Boring ADHD Struggles

When Boring And Hard Are Synonymous - Understanding the struggle with ADHD

ADHD Education

By Nathaniel Peters

I have ADHD. No, I’ve never been officially diagnosed as an adult. 

As a toddler in the early 90s, the teachers just called me “challenged” and told my parents I needed help. 

In what I can only describe as heroism, my parents refused to medicate me. Instead, they were advocates for me through and through, and over time, I learned to deal with being endlessly distracted.


Eventually, I even learned the advantages of ADHD. I have to thank my dad for planting the thought in my head as a pre-teen that kids afflicted with ADHD might be better at working on multiple ideas at one time. His affirmation led me to pursue my distractions fearlessly. Today, I have a resume which is as distracted as myself: graphic designer, figure skating coach, 3D modeling teacher, DJ, dialogue facilitator, writer. I’ve taken my distractions and turned them into an incredibly fulfilling life. 

However, I had a moment two nights ago which reminded me just how much I’ve been impacted by ADHD. 

I’m teaching my friend how to DJ so that she and I may gig together at bars around Pittsburgh. A big part of achieving that goal is building up our music library. Up until this past week, we’ve just been dumping all of our songs into one folder, which is not a great organizational method. 

So we sat down and started the tedious work of organizing the 350 song library (which is still very small) by genre and mood. At one point, she wanted to rearrange all 350 files on the computer before we started to label and sort the tracks in Serato, the software we were using. 

I panicked. I didn’t want to do or even watch something so tedious as that. It seemed inefficient to pursue such a task at that point, as the folder structure on the desktop did not have much impact on the structure within the software. Not only that, she seemed blissfully unaware of how long her reorganization would take. I watched as she started the arduous process of repeatedly moving files into another folder and dragging the files back into Serato. 

Except it didn’t take that long. Maybe, like, ten minutes tops. And she did it while talking to me. The hell? 

I was recently awarded the opportunity to work with David Giwerc, founder of the ADHD Coaching Academy and author of a fantastic ADHD self-help book, Permission to Proceed. He approached me to create and refine the graphics for seven different coaching models to aid coaches and participants in learning the methods to work through ADHD. 

One of the models focused on the “Barriers to Attention.” The model lists different circumstances which make it difficult to focus. Two, in particular, are tremendously interesting to me: biology and boredom

Two of the Barriers 

The first barrier may seem obvious: biology. For this, we went simple and created a picture of a brain. I’m not going to get into the science behind it, but there are physical circumstances in an ADHD brain which make it more difficult for an ADHD person to focus — but only in certain situations. 

The second barrier is boredom, and it’s one of those certain situations. Boredom is represented by an on/off switch, because that’s what boredom does to an ADHD brain: it turns it off. When an activity is interesting and vibrant, it’ll sometimes be impossible to draw an ADHD person’s focus away from that activity. When something is dull and uninteresting, though, it’s often painful to participate. 

As I was illustrating these barriers, they made sense. I certainly related to and agreed with the concepts. However, it wasn’t until I was organizing the music library that I realized just how much these barriers had impacted my life. 

My friend and I continued organizing our music library. At one point, I started to get nervous about the agility of our organizational system. About 75 songs in, I stopped her and brought up my concerns. She didn’t seem to understand. 

Without getting into the specifics, I explained that I was worried about how we might be setting ourselves up for a mess at a later point in time. I was overwhelmed with the number of tags we were applying to the music. I like to keep things simple. 

She did not understand the problem. To illustrate, I pointed out how we haven’t been keeping track of the tags, and we’ll need to go back through and write down every single type of tag we were putting on each track. She raised her eyebrows, and in an act of magic, went back through the 75 songs and said, “yeah, there’s about 20. I can do it right now if you want me to.” It took her maybe 40 seconds. 

I blinked. 

“How did you do that?” 

She laughed, and said she just looked at them. Like it was no big deal. We ended up having a conversation which explored why I thought, for some reason, that would have been a hard thing to do. I told her I had a gut response to the idea of going back through something I had already done. I explained that repeating something was terrifying because it was so much harder to stay focused than the first time. Then we had an exchange that illustrated everything so perfectly. 

She said, “Yeah, I mean it’s boring, but it’s not hard.” 

I responded, “Boring and hard are the same thing for me.” 

She paused. I paused. It was a wonderful moment where we both suddenly understood where the miscommunication was. We continued to discuss our differences late into the evening. We figured out a good, agile system to accommodate both our preferences, and she told me to go home and she’d take care of the grunt work. I got a snapchat from her around 4AM showing the finished library. Incredible. 

Sure, I knew that I didn’t like doing boring things because they were hard. Now, though, for the first time, I really understood that it’s not that way for everyone. Boring things aren’t hard things for people who don’t struggle with ADHD. Boring things are a completely different type of unappealing, but they’re not hard. I have a pavlovian response to the thought of doing something boring. If I’m not motivated by money or feedback, chances are I won’t even take on boring work. 

That expectation has altered my life. My habits revolve around the avoidance of boring work. There have been design clients I’ve turned down — fair paying clients— because I know the money still wouldn’t be good enough to justify the torture of doing unexciting work. 

After we finished up the ADHD models, David sent me a copy of his book. I’ve started reading it, and I must say, I’m surprised at how accessible it is. David also has ADHD, and he wrote the book in such a way that allows the reader to bounce around to different parts with the hope that, eventually, they’ll read the entire book in the order they choose. It boggles my mind that some people wouldn’t understand the need for that flexibility. 

I still think about how hard ADHD is going to make my life moving forward. There are still many opportunities I’m afraid to pursue because I know how dull they’d be. However, understanding my ADHD brain, and understanding non-ADHD brains, gives me hope that I can overcome those barriers and do the hard work that needs to be done. 

And really, I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping things interesting. 

After five years of being a graphic designer, Nathaniel Peters is only just teaching himself web development because coding was kinda boring. As a result, he’d rather you not visit his pretty meh website right now, and instead would appreciate you checking out his Behance Portfolio and saying some nice things. Or not nice things! Just keep it interesting. 

Originally published at https://medium.com/@truthinmovement