The Weekly Five

Five things for creatives with ADHD...and those without

May 07, 2025

The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

I’m not one who keeps a journal. It’s not that I haven’t tried. I can still picture the diary I absolutely had to have when I was twelve, the nubby red faux leather one with the lock and key to keep my deepest thoughts safe from prying eyes. The one with mostly blank pages. Thanks to my inability to make entries, I have no idea what deep thoughts my twelve-year-old self had, if she had any. When I was just a few years older, I was enthralled by others’ diaries—Anne Frank, Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—still, keeping one myself never felt authentic or purposeful. At Julia Cameron’s urging, I managed for several weeks to write morning pages, but morning not being my best time, and journaling having never really captured my enthusiasm, it didn’t last. Thanks to Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy, however, there may yet be hope for me. I’m encouraged—perhaps, surprisingly, even won over—by this collection of essays and prompts curated by the always inspiring author of Between Two Kingdoms and the creator of the extraordinary community The Isolation Journals. Jaouad has written deeply thoughtful and moving introductions to ten chapters on universal topics such as memory, fear, ego, purpose, and love, exploring through her personal history the ways in which journaling on these topics has been transformative. In each of the ten chapters are ten essays and prompts by a range of contributors including professors, poets, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, advocates, activists, cancer survivors, and more. Some may be among your favorite writers: Kiese Laymon, Dani Shapiro, Lidia Yuknavitch, for example. The collection offers readers a 100-day project. Each day, read an entry and respond to the prompt. Because each of the prompts is intelligent, provocative, and generative, by the last chapter and these last words, my resistance began to crumble. “So stop looking for reasons not to do it. Open your journal. Pick up your pen. Return here as many times as you need to. Keep going.” I believe I will.

You Are a Lot (An ADHD/AuDHD Podcast)

Jen Kirkman is a television writer and stand-up comedian who wrote for four seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and a writer/producer on the Amazon Prime comedy Etoile. She’s also a Gen-X, late diagnosed AuDHDer who talks about her personal experience and shares the latest research on ADHD and autism spectrum disorder on her podcast, You Are a Lot. Episodes cover a range of topics such as negative self-talk, justice sensitivity, and pathological demand avoidance. In Episode 43, she addresses the blowback to the recent controversial New York Times article by Paul Tough, “Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong?” (See my take and get links to the articles and rebuttals here.) She shares in full the response from ADDitude magazine and summarizes the four-part YouTube rebuttal by renowned ADHD expert Dr. Russell Barkley.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

You may have no interest in the 1970s film industry in general or the rise and business operation of the animation company Pixar—on the surface the subject of Creativity Inc., by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. But there’s a good chance you’ll keep reading for the authors’ insights into the prerequisites for creative work and what it takes to nurture a culture of creativity, even if you’re an enterprise of one. Wallace and Catmull, a five-time Academy Award winner who was president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, which he cofounded, traces the rise of the company that created phenomenally successful films such as Frozen, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Toy Story. That success story (peppered by failure) is a backdrop for an analysis of the qualities that make creative individuals excel, that allow for the creation of successful creative teams, and even those that that throw a wrench into the creative process. It’s a call to rethink our views on failure, to see them as not shameful but as opportunities for growth. It’s also an important look at the role of play in creativity, the nature of feedback during the creative process, and the crucial need for candid communication. Some of this may seem irrelevant to writers who work in isolation, but for those who participate in writers’ groups and other creative collaborations, there’s much that may resonate.

Climbing the Walls

In Climbing the Walls, a new limited-series investigative podcast by Understood.org, health and science journalist and documentarian Danielle Elliot attempts to understand the rise in ADHD diagnoses among women and why they’re left behind in the ADHD conversation. Elliott includes her own story of a lifetime of feeling that she was falling short, until an ADHD diagnosis at age 36; shares stories of the lived-experience other women late-diagnosed; and features experts such as psychotherapist and author Sari Solden, MS, and psychotherapist and ADHD coach Terry Matlin, MSW. These are wide-ranging, intelligent and empowering conversations about shame, stigma, overwhelm, and other ways ADHD affects women. Understood.org also launched MissUnderstood: The ADHD in Women Channel and offers numerous resources on ADHD on its website.

100 Days of Creative Resistance

Created and curated by Brian Gresko, 100 Days of Creative Resistance, a project that was delivered via email from Inauguration Day 2025 through April 30, is now available in full on the website of Writing Co-Lab, a writer-owned experimental cooperative school founded by Gresko, Sara Lippman, and Amy Shearn. It’s described as messages of “encouragement, opposition, and commiseration—a reminder of why we write and create—from 100 iconoclastic contemporary voices,” including Melissa Febos, Celeste Ng, Lilly Dancyger, R.O. Kwon, and Paul Lisicky. Gresko, a Brooklyn-based writer, illustrator, and teacher, and contributor to publications such as Poets & Writers, Slate, The Atlantic, Longreads, and The Rumpus co-runs Pete’s Reading Series. For more motivation and inspiration, check out Writing Co-Lab’s Summer Camp—an online program of generative classes, panels, open mics, and write-together accountability groups— taking place July 12 to August 2.