The Virtual Gazebo
ADHD, Fear, and Making Fish Suppers For Imaginary Builders
External validation you say? Why I don’t mind if I do, thank you. Your like is exactly the ticket. Thank you for helping me with this small patch repair to my self-esteem. ❤️
What the fuck, Ros? A thousand things are overdue, and you have just spent two hours “levelling up” your “Arabian Garden Gazebo.” I wouldn’t mind if this were a real gazebo in your real garden. The sort whose building strengthens the muscles, then satisfies the eye and brings long-lasting pleasure to you and your loved ones. But no. This gazebo’s construction is 100% pixels.
So you’re back in the Palace of Virtual Achievements, disrupting your sleep by chasing pointless dopamine hits until 1 am. Delaying your “at the desk” start time by clicking the logo (two coffee cups, natty), which will bring you the instant hit of fake wins when real ones look too far away.
And scary. You know that’s really the driver, don’t you? You’ve been hooked on this methadone before. And always when a creative project makes you want to run away screaming.
I get it. You spent nine years researching, writing and revising an extraordinary work that was just too long for the market that came into existence while you were creating it. The null result hurts like shrapnel, moving when you move, jagged against the half-healed wound when you return to the battleground, your current work in progress.
Let’s clarify. Creation’s not a battle (except when you’re wrestling yourself, even to do it). But the publishing market? It’s littered with the bodies of brilliant authors who couldn’t quite meet its quixotic desires. This stuff cuts deep, and the taste is pure Angostine bitters, no mixer. Rejection and failure. How this new book will land is uncertain. Will there be payoff? Will there be love and recognition? The future is a terrifying abyss. Whereas now, 10.20 on a Tuesday morning, you’re only twenty clicks from a wise-looking wizard saying you’re wonderful.
If only your mum had said you were wonderful more often. Sure. But no blame to be laid. We all know where a need for external validation originates. But also, thank your Mum, because how damn useful it’s been, the engine that has powered you to achieve many things. Winning you appreciation from total strangers and this rare gift: an income from doing what you love. Your mum’s mothering ended decades ago. The only person responsible for opening this game is you.
Sure, you could plant some blame at the feet of the Pablo Escobars of the tech world, whose understanding of human psychology and their desire to roll naked on vast beds of cash combine to hook thousands of sad-eyed users like you.
The creators of Travel Town and Magic Sort don’t give a shit how many works of humanity-enriching art will never be created due to artists sedating their creative anxiety with fake rewards in an imaginary world.
But you do.
You’ve read the book, Four Thousand Weeks. You’ve spent thousands of your life’s weeks developing a unique, irreplaceable skillset. If you die when your Mum did, you have 230 weeks left. How many will you waste getting fake surfing gear for a digital blonde?
Beating oneself up only leads to more shame, and thus more avoidance. Remember, this is not new. That year you took off to “become a writer” after uni. How many hours of that did you spend shuffling and re-dealing a pack of cards onto your bed, laying out clock solitaire where your poems should have been? And all through the four years you were writing The Marlowe Papers, sequestered in your study, you spent hour upon hour avoiding the terrifying task by playing Spider Solitaire. In 2011, your first smartphone opened whole new avenues of digital avoidance. Your daughter says, Mum! This is Paradise Cove all over again!
Delete and reinstall. Delete and reinstall. At some point, you have to cut off the head of this dragon. Gamify something productive. Gamify reading. It doesn’t have the haptics, that satisfying tingle when you fill up a test tube, deliver a surfboard. But it has streaks and badges, and for just a few minutes a day, a sense of accomplishment.
Being rewarded by apps is a dopamine-satisfying brand of procrastination. Your long-undiagnosed ADHD makes you extra vulnerable. You learned to jump through hoops of external validation early on, the only way to grab a bite of positive attention in a smorgasbord of criticism and disapproval. But external validation requires taking big risks with yourself. Putting yourself out there risks rejection, and worse.
Now it’s Wednesday morning, and you have downloaded Bookly. You are still slow to your desk. The avoidance is strong because the fear huge. Eight or nine out of ten. Self-aware, at last, you set about tapping it down to size. Let’s pull a few teeth from the dragon at least. The phrase that arises:
“I am fucking scared.” Lacing genuine terror. Tears.
But you write that day, eventually. Six hundred words. And read, with Bookly. And those six hundred words, they give you a zing.
Thursday morning, the fear‘s down to five out of ten. You tap it down further. Then write a little more on this post about Virtual Achievement. Bringing it into the open is part of the cure. Shame dies in sunlight. You’re only human. And humans can get addicted to stress-relieving things.
You read Wednesday’s six hundred words and find them inspiring. You aim for six hundred new words. Write over a thousand before you run out of breath.
And now you have it.
There’s a feeling when a book catches fire. When it stops being a mess and starts being something. When it hangs around in your head, long after you’ve finished your typing. Taps you on the shoulder in the shower. Wakes you up with a brand new line at 4 am. There is nothing, nothing in the world you love quite so much as being in the middle, the full momentum, of writing a book.
You have surfaced from the blindness of your fear. You can now see it clearly. Fear is your good buddy. Fear will hang out with you every single day, in the passenger seat, and you’ll tell it,
I see you. Relax, friend. I’m driving. This is absolutely normal. We’re going to write the book.1
As you’ll know if you read this regularly, I consider EFT tapping the most powerful took that exists for emotional regulation, and I’m running monthly tapping circles for full members of How to Evolve, both to teach the technique and to get real in-the-session results. For details of this month’s session on 28th December, and to register, click here.
Over to you
I love to hear from you. I read all of your comments and will attempt to reply to as many as I can. Here are some questions to kick you off:
Have you ever (or do you now) struggle with a phone app addiction of any kind?
If so, have you investigated what’s behind it? Is it a form of procrastination (which is generally driven by fear) or something else?
Come on, fess up!
An unwritten book is a perfect book. Right?
Yes, this is Elizabeth Gilbert’s metaphor. Despite occasional extended excursions into dumb phone games, I also read!
Love to see the Fuck written out - feel like it’s an act of rebellion against the entire boomer generation (or maybe just my mom) every time I see it in a woman’s writing. Fuck yes!
Oh, dare I admit I've played that game as well? 🤣
I have been through game phases when I felt unhappy - I assume the rewards were helping with the unhappiness. But all the games hit a plateau (very quickly, some of them) where they start demanding real money to progress. I chuck a few quid at them, but it's never enough - they want more and more, at which point I check out. Since my ADHD diagnosis in January, I've steered clear of those games entirely because I'm aware my brain could get hungry for them.
I found Solitaire on my phone and play that sometimes - it's free and there's no adverts! Hurrah!
I remember when my stepmum was trying to set up her own marketing business in the 90s. At one point, we'd come home from school and she'd still be in her PJ's playing a Tetris-rip-off on our Sega Megadrive. As you say, she probably was scared.