same song playing in the background. There is no space - or stillness - for learned and ingrained behaviour.
Taking my medication for the first time was a huge shock. Not only did it almost silence the trains of thought (bar the song, echoing stubbornly in the empty walls of my brain) but it also calmly, almost in slow motion, uncrammed the rhythm. It released the “ideas, and visions and so on”, in a more orderly manner, slower, allowing me to spend time developing them, rather than waiting for “o Sete” and it’s sustained energy.
The Adhd mind - or at least my type - is creative and restless. It seems that a genetic variant of Adhd has been detected in nomadic people, which corroborates the hunter-gatherer hypothesis as its origin (frustrating for a vegan!): my office is great because there are no distractions and it’s highly predictable–the only unknown element is how loud my cats will snore. Otherwise I can’t focus (how can people read at the beach?!). This seems to sustain the notion that a high awareness of aleatory movement and pattern perception was inherited, and, in my case, transposed to words and their graphic and sonic patterns.
This is also why I’m so attracted to Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic notion of language as a political obligation. Words carry the structures of power and oppression (“words are fossils” as Irma Blank said). A writer is a nomad, redesigning wordscapes, deconstructing calcified concepts. I’ve never deeply, viscerally understood aesthetics, philosophies, desires of belonging. I get it conceptually. But belonging is not the opposite of othering. Belonging is unquestioned acceptance. An empty space outlined precisely with our shape. The opposite of belonging is a nomadic spirit, not having an automated response to life.
It is beautiful but it is also momentous, like the roaring waves at the end of August, breaking on the sand with the pregnant impetus of change. The effect of the medication channels the rhythm into song–but you see a symphony. It releases and delivers the mind in all its mighty flow to you. It doesn’t reduce its overproduction. The work now is to sieve, organise and timeline–schedule.
But what is time? Sunsets and sunrises, patterns of light and shadow, ripples on the skin, awareness and sleep. Sleeping is a coma, awaking is rebirth. The day, with or without the white and blue pill, is reinvention.