Crafting with ADHD

God knows it’s not always easy. I’ve found that with ADHD, most things aren’t - unless I hit flow state, in which case literally everything is easy, I’m the most capable person in the world, and no crisis is a match for my problem solving skills.

But most of the time, everything is hard - even things I love doing. If you have ADHD, or depression, or a personality disorder, or a schizo-affective disorder, you might have the same experience. 

First off, I want you to know: it’s not just you, and you’re no less of a crafter if you go days or weeks or months or years without making a single thing. You can always pick it up tomorrow, if today is too hard.

Second, I want to share what I’ve learned, in the hopes that it’s helpful for you.

Remove the Pressure

This has gotten harder for me the longer I run my small businesses. There’s orders that need to go out, collections to be designed, and commissions to make. There’s no pressure more intense for me than other people’s expectations - and that pressure makes it harder to craft, not easier. 

I can’t remove that pressure, so it’s important for me to focus on what pressure I can remove. For me, that means removing time-pressure. After setting my expected shipping times, I extended them twice before I figured out how long I need to remove time-pressure from the things I sell online. When I’m working on inventory for a market, I plan out how much I want to make, then cut that amount in half. There’s not enough time otherwise.

The pernicious thing about ADHD and time is that you think you have enough. You don’t. I promise you don’t. Look me in the eyes. You don’t have as much time as you think.

If you can’t extend the time, reduce the amount of crafting to do. If you can’t do either, then reduce the quality - and let yourself enjoy it.

If you also run a craft business, I’m not telling you to sell crafts that don’t meet your standards. I’m telling you that even the things you consider “not your best work” are still things that someone somewhere else will enjoy. You don’t have to sell those things (although you can, if you’re honest about their quality), you can give them as gifts. You can keep them for yourself. Most importantly, don’t promise to make things you won’t enjoy making.

It takes a lot of courage, to stop offering products you’re burnt out on, or that take too long. It’s hard to extend your commission timelines. I get it. But you are more important than the stuff you make, and there is no art that is worth your hurt.

Make the Steps Smaller

You know how long it takes me to make a batch of soap? Minimum four days. Because I simply will not do it all in a day. 

If I were to just start from the beginning, it only takes about an hour, an hour and a half for me to make what for me is a full batch. Lye-water to spritzing, an hour and a half - it’s really not much.

I simply will not do that many steps. 

Oh, I’ll try. I’ll get started, and then get distracted partway through. My feet start hurting. I’m bored. I’m sweaty and my goggles are fogged and I want to do something else. So I don’t finish. And that’s fine.

Now, I split my soapmaking into steps that I can do in short bursts, and one of those steps is “get everything out”. Seriously. The first day of my soap-making process is cleaning off my work surface. The next day is just pulling out all of my bowls and containers and spatulas and supplies. The day after is making the lye water and prepping fragrances and colors. Then, finally, after I reach the point where it all needs to be done in one go, I make the soap.

I do the same thing with my junk journaling. If I have the urge to dig through my ephemera, I get it out. Then later I print some photos. Then the next day, or even a couple days later, I sit down and put it all together.

There’s nothing wrong with having your supplies out, as long as you can make the space for it. Sometimes I ask to use the dining table for a whole day, or a whole weekend (a luxury, I know). Other times, I get everything out and then stick it in a tupperware on my desk, because that’s what I can manage.

The point is, you don’t have to do it all at once.

Learn New Crafts

I’m going to take your hand while I say this. Are you ready?

It’s okay to start a craft, do it once, and then never touch it again.

You have no moral obligation to finish a craft just because you started it. It might be annoying. It might cost more money and time than you’d like. It might be baffling and frustrating to the people around you. But there is absolutely nothing ethically wrong with not finishing a craft. If buying things you don’t end up feeling like are worth the money, then that’s a challenge to solve creatively, and I’ll talk about that in another blog post.

Everything else? The annoyance and frustration and box of unfinished projects? Those are all dependent upon the idea that there’s some intrinsic value in finishing a thing. If you commit to the idea that your value is not based in what you produce, you will find that it is easy to let go of those feelings, and those knitting needles you’re never going to use again. 

If just trying a new thing makes you happy, then the craft has already served its purpose. You’re allowed to let go of it when it stops being interesting. And if your partner or parent or friend objects, you can show them this article. 

It’s okay to move on to something new.

Forget About It

Last but not least: you’re allowed to forget about your crafts.

Leave ‘em alone. Let ‘em rot in the draw for a few months, it’s good for ‘em.

The first cross-stitch piece I ever finished took me eleven years. Yeah, that’s right, more than a decade. If I had taken all the days that I worked on it and lined them up next to each other without skipping, it would have taken maybe a year.

But sometimes I went months or years without touching it, so it didn’t take a year. It took much, much longer. I thought about throwing it out more times than I can count. During that time, I started and finished a half-dozen other embroidery projects, not to mention other various crafts. I made a lot of other crafts in those eleven years.

I can’t tell you what made it so hard. But I can tell you what made it possible: I vigorously, intentionally rejected any sense of shame that I went so long between bouts of work. Anytime I thought of that cross-stitch, sitting neglected in a cardboard box on my shelf, I would feel a sense of uncomfortable guilt well up inside of me. 

“Aw, I should work on that,” I would sigh to myself. Then I would catch myself, and straighten, and insist, “No. I can work on that, but there’s no reason to if I don’t want to.” I did that until it became habit, and then second nature. Then, when I did think of it, I could consider whether or not it sounded fun to work on without having to sift through any sense of obligation. It got a lot more fun to work on it when I didn’t have to.

So here is my official endorsement: let yourself forget about your projects. Don’t come back to them if you don’t want to. But if you think you should finish them, nip that right in the bud. There’s no time limit on finishing your crafts.