It’s ADHD Awareness Month!
It’s ADHD awareness month and here our Artistic Director Nina talks about how her ADHD has impacted her creative career.
As a middle aged person who was only diagnosed in the last year, it has been fascinating to realise all the many ways my professional life has been shaped by a neuro-difference I didn’t even know I had.
While there have undoubtedly been and still are challenges, it’s important to acknowledge all the positive ways in which my career and therefore Peer Productions has been influenced by my very busy brain. Here’s my top three!
The ability to hyper focus - many people (understandably) assume that ADHD is characterised only by an inability to focus. While there are often times I can struggle with paying attention especially if the task isn’t interesting to me, I don’t think I could have become a playwright without an ability to hyperfocus. When I am in that flow state I can concentrate for hours and even days on end churning out material very quickly. It often feels like I have already half written the work in my head, as though my subconscious has been busy whilst I have been doing other things. I now describe it as all the tabs on my browser remaining open all the time which is often exhausting but it allows me to be highly creative pulling together seemingly disparate ideas in interesting and innovative ways. For example, at the moment I am working on a new play about misogyny and incel culture and woke up one day thinking about the children’s story Chicken Licken as a parable for internet grooming.
Multiple projects - I do get bored quite easily. Without realising it at the time, this tendency has led me to create an organisation that is built around variety. This year alone we will be running five performance projects, two training programmes and multiple outreach projects. My busy brain is always thinking of creative solutions to problems so it is natural for me to persistently generate new ideas for work. On an ideological level this means that Peer can help more different types of people in more diverse ways. On a commercial level this means we can find funding from a variety of different places making the charity more resilient.
A sense of injustice - Multiple studies have shown that people with ADHD can experience justice sensitivity. Ever since I was a child, I have been preoccupied by a sense of fairness. This makes me well suited to advocacy, campaigning and activism. Thematically, the majority of my work is driven by an urge to tackle social injustice and those strong feelings have propelled me through my work keeping me going even when things seemed impossible.
So happy ADHD awareness month! Maybe without ADHD Peer Productions would never have happened!
