Writing · Why more discipline isn’t the answer
ADHD and Self-Acceptance.
Miles Davis, B.B. King, and ADHD. On what self-acceptance is actually for — and what it isn’t.
Self-acceptance gets misread as giving up. It isn’t.
It’s closer to what musicians do when they stop fighting the room and play it instead. Miles Davis didn’t fix himself before he played. B.B. King didn’t. They worked with what they had, and what they had became the thing that mattered.
For ADHD, the version of this looks like: stop trying to be the engineer you were supposed to become, and let the engineer you are show up to the work. The structures you need will be different. The pace will be different. Some things will be harder than they would be for someone else. Other things will be easier. None of that is a verdict.