The ADHDcv

The inconsistent life

I was listening to an ADHD podcast as I drove up from France (Women and ADHD, it’s really good) and the woman host said, ‘You wrote a novel too, didn’t you’ and the woman being interviewed replied, ‘I did. I thought I should, but like so many ADHD things, once I’d written it I decided I didn’t want to write any more novels.’

My mind (which is regularly flabbergasted by these podcasts) went into hyperdrive. I did that. I wrote a novel that got published ‘along the way’ but haven’t managed to finish another one since, despite having a fair few partly or largely done.

I started to think about all the other things I’ve done ‘along the way’ that have never turned into anything long term or paid for themselves. In a way it’s something I’ve been doing all my life. I have four degrees up to and including a PhD but I’ve never done anything with them that the world would recognise as what you should do with a lot of education. My life has been measured out in degrees.

What do I think about this now, AA (After ADHD)?

I think a lot of things, none of them particularly useful. But at least I can start to work out what the fuck was going on along the way. Mainly, I think, I need guardrails to get me through any particular part of my life. And whether these are doing degrees or starting businesses or inventing new art techniques, it seems to be something I’ve been doing forever.

I call the results of this sort of restless yet not restless (like serial monogamy perhaps) life an ADHDcv (an ADHDresume for our American cousins). We all tinker with our resumes, with our history of work and education, to make them more consistent, to fit in with what is expected of us. What is expected of us is a sort of seamless flow of jobs which adds up to a career. When it doesn’t look like that, we resort to obfuscation. How to explain that nine month gap when I went crazy and hitch-hiked to Japan? How to explain a 180 degree career handbrake turn? What about the five years I spent in prison?

Personally my cv is a bombastic, a burnt out wreck of a life which looks brilliant from a distance but crumples when written out as a cold hard process. I do have a version which attempts to manifest the glorious truth of what I’ve done by shamelessly bullshitting the gaps, the omissions and the handbrake turns. Luckily, as I never engage with the formal world of getting jobs, I never have to use it, so it’s my dirty secret.

Bu I’m developing an ADHD coaching tool which encourages people to come clean, to write an ADHDcv in which rather than obfuscate the wonky bits, they focus on them. They write a new cv which reveals every time they made a change or impulsively quite a good job or failed to thrive.

Once this is written it works as a tool to start the process of pattern matching. As self-awareness is the basis of my ADHD coaching, knowing how you have acted in the past is a great tool. And starting to recognise the pattern of your BA life is a great way to start recognising signs in your new AA life.

So, for myself, I would put in everything that I’ve done, all the things that I’ve half forgotten, things that I pretend I never did and things that are so irrelevant to my current life (was I really once a Director of Nominet, the UK domain name authority?) that I never mention them. I would put them all in and then start the work of seeing the patterns of behaviour. And of becoming proud of them. The inconsistent life is still a glorious life - it’s just a neurodivergent life in a neuronormative world.

Ivan Pope is working to become an ADHD coach specialising in those creative bods who are full of ideas yet stuck, just as he has always been. Neurotivity.com

Pass this newsletter on to all the crazy artists and startup merchants you know - there’s a lot more to come. I’m writing a book called In Praise of Inconsistency.