Am I going to be less creative if I better care for my mental health?
After many years of putting it off and agonizing about whether or not to go on drugs, I finally went on medication to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder this month. Spoiler: It’s been super dope, and I feel superhuman and also happier.
My reluctance to get medicated was probably based on a stigma, but probably not the stigma that is most common. I don’t have many hang-ups about taking medicine to treat an issue and to get relief. I don’t think I have too many hang-ups about mental health or neurodivergence either — at least not in the sense where I feel weaker for “needing” medicine.
Like, I knew medication would help me a lot — I knew it would help me feel less irritability, anxiety, anger, and depression. I have known this for years.
But also for years, I’ve been reluctant to go on medication because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to fully let go of all of these annoying, shitty bits of me. I was worried that becoming a happier and healthier person would make me less creative and less “special” in my creative expression. I worried that there was a direct correlation between how crap I felt inside sometimes and how beautiful and idiosyncratic I can make things outwardly.
A lot of people told me my worries were irrational and told me just to let myself be happier. But honestly, none of these people were creative like me, so their advice was super annoying to me. They didn’t do the same kind of work I did — they don’t know how it feels and what it takes — so I couldn’t take their assurances seriously. I found the assurances arrogant. I told myself their advice works great for engineers and computer programmers. But I’m not a freaking engineer or programmer.
I used to eat up hours and hours of therapy sessions analyzing this with my therapist, John. (He generally encouraged me to get treated, but he kindly never pushed it very hard.) I used to passionately and emotionally give him really convoluted, bonkers-deep rants about how this is going to be like some real Flowers for Algernon shit.
Like this:
“So I’m going to get medicated? Be super happy and content and whole and healthy? And I’m going to create fucking bullshit flowers one-stroke paintings and people are going to fucking love it so much and be like, ‘Where can I buy your flowers, Stacy? I want to decorate my living room with it and put it over my Pottery Barn console.’ And then I will become famous making these dumb paintings of bouquets and I’ll have so much money and will be so happy about it and have a balanced life and be celebrated like Thomas Kincaid — and then what? I just die as the flower lady, JOHN?”
John often acknowledged that my fears were real and legit — which was crafty of him. It often takes the wind out of my super worked up sails whenever people just agree with me. He told me there’s research on the correlation between creativity and depression. And there’s some linkage between ADHD and creativity.
We basically talked about it a lot. I thought about it a lot. And overall, I never did much about it for years besides think about it and practice mindfulness as a workaround.
There’s also a weird survivor’s guilt that hung over my head with treating ADHD. My brother has it too and it has completely disrupted his life and has made a lot of things much harder for him.
In contrast, I coasted through life smoothly and was basically constantly rewarded for being the way I am. My parents still treat us differently because of how we performed academically in school — and maybe in some ways, by avoiding treatment, I was trying to pay penance for the disparity in experience, man.
The way I often thought about it was:
You finished school on time. You got good grades
You have a job. You make good money.
People talk about you with respect. They value your brain.
What more do you even want, asshole?
One criteria for treatment is if symptoms are disruptive to your life. I thought about this obsessively and for years, decided that my symptoms weren’t really that disruptive to my life. Also, sometimes they were strengths to my life.
I’d read stories about and talked to people whose lives were shitshows because ADHD made them unable to finish anything. I observed to myself that I was finishing stuff all the time.
Like, seriously, what is even my problem?
Well, I was having rage meltdowns a lot in the course of work because something didn’t exactly go my way. I was having combative meetings with people. Sometimes I was rage-crying in meetings because I couldn’t keep my composure or feelings in check. Sometimes I insulted people because I was so pissed they were making choices from a place of (in my opinion) fear, conservatism, and poor taste. I read racism in almost everything.
I was also pissed that I felt societal pressure to eat it and just do what clients want because they paid me money. I started bitterly joking and believing that I’m a fucking art-worker for sale. I have a cost and if you pay for me, you can use my talent and my brain and set the terms and have power over me and I will fucking take it because I am getting paid to take it.
I was super angry a lot of the time — on top of constantly losing my keys and getting lost all the time and being late all the time and paying extra fees all the time because I can’t pay bills on time or grab my mail — on top of living in my own filth because cleaning is so boring.
All of that anger made me feel despondent about work — and I usually love work. But all of the negative feelings made me kind of fatalistic and feel like everything I was doing was fucking pointless. I started fantasizing a lot about not working anymore and just being a fucking bum somewhere alone where I didn’t have to talk to anybody anymore ever again.
This is generally the oblique way that my attention issues exhibits. I know that most of us (me included) generally think that ADHD looks like a 12-year-old boy who can’t sit the fuck still or be quiet for a bit. But I have learned (with a lot of help from John), that ADHD also looks like the cracks in our coping mechanisms — for me, it’s stints of depression and intense bouts of anger and big emotions that I constantly have to manage and suppress because like, I get that no one wants to be around an asshole, so I have to work hard to not be one.
I think that my Vietnamese upbringing and cultural norms helped me be great at coping with my attention stuff, which has been this double-edged sword kind of blessing.
It’s really easy to get bored and start causing a ruckus as a kid when you have attention issues. But that wasn’t the case with me because I was brought up in a very disciplined, regimented, and sometimes oppressive environment. And I mean the cool kind of oppression, relax.
Right now, I’m back living with my parents, and it’s been a culture shock to be immersed in their discipline again. These people are fucking robots, and it’s really cool to see them live their lives striving for awesomeness all the time. Being away from their day-to-day so long, I had almost forgotten what childhood was like.
My parents generally have super high standards — especially for me — and the target to hit is often impossible. And there’s also only one right way to do any one thing — and I will never do it perfectly right. I am always failing even when I’m kicking ass.
I know this style of parenting is common in Confucian-based cultures. I know it can be soul-crushing and is for a lot of adults. For me, though, it actually kind of worked out pretty aiight. There’s good and bad with most things. The bad here is that it’s sometimes discouraging to never get in a win. The bad is that it teaches the brain to clamp down in rigidity and binary thinking.
The good is that it has taught me to love and be obsessed with process and the journey, to not care too much about success as an outcome. The good is that I know my parents are invested my improvement and my abilities, because they think about it a lot, too. The good is that I don’t need compliments or positive reinforcement at all to do my job — so I’m not a very insecure person in general. I do stuff because it’s what we ought to be doing or because it’s the right thing to do. My motivation comes from a really, really deep place because of how I was raised.
I think having so many systems and structures in place from a young age helped with my attention stuff a lot. It helped to be obsessively trained to sit still and to really deliberate before speaking from a young age.
And having the pressure to perform also helped. When I feel pressure, I get a little stressed out, like most people. When I get stressed out, my body produces adrenaline, and adrenaline is fantastic for ADHD. Another misconception about ADHD is that people with it are merely bad at focus. But actually, we are great at hyperfocus. We are just bad at focusing on stuff we find boring.
I think I was a really good student because my parents were always stressing me out about it. The adrenaline fed my brain, and I could push myself into hyperfocus all the time, to get good grades.
This is one of my most enduring and greatest coping mechanisms. I fucking love stressing myself out so that I can perform. I love the rush of it. It feels dark and visceral and violent and animalistic and intuitive and fast-moving and sometimes chaotic inside. I loved working in news for this reason. I love owning my own business for this reason. I love overreaching and doing stuff that I’m not yet great at and bearing a lot of responsibility in projects with shaky expertise. I love the possibility of abject, public failure. I love learning in high-pressure environments. I love risk. I secretly don’t relate at all to people who work so hard to avoid stress and conflict.
And all of these tendencies have been amazing for my career.
The flip side of this is anger though. Like, if you always need to be in a heightened emotional state of stress to perform at your best, um, you’re basically never really a calm person. You’re basically always a livewire.
That’s what I have to manage in myself a lot. I have to watch myself to make sure I am being fair to people. When I was younger, I was a lot more prone to yelling or snapping at people when I was ticked. That was not cool. So I’ve forced myself to never raise my voice in anger anymore. It is hard and weird and takes concerted effort sometimes.
Often, I have to wear a mask and put on my best face. And that’s probably the person you know me best as. Like, I know I often come across very gregarious and very friendly and very flexible and very easy to work with and dynamic.
That’s not really intrinsically who I am. That’s a coping mechanism.
Though it feels natural a lot of the time. I am a charming and calm-seeming person for real a lot of the time. But sometimes I think the constant effort around this makes me depressed and sad inside. Or angry. Sometimes I get angry that I have to work to manage emotions all the time — my own and other people’s.
The medication I’ve been taking makes me pretty sleepy, which is not exactly normal, so I’ve been talking to my doctor about that, and we’ll probably have to fine-tune some stuff.
Medication for ADHD are stimulants. Generally in people without ADHD, Adderall or Ritalin will make them a bit jittery and speed them up. That’s why legions of college kids take Adderall to stay up all night and get through finals.
I believe that in people who have ADHD, the medication does the opposite. For a while, I was trying to figure out if the sleepiness I was feeling was actually internal calmness, and I just couldn’t differentiate, having never known internal calmness before.
But no. I am pretty sure this stimulant just makes me really sleepy.
My focus has been amazing — and by that, I probably mean it’s been normal. I don’t have to motivate myself with a mountain of shame, anger, and negative self-talk to get going. I don’t have to stress myself out to do stuff like update some drafts. There’s suddenly an ease to everyday tasks that is stunning. My impulse control is so much better, and I didn’t really think that much about my impulsivity — but now that it’s seamless to just . . . not jump face-first into a thought or idea or inclination, I’m like whoa. So this is how must people do stuff!
And I feel blander. This is early days, so it’s subject to change, but I feel like I wasn’t completely wrong, man. I think that a certain amount of ‘dysfunction’ fed my creativity. I think my secret bitterness colors how I communicate and my sense of humor. I think my hyperfocus and obsessiveness makes me a better and broader designer and illustrator. I see how I got to here — by eschewing sleep and self-care to devote hours to something that my brain locked down on randomly. I think I learned to labor because of my attention issues. I think I learned to think broadly and differently because of my attention issues. I think if I had an easier time with focus, I would be a person that stops at the first okay idea, instead of having an internal drive to rework and rework and rework. I think my anger created my form of activism and my politics. I don’t think I would give as much of a shit if my rage wasn’t so big and if I was better at compromising. I think my constant boredom makes me a good writer, because I know how painful it feels to be trapped in say-nothingness. Like, it is fucking painful, and that’s not an overstatement.
All of that stuff has been rounded over on medication. And I love it, because it’s like, holy shit, I can be better at answering my emails. And I am an adult who has lived an entire life and has locked into all of these habits, so I get to keep all of the context, experience, and wisdom and carry on with the information — with better focus.
Like, I have decided that I am glad I didn’t get medicated when I was a kid, for instance. I’ve done a bit of thinking on this, and I think if I had been treated as a kid, the idea of going into medicine or engineering wouldn’t have been world-destroying. It would’ve bent underneath my parents and been like, “Oh, I can do that. Studying boring stuff is easy!”
I’ve also been thinking of the multiverse and about the version of me that actually did have that path. I wonder a lot if she’s happy in her life and what kind of person she is. What is her wardrobe? What does her home look like? Does she have children? Is she funny? Is her life a million times amazing? Is she actually an astronaut because maybe I am totally wrong about this and if I had been treated earlier, I would actually be in outer space right now.
(BTW, I need to take a break from recording audio versions of my essays because I don’t have an ideal set up at my parents’ place, and it’s driving me a little nuts!)