Writing the ADHD guide we wish we’d had

Content warning: This episode discusses self-harm. 

What does it actually take to finish a book with ADHD? 

Cate sits down with Erik Gude, her co-author of The ADHD Field Guide for Adults, to unpack five years of starts, stops, and persistence. They get into taking advantage of accessibility options and overcoming the shame of looming, unfinished projects to get this one done. 

• Listen: Infinite Quest (Cate and Erik’s podcast)

• Listen: ADHD and procrastination

Cate Osborn: Hi, everybody! Welcome back to "Sorry I Missed This", the show where we talk about all things ADHD and its impact on sex, relationships, intimacy, communication, and more. It’s me, your host, Cate Osborn. Today, I am bringing you a very special episode all about the process and considerations that went into writing my new book, "The ADHD Field Guide for Adults".

I am joined today by a very special guest, my co-author and the co-host of "Katie and Erik’s Infinite Quest", Erik Gude. In this episode, we are going to talk about the process that went into writing "The ADHD Field Guide for Adults".

"The ADHD Field Guide for Adults" was born of the idea of: what if we made a book about ADHD that was actually accessible and actually helpful to people with ADHD? And it turned out that that was kind of a revolutionary idea, which I think is wild.

So, Erik and I sit down to talk about how this book got written, how this book got made, what went into being two authors with ADHD, and what it looks like in terms of accessibility and creating something that was such a labor of love. This book has been about five years in the making with a lot of setbacks, a lot of delays, but it is finally out and it is finally available.

So, in this very special episode of "Sorry I Missed This", we’re just talking about the book. I’m really excited. I’m really proud of it. We are honored to be an instant bestseller. We hit the USA Today’s top 100 books. It has been a consistent bestseller across Amazon and several other platforms. So, we have just been absolutely overwhelmed and honored by the response.

This episode is a behind-the-scenes insider’s look at what it took for Erik and me to write this book and how we got here now. So, I’m super excited to welcome you to this very special episode of "Sorry I Missed This".

Cate: Hello, Erik. Welcome to my other podcast.

Erik Gude: Well, hello. This is cool. I feel like I’m seeing my teacher at the grocery store or something. I’m on your podcast now.

Cate: For those of you who don’t know, Erik and I also host a much more informal and much more casual podcast about — I don’t know, Erik, what would you say our podcast is about?

Erik: What is it about? It’s about whatever is going on in our brains at the time, I suppose. I mean, it was originally when we first started the podcast, people kept messaging us saying it’s so awesome to hear people talk the way I do. So, we sort of committed from then. We were like, "Okay, we’re going to try not to edit too much of the ums and oops and all that stuff, and we’re just going to talk about stuff. If ADHD comes up, it comes up."

Cate: Well, it’s funny for the press tour for the book, a lot of people have asked us about our ADHD journeys. I’ve talked a lot about how we are kind of exactly the opposite. Erik was diagnosed young. He was a person who struggled in school and is maybe, like, not the best reader in the entire world. I don’t feel like I’m saying anything mean because you’ve talked about it publicly.

Erik: No, it’s okay. I’m very open about those things, yes.

Cate: But I was the opposite. I didn’t get diagnosed until the day before my 30th birthday. And so, I was great at school. I did really well academically and I loved reading. I was one of those hyperlexic people. So, Erik and I came to writing a book from very different perspectives, just in terms of accessibility and how we feel about reading and how we feel about writing. So, I don’t know. Do you want to just talk about that a little bit, Erik?

06:33 The core philosophy of the book: that ADHD does not mean you are broken.

Erik: Yeah. Well, I think generally how I was diagnosed is I was always an ADHD little kid. I could kind of keep it together in school, so teachers didn’t really call my parents or anything like that about it. I knew how I was supposed to act. But I was never good in school, just because I didn’t want to do what people told me.

But at some point, school stopped being about shapes and stuff and started being about , like, there are these things called electrons, or , like, this is called a standing wave, and everything you ever hear is air vibrations. I’m like, "What?"

So, somewhere around sixth, seventh, eighth grade, I started being like, "Dude, school’s kind of awesome." It’s , like, my whole job to just go to this place and learn the cool stuff that they’re teaching. Like, that’s sweet. So, I started dialing in. I was like, "Okay, I’m going to pay attention in class." And I still couldn’t. And that’s a really, really shattering moment as a kid.

So, I talked to my parents about that, and I got diagnosed at 15. Which is very good; I’m glad I know that about myself. But I think the perspective that a person who was diagnosed earlier that is different is from the age of 15, I did well because I now know I have ADHD. I got medicated, I started developing skills, my grades skyrocketed. But in the back of my head, I’m like, "If I endeavor to do something, I’m going to fail."

After high school really is when it started showing its face, where I would take things that came to me. If I got offered a job, I would take it and I would do as best as I possibly could at that job. But I never aspired to do anything other than what was right in front of me because I didn’t trust myself. In a lot of ways, I still don’t.

I don’t endeavor to do large things because I know I’m probably not going to want to do it for long enough to accomplish it. And that is a deep, deep belief of mine that has been in there since I was a kid. But I think that perspective hopefully comes out in the book — that I was told I was broken quite early, and I believed them. And it’s going to be a lifelong process of unlearning that.

Cate: What do you think would have contributed to feeling less broken? Originally the book was going to be called "You’re Not a Fuck-Up". Like, that was the original title of the book, and then they low-key made us change it before we published it, which is fine.

But that’s kind of the thesis of the book: that inherently, having ADHD does not mean that you are broken. It does not mean you are clinically doomed to not finishing things. It does not mean that you cannot live a fulfilling and amazing life, particularly once you start developing the ability to create systems and structures that work for you. So, how does that experience as a young person show up in what you’re trying to communicate in the book now?

Erik: That your worldview, the way that you understand the world around you and the way that you understand your place in it, is malleable. The little assumptions we make about the world every moment of every day — they’re so ubiquitous and happen so fast, they are almost impossible to really notice.

There’s a joke that David Foster Wallace tells — it’s my favorite joke. He said there are two young fish swimming along in the water, and an older fish swims past them. And the older fish says, "Hey boys, how’s the water?" and swims along. After a moment, one of the younger fish turns to the other fish and says, "What the hell is water?"

The idea being that fish exist in water. Everything around them is water. But it takes a lifetime to notice what’s all around you. So, I think getting people to notice that their worldview is up to them — it’s affected by a lot of other things, but you can change your assumptions about yourself.

11:51 The role of collaborative writing as an accessibility tool and the importance of addressing difficult topics like self-harm.

Cate: It’s been interesting even just in the process of promoting the book and the questions that we keep getting asked about, like, "How is it possible that two people with ADHD wrote a book?" Does it hurt your feelings at all? Because it’s starting to kind of hurt my feelings.

Erik: I mean, I get what they mean. I get the sentiment of, you know, how could you possibly have written a book? But the thing is, one, how did we write a book? Her name is Renée Dyball. That was our secret — I mean, it wasn’t a secret at all. I talked about it all the time. But she’s a collaborative writer. So, she was a massive, massive accessibility tool for us.

So, my actual answer would be we had a lot of help organizing and keeping on track and stuff like that. But people with ADHD can write books. A lot of people with ADHD write books.

Cate: I feel like talking about the accessibility portion is really important because I was really surprised to learn, especially after we kind of started talking more publicly about the fact that we used a collaborative writer as an accessibility feature — I hate saying accessibility tool because it makes me feel like I’m calling Renée a tool, but she’s not. She’s the best in the whole — she’s such a tool. She’s the best.

But there’s this big stigma in a lot of the writing community about this hyper-independence. Like if you get help, or you ask for help, or you use a collaborative writer, you’re somehow cheating. It’s giving "back in my day, I had to walk to school uphill both ways" because it’s like, "Well, I had to struggle, so you’re supposed to struggle, too."

I wonder how many people are not utilizing accessibility and not creating the amazing, wonderful, cool projects they have in their head because they don’t want this stigma of , like, "Oh, I cheated. I didn’t do it all by myself."

Erik: It was just, we’re either going to make a book or we’re not going to make a book. If we don’t use a collaborative writer, we’re probably not going to make a book because of our brains. And anything that helped us make the book, I just considered to be a reasonable and necessary thing. How did it feel — because you went to school for writing extensively?

Cate: Kind of. Not for writing, but for Shakespeare.

Erik: Yeah. Sure. Academic, academic writing. You studied beautiful, beautiful language. At any point did you feel like, "I should write this whole section in iambic pentameter" or something like that?

Cate: No. I don’t know. We studied the language of Shakespeare, but studying Shakespeare isn’t about learning to write like Shakespeare, you know what I mean? But I was a writer when , like, my first professional writing job was when I was a teenager. I had a column in my local newspaper for years.

But I think my connection to writing is that I never finish stuff. I mean, I have hundreds of unfinished novels, unfinished poems, unfinished essays, unfinished articles on my computer in my Google Drive at any given time, because I’m just constantly thinking about stuff. I’m constantly thinking about the way that I want to tell stories. But then I will hyperfocus on that story for three, four months at a time, and then the impulse dries up, and that particular novel or that particular story just kind of languishes.

I guess I don’t know, there’s also that kind of , like, you remember the negative more than the positive. I do have multiple Master's degrees and I did write a bunch of dissertations for those. So, it was like, I have proof that I have finished stuff. But it’s the stuff that I have really cared about.

I know you’re not supposed to say that you don’t care about your dissertation, but it was homework. There’s a difference between finishing your homework and finishing the novel that you’ve always wanted to write. And I think that to me was one of the harder parts — was I had to move past that idea of, "Well, I never finish anything, or I never finish anything that’s important to me." And so, that I think was part of my journey in the book, maybe a little bit.

Erik: I think that was honestly something I was surprisingly not worried about — was not finishing — because the amount of people we’d be letting down if we didn’t finish was just staggering.

Cate: Did it start to feel like our book that lived in Canada for a while? Because it’s like, "No, seriously, guys, for real, we have a book coming out. No, it actually really does exist." That got really stressful.

Erik: Yeah. No, especially because we started talking about it pretty early. Because how do you not? I mean, we got approached to write a book, and then we were doing it. We were excited! How do you not talk about it?

06:33 Including overlooked topics like intimacy and self-harm.

Cate: Okay, let’s just talk actually about the book. What is your favorite section of the book?

Erik: Honestly — no, dishonestly — I think the self-harm section that I wrote. Well, I remember when I started self-harming in middle school — when I first started, it had nothing to do with depression or feeling like I was punishing myself at all. It’s because I was bored.

Self-harming was a way of not being bored. It wasn’t boring. It wasn’t good, but if I was self-harming or had just self-harmed and was dealing with what happens after that — I won’t get too specific here — I wasn’t bored. I had something to do. Something important to do, in fact. I had to do something or else it was just going to get worse, you know?

So, I just kept doing it. It became like a little game. My — I would get caught, I would get yelled at, I would go to the counselor. And so, I had to get better. I had to get cleverer and sneakier. And then my depression really hit around 12-ish years old. And then I did feel compelled to self-harm for depression-related reasons. And I was already practiced. I was old hat at that time. I had been hiding stuff. I had been hiding parts of my body. I was good at this little game I was playing.

But I remember just being so dissatisfied and frustrated when I first was getting found, getting caught before the depression hit, that there was nothing I could say that would convince the adults in my life that I’m not doing this because I’m depressed; I’m doing this because I’m bored.

Later on, I was doing it because I was depressed, but initially, I was doing it because I was bored. And I would make that case, you know? And so, they were, God bless them, trying to get me resources and counseling. I was like, "Guys, I’m really not — this is a separate thing. I need to join the science club or something." I mean, I was 12. I wasn’t that self-aware at the time.

As I got older and we started writing the book, I just kept thinking there must be kids out there who feel the same way, who are sitting in the counselor’s office and they’re giving them the wrong resources. Anyways, I was proud of putting that in writing. Maybe somebody else has had a similar experience and will get something out of it. What do you think your favorite section of the book is?

Cate: Oh, I knew you were going to ask it and I still didn’t have an answer locked and loaded, which I think is very funny. I thought it was really important to talk about stuff like sex and intimacy and relationships. And, like, the way that trans and non-binary people are left out of the conversation and the way that being a BIPOC person or a person of a marginalized identity is going to impact your ADHD, because those are conversations that are left out of the ADHD conversation all the time.

So, I wanted the book to be as representative of the ADHD community as possible, but then also just kind of acknowledging the fact that there are a lot of uncomfortable conversations that we have to have when we talk about ADHD stuff, like self-harm and addiction and eating disorders and sexual issues and that kind of stuff.

I get comments all the time from people like, "You’re the only person who’s ever talked about my period impacting ADHD," or like, "sex, intimacy, whatever." But all of that stuff is part of ADHD, nearly unilaterally. The percentages are so high that if there is a person who is just existing only with ADHD and nothing but ADHD, that is extremely rare. But that’s who most of the other books about ADHD are written for.

So, I feel like talking about comorbidities and talking about how stuff stacks and interacts with each other — that’s super important. So, what I hope is that people come away from the book getting interested and getting curious and saying, "Okay, like, that’s super interesting. I’m going to look more into that." I don’t think the book is the end-all-be-all, but I think it is absolutely the place to start.

I want parents to be able to look at their kids and be like, "Hey, did you know that ADHD impacts your driving? Did you know that ADHD impacts your ability to consent? Let’s have some hard conversations about the realities of being a young person diagnosed with ADHD" in the hopes that we prevent some of the hurt and the harm and that sort of feeling of, "I’m doomed to a life of failure because of this diagnosis." Like, that’s really what I hope for the book.

Erik: Yeah. I hope people come away from the book with a feeling of "I can do this." And you are very much not alone. There are a lot of other people dealing with the same thing, and there are a lot of resources available. Not just accommodations and stuff like that, but just the people around you. There’s a lot of compassion around you and a lot of people who would love to help.

Cate: I hope so. I hope you do, dear listener, if you decide to get the book. Speaking of, it is out. It is available now. You can get it wherever you procure your books. There is also an ebook available. There is also an audiobook available — a bestselling audiobook available. Erik and I recorded it together. Also, Casey Davis, friend of the podcast, Casey Davis did the foreword for us and she recorded the foreword. There’s a few other guest voices as well. So, the audiobook is really fun because I feel like it’s like a little multicast podcast experience.

All right, Erik. Thanks for coming to talk about my own book. I appreciate it so much.

Erik: Thanks for letting me set up this little booth in your dining room. No worries. Good job.

Cate: Thank you for listening. Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, or burning story you’d like to share? Email us at ADHDaha@understood.org.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.

"Sorry I Missed This" is produced by Jessamine Molli and edited by Jessie DiMartino. Video is produced by Calvin Knie. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright. Production support provided by Andrew Rector. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. And I’m your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.

Erik: This is cool. I feel like I’m seeing you at work or something.

Cate: Ah, you are.