The Chaos in Creativity...

Some days, creativity feels less like inspiration and more like standing in the middle of a four-way intersection while every thought in your brain ignores the traffic light.

I’m stuck right now.

Not because I don’t have ideas. Honestly, that’s probably the problem.

I’m trying to finish edits on my newest novel so I can finally release it into the world, but my ADHD has other plans. Every time I sit down to focus on one chapter, my brain suddenly remembers three other manuscripts that are “almost done,” twenty new story ideas scribbled in notebooks, and approximately six hundred unrelated things I should probably also be doing.

It’s chaos in here.

I envy people who can sit down, complete one project, check it off a list, and peacefully move on to the next. My creativity doesn’t work that way. Mine is more like having fifty browser tabs open at once, music playing somewhere in the background, and one tab randomly screaming, “WAIT, BUT WHAT IF THIS CHARACTER HAD A DIFFERENT ENDING?”

So instead of editing, I end up bouncing.

From one manuscript to another.

From my laptop to my notes app.

From writing dialogue to reorganizing old photos.

From planning fictional lives to sorting through the very real clutter in my basement.

And honestly? The basement feels a lot like my brain lately.

Bins everywhere. Half-finished decisions. Things I meant to deal with years ago. Old papers from when the kids were little. Trinkets I forgot existed. Photos I can’t throw away even though I haven’t looked at them in a decade.

All these little pieces of life stacked away because I was always too busy, too overwhelmed, or too distracted to sort through them.

But now we’re talking about something we’ve wanted for years - downsizing and moving to the city for a while. A fresh chapter. Less stuff. More living.

And to get there, I have to go through all of this first.

That’s the thing nobody really tells you about ADHD and creativity: they often travel together. The same brain that can imagine entire worlds can also struggle to organize a basement. The same mind overflowing with ideas can completely freeze when it’s time to finish just one thing.

People often romanticize creativity, but they don’t always talk about the chaos that comes with it. The unfinished projects. The mental clutter. The exhaustion of wanting to do everything all at once.

But maybe there’s something hopeful in that too.

Because even if progress looks messy, it’s still progress.

Maybe editing a few pages before getting distracted doesn’t mean failure.

Maybe going through one basement bin counts.

Maybe unfinished manuscripts aren’t proof that I can’t finish - maybe they’re proof that my mind never stops creating.

And maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.