better the mid draft you know
One of the side effects of my current prescription I've been on since January is that I've been forced to reevaluate and/or analyze a lot of my usual behaviors and coping mechanisms just to make sure I can function. (The prescription as a whole has positive effects and with the US healthcare system being what it is, I'd rather stick with this than try to rock the boat atm.)
What this means is I've been spending active thought on things I've been doing for so long that even though I know why I do them, I haven't dragged them out to take a good look at them in a long time. In this post's case, it's about writing.
A lot of people write using scaffolds like drafts, outlines, notes, etc. And it's not that I've never used them or I don't see the utility or whatever—I absolutely do. But I have never, ever been able to use them effectively myself unless I am doing it at the same time as I do the rest of the writing, in one or two sittings. My brain will look at an outline and go "yep, got it" and mark it as "done" so I never get back to it unless someone else is waiting on it. Worse if it's a presentation because I'm very good at presenting on the fly, but presentations still need more work to make them effective (and I don't just mean making everything star wipe into the screen). As you can imagine, my ADeHeDe working like this was Very Bad for an English major when I was in college!!
I'm slightly better with drafts in the sense that I have been known to eventually finish and post them, it just…takes me a while after the first burst.
Anyway, that plus only having occasional spurts where I feel I even have enough executive function to write a draft or outline helps me explain to myself why it's been so hard to post lately and reminds me that traditional tips, mindsets, and goals for writing just don't work for me, and that's ok. The sooner I realize that, the sooner I can figure out what does work for me (in this case it appears to be "keeping the tablet screen on for over an hour while I work on this while dozing on and off after a super rough week).
Oh. And making sure that for things I really want to work on, I work with someone else to help hold me to scheduling when I work on things, because it turns out that having the sense of urgency I've relied on all my life to get things done under the wire thrown into a deep lake is very bad for my scheduling skills!
And and, probably being less ambitious about what-all I'm writing about too 😅 Initially this was going to go into the whole "but I still feel the pressure to make sure everything I write turns out as thorough as possible despite another way my ADeHeDe works meaning that I keep branching out into tangents and then keep feeling like I have to complete those first before I finish!" thing.
And and and, not stressing about the perfect ending. Gbye!