Artists v. farmers
You have two options when you have ADHD. You can figure out how to force yourself into a farmer’s world or you can figure out how to make the difficult choices to be a [hunter] for a living.
Tom Hartmann
Artists are hunters. Creative people, people who are driven by their creativity to a degree that they do not control or even understand, are certainly not farmers. What does this mean?
It means that people who grow up with a creative drive often find a place where they can ‘hunt’ in safety.
To become defined as an artist (or any creative person working outside of established rules) you have to find your way to the space that allows your creativity. Because true creativity is often misunderstood as all sorts of other things (bolshy, difficult, amateur, uncommitted, dangerous, mad, bad, dangerous to know) people with this gift often spend years trying to find a place where they fit.
If they are lucky they will find themselves drawn to one of the creative zones, to a place where all that they do suddenly seems to make sense.
I’m a good artist.
I’m not a good academic.
I’m a bad artist.
I’m a good academic.
I’m good at the parts that fit with me and bad at the parts that don’t it with me. I spent years trying to normalise how I related to these disciplines, but now I understand that what I do is what I do.
Unmask or die.
What does this teach me? That the separation between hunting and farming, between creativity and bureaucracy. It is how we bring our executive function to bear on our world - or not.
To be a ‘successful’ artist you need to marry your creative tendencies to good control of executive function. For many of us this never really happens and we spend a lifetime watching as others scoop up the prizes. But does that make us a bad artist? No, not at all. We can look inside ourselves to know that. It means we are not good at conforming to the long term processes that the art world demands of us. Our impulsivity, our inconsistency, distraction and time blindness ensure that we don’t build that artists cv that we feel we should. At the same time, the same attributes make us good artists. Traits such as hyperactivity, hyperfocus, impulsivity, give us a running start in the creative stakes. We are great at inventiveness, at bringing new combinations of things into the world, but we’re not so good at the mundane necessity of paperwork, of filling out forms, of saying the right thing at the right time, at keeping track of what we’ve done. Those jobs are for the farmers, the non-neurodivergent. They make good artists because they can work out how to fit in and can sustain that form of masking while also looking at what true creatives do and copying it.
Where you find true creativity you will always find neurodivergence.