Being a writer is challenging work. Being a writer with ADHD can be downright exasperating. 

If the rejection sensitivity wasn’t enough, I’m often battling my habits and routines, and no matter how many times I read Atomic Habits by James Clear or other advice often meant for neurotypical brains, it never seems enough. 

Consistency? We don’t know her. 

Well, that’s not entirely true…

If you write, you’re a writer. 

I’ve said these words to myself and to others so often, it’s impossible not to embody them. They might as well be my calling card.  

I whisper this phrase as encouragement to new poets at the local open mic. I impart this phrase from the front of classrooms when I’m invited to facilitate spoken word workshops. I repeat these words to the youth I coach and mentor when they feel uncertain. I hold my gaze in the mirror in moments of rejection and doubt. I write; therefore, I’m a writer.

And yet, from my laptop’s place in this coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon—by all rights, its own cultural indication as to my status as a writer—the flashing cursor taunts me from the page as I wrestle with too-obvious-metaphors and this never-finished-only-abandoned-poem.