Some days the ADHD wins. I was diagnosed this year at age 50. It took two different tests but I finally got medicated for severe ADHD, inattentive type. I have struggled with this my entire life. How do I manage to write and get through my day? Some days I don’t. I’ll be honest about it. Even with the meds, which are helping, there are still days where I forget where my glasses are when they are in my hand or on my face. There are days when I can make a to-do list and mark off almost all the items. There are days when I zone out while playing games on my phone. I have days where I start making notes for poem ideas and fall asleep with a pen in my hand.

Even with a stimulant and a limited amount of coffee, there are days when I sleep for a few hours, get up and have a snack, then lay back down and sleep for another six hours. Rinse and repeat. But some days I forget what I’m doing or what time it is and drink my one cup of coffee too late in the day and only get two or three hours of sleep. Those days I end up so tired I can’t think straight enough to make notes or write and end up doom scrolling or playing some game on my phone.

But there are good days. Days when I have enough spoons and enough focus at the same time. Days when I have had enough sleep the night before and my pain levels are cooperative. I get up and can mark off some stuff from the list and look at my notes and knock out a couple of poems, make a post or two to the Instagram. Those are good days. It’s really nice when I can stack those back to back. Good days mean my head is calm and I don’t feel like I am diagraming a twelve city crime scene on a white board. Good days are when I can clear my desk, make the bed, get in some writing, read some poetry, and still have energy to crochet something. But some days…