Unmasking: Project H

The pre-launch to the soft-launch. I said what I said.

Well, hello. It’s been awhile.

The ultra-abridged version of “where the hell I’ve been” is that I was sick. The details of that are less relevant and will inspire conversation another time, but the general timeline started with burnout to COVID to long-ish COVID to “recovered, I think, with occasional flareups.”

Something big happened while I was out of commission. It was both terrible and wonderful. At the outset, it felt small and insignificant, then grew into something incredible and powerful.

While my body was down for the count, my brain was free to do things it hadn’t been able to in years. The one thing I had energy for was allowing my creativity to run amok without restriction. I trusted my instincts and let it do its thing.

It wasn’t easy at first. I was deeply ashamed of not being able to publish the way I had before. My writing voice had changed and I didn’t understand why or how, just that it was different. I didn’t feel that it was bad, just unfamiliar. My process changed in ways I didn’t intend and I couldn’t figure out why. I was creating more than I had in years but couldn’t finish anything I deemed worthy of publishing.

I took a step back and examined what I was creating from the top-down. Everything I wrote involved at least one of three things: ADHD, complex trauma*, and attachment.

My shame wormed deeper. I had become yet another Elder Millennial, American white lady writing about her neurodivergent life. Was that all I had to offer?

The answer was no, but also… yes.

Sometime in the period between “no longer testing positive” for COVID and “oh no, I think this is sticking around for awhile,” it dawned on me that everything in my life, before and after diagnosis, had gone through the ADHD filter in my brain.

Anyone with this condition will tell you that it is much more than how it appears on the outside. It is a constant that impacts every single area of one’s life. The shift in my writing wasn’t that I was adjusting to a big change; it was that I finally had the words and framework to reference and explain what I had experienced my whole life.

That was when the light bulb flashed above my head: I always had written about it, and one way or another always would.

I noticed a theme among people like me, thirty-something women and feminine people with recent ADHD diagnoses wringing their hands. They, like me, often felt lost even after the life-changing revelation of diagnosis and treatment. Many of us still felt something was off and we often asked each other “What’s wrong with me, still?”

Trauma, I realized. Something that has a known relationship to ADHD and yet often still seems to be disregarded or separated especially in womens’ spaces. No one told us that getting help for our ADHD could fray and re-bind the tight grasp trauma often has on our lives, and it’s disorienting when everything shifts.

The established knowledge we have about ADHD isn’t vast, but it is solid. We know what we know. But we also know that there is a large gap in knowledge, especially among women and girls. And many of us are not prepared for life after diagnosis. There is so much nobody tells us because most of the medical field doesn’t know yet.

It’s true that there is grief for the loss of who we were as children and young adults. The potential we could never fulfill, the tools we always needed—what could we have accomplished? How might our lives have been different?

In my experience, however, I have found that what caused more pain and terror was grieving who I am now. Who I wanted to be and can never become. The fear of missing out, of assessing how many skills I have to learn anew and others I have to reprogram or shed entirely.

For a population that is already inundated with constant threats to our safety and saddled with more mental and emotional labor than our masculine counterparts, it can be devastating. Diagnosis is a blessing, but it’s the first step of a thousand-mile journey when many think we are pulling off the highway at the next exit. This journey is even more complicated when one has to also account for the considerable impact of complex trauma.

That was when I realized my voice hadn’t shifted, it had opened fully. Unmasking isn’t just an external process; something that a neurodivergent person does around neurotypical people. It’s an internal one as well. The past year-and-change has been an uncomfortable process where I had to see and accept myself for who I was. I already thought I had been on that route. I was for the most part, but realized I had taken a shortcut.

People with ADHD and especially those also with CPTSD often burden themselves with perfectionism. It’s second-nature for us to compare ourselves to others, neurotypical and divergent alike. Often thinking we just aren’t there yet, are not worthy of compassion, self-esteem, and success. We often don’t see our own lives as success in their own right.

I realized there is a lot of value in sharing our experiences for those of us still in transition, because part of the journey is not just knowing but embracing that transition is constant state for everyone. Anyone who has done personal development can agree that not only is healing not linear, it’s also never-ending. It’s just as valuable to share our successes and insights in-progress while also recognizing and meeting challenges as they are. In writing terms: we all know the middle part of the story is where the good stuff is.

And that, I realized, is where my voice resonates. That is where I belong.

So what does that mean? What’s next?

In short: a rebrand. Temporarily, this will be known as “Project H.” I will reveal the official name of the rebrand later. There is no selling and no third-party newsletter—I have accepted this is not what my spoons were forged for. Approximately 75% or more of my content moving forward will center around neurodivergence and mental health as I experience, manage, and grow from it.

The rebrand will include video and when possible, audio. For a few years, I have wanted to make my content more dynamic. I couldn’t put my finger on why or how. A lot of the creative exploration I navigated this past year focused on livestreaming and gaming communities. The more I learned, the more I understood that streaming is a wealth of untapped potential for writers and I am eager to dig in the sandbox.

The current plan is that Project H content will be a hybrid of blogging and vlogging to make the content more accessible. I haven’t ruled out the possibility of moving to a live format in the future, but for now it will be recorded material. I’ll admit I’m reticent to use words like “vlogging,” because in my mind it means something specific, but at the end of the day it’s what most will understand in a broader context (I prefer “essayist,” but tomato, tomah-to).

The remaining content that doesn’t fall under the Project H umbrella will include my trademark miscellaneous op-eds, and addition of music critique and travelogue formats I am excited to try out. I may also archive and/or revise previous work I feel has gone stale.

Thank you all for being here, then and now. If what I have described interests you, watch this space!

*Officially, CPTSD (sometimes styled as cPTSD, C-PTSD, (c)PTSD, or “complex trauma”) is not declared in the DSM-5, but is documented in the ICD-11. Research supports it as a separate diagnosis broadly categorized by the impacts of ongoing or repeated trauma. Someone who has experienced trauma, complex or not, may live with lifelong impacts but not always meet diagnostic criteria, whether due to an absence of presentation and/or a result of treatment. For this reason I will generally use “complex trauma” for inclusivity, but for readability and writing style may use them interchangeably with the acronyms.