“Whoa! What’s the rush? Where do you need to be?” Whoever says this has already slowed me down.

Nowhere. The answer is almost always nowhere.

For someone who went long un-diagnosed for their ADHD, I think I’m pretty good at leaving the house on time. It’s uncommon that I feel pressed to rush. So I wonder at this fixation others have that “rushing” could be the only reason for a person to walk so fast.

Let me ask: How much concentration does it take you to pace out your breathing? How unconscious of it are you 95% of the time? That’s how my stride is to me. It’s my pace. It’s the sweet spot on my gearshift.

Often, my speediness comes up because someone I’m walking with has a pace—just as natural to them—that is slower. Their desire to fall into step together is a trait I would appreciate in any loved-one. But the jabs at my own pace—however playful—begin to sting.

If I’ve set off at a faster clip, you don’t have to tug my shirt or call ahead or ask one of these snarky questions to get me to slow down. It may take me a beat to realize the situation and adjust, but I will notice you, and I will come back, and I will do my best to be conscious of my pace, particularly when I know that something out of your control (like an injury) dictates your own.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I feel the need to stick up for this thing that comes so naturally to me. To point out the ways I find it different and wonderful, rather than inferior.

I grew up getting and feeling sick all the time. It wasn’t until after college that I started focusing on solving this and worked to get dramatically more athletic than I was as a child.

Health is something I didn’t understand in a meaningful way until that age. It’s something that, for many reasons, I still feel I have only a tenuous grasp on.

Because of that, I can’t express to you the gratitude I feel when I “have my health.” For me, moving quickly is a joyous expression of that. I love the feel of my hair bouncing when I walk. I love how the faster I walk, the more wind there is in my face. And I love the gentle burn in my hips and knees as I do so. These body parts used to give me nothing but pain, but I nurtured them until they could handle miles and miles of fast, hard walking.*

Slow walking has a meditative reputation. It is “taking it all in” and “smelling the roses.” But does someone who isn’t “taking it all in” notice the softness of their hair skimming the back of their neck as it swishes from side to side?

I promise, too, that I smell the roses.

Walking fast does not preclude the enjoyment of the journey. The journey can still be everything. Just like it can still be everything even if you can’t walk at all.

When I walk fast in a forest, it is because I am so hungry for fresh air that I want to vacuum it up with my body. It’s because I like how my feet fall unevenly on the trail in pace with my quickening breath. It’s because I like the dappled sunlight dancing on my face.

When I walk fast in a city, it is out of a similar enthusiasm to consume life. I go farther. I see more. The alertness demanded by weaving through a crowd pushes all other thoughts to the outskirts. It clears my monkey-mind just as effectively as slow-walking might do for others.

Because fast-walking is my natural state, it has a rhythm to it, a rhythm I lose when I consciously alter my pace.

I understand the beauty of moving in step with someone. I love to hold my boyfriend’s hand and look down and see our feet go left, right, left, right, left…

But I love moving in time with myself too. It’s a different kind of peace, no less valid. My heart, and my feet, and my lungs, and my thoughts… all moving together to some fun beat I’m sensing in the air.

On laundry day, I feel like I could be POTUS.

The chore is a Level Ten on my executive function scorecard. I mean, think of all it entails:

• being dressed and showered enough to be presentable in the hallway
• stripping my bed and/or sorting clothes
• refilling the account on my laundry card
  • which likely means finding my password again because I go long enough between trips that it signs me out
• setting timers
• adhering to timers
• freaking out about whether someone will get there first and dare to touch my clothes
• determining which items go into the dryer and which come back to my apartment to hang out
• accidentally throwing a Swiffer sheet into the dryer instead of a dryer sheet and having to run back down the hall to make it right
• folding/hanging things up/redressing the bed
  • THE IMMINENT DUVET COVER FRACAS

Doesn’t it exhaust you just reading about it?

If I had laundry units in my apartment (the dream scenario of all big-city renters, no?) I think things would be different. It would eliminate 1, 2, 3… at least 5 of these bullet points!

And as a bonus, the company that runs my laundry card account would stop sending me passive aggressive emails:

• “Your laundry room misses you”
• “Wash your bedroom items weekly!”
• “Don’t let that laundry pile up”
• “You can still be productive during the big game”
• “Tips to smelling fresh for Valentine’s Day” — *sniffs underarm*

At least when our building switched to a card instead of coins, I could eliminate the cumbersome “drive all the way to the bank in real clothes to get quarters” bullet point.

But in all seriousness, laundry day is a triumph. I limp by with hand-washed batches of underwear between these red-letter days, but it’s not the same as having a closet full of soft, fragrant clothes. And the constant Febrezing of my skating bag only gets me so far before the bag is mistaken for that of a hockey player by keen figure skater noses.

It’s always been this way. It’s not because I wasn’t forced to do the chore more as a kid, and it’s not because I’m lazy. It’s because my brain finds these minor stresses less surmountable than the average brain.

My inherent rigidity means that merely sorting my clothes is a task with a million rules unique to me. (Frustratingly, even with an offer of help, I would be hard-put to delegate.)

My aversion to the common spaces of the building makes every chore that involves crossing my threshold (see Article 2.9B – Taking Out the Trash) a daunting one.

My compulsive counting down to scheduled “events” makes it hard to do anything productive between trips to the laundry room.

So when I do laundry. It’s a time to celebrate. It’s a time to shave my legs and kick them under the crisp, fresh sheets (my favorite sensation!). A time to indulge in how well my once stretched out jeans suddenly hug my legs and smell nice. It’s a time to pat myself on the back for a day where I managed Level Ten functioning.

Fresh laundry reminds me I’ve done much bigger things in spite of my challenges. I’ve written books. I’ve painted paintings. I’ve won competitions. For me, tasks might be slower, clothes might get smellier… but I get there in the end.

I had the privilege to spend the past week on a lake in what must be one of the most beautiful pockets of the United States.

The Adirondacks are a part of the country I previously knew only from films—mostly 70s summer camp flicks, horror or otherwise. A place where white birch trunks brighten the forest. A place where the leaves are eager to leap into their autumn colors. A place where loon calls and thunder are the only things you hear at night.

Twice we spotted a bald eagle. I realize there are now hundreds of thousands of bald eagles across the country, but when I was a kid they were so endangered that there were only a couple dozen breeding pairs suspected to be in New York state. So my excitement at seeing them in the wild met with that memory of their rarity and I silently welled with gratitude.

I was almost as enthusiastic for the loons. And for the toads that hopped daringly underfoot at night. And for the garter snake that looked like a stick until I was right on top of it.

I marveled at sheet lightning as it backlit an untouched panorama of bulging storm clouds. I braced for that first chilly kiss of the water as I went for nearly daily swims. I sketched placid landscapes and learned, with no disappointment at all, how hard it is to capture the colors of the golden hour.

But most impactful was the fresh air. The lake we stayed on was historically a spot for tuberculosis sanatoria and it was easy to see—and smell, and taste, and feel—why. It was the end of the summer season and some nights got quite cold and windy, yet my expected asthma attacks never came. As soon as we landed back in Los Angeles, the air tasted acrid again and my asthma lightly kicked up on my first morning back. I’m trying hard not to focus on how much I miss that part.

It all left me with a great deal of longing to be closer to nature or even to shirk the city entirely.

My boyfriend, who took me there, mentioned recently how torn he was between wanting to live in a bustling city—one denser and more communal than Los Angeles—or leaving everything for the quiet of the country. I leapt to share that I struggled with the same question.

It’s a question I have no answer for. Sometimes the heart wants more than one thing and sometimes those things are in conflict. For those wealthy or privileged enough to have a foothold in both worlds, I certainly see the appeal.

I am, and have always been, a storyteller.

A lot of the stories I tell are the ones I tell myself.

I remember one story I told to myself as a kid. I stood at the foot of an iron-posted twin bed and rested my elbows on the cross bar. It was my podium as I played pretend, imagining I was a Hollywood auteur accepting one of multiple statues at the Oscars.

Back then, I told myself the story that I’d be a great writer, a great director, a great actor. I glowed with hope and ambition.

Things were bearing down on me that I couldn’t yet imagine. I didn’t know that some of my quirks and anxieties were chapters in a story of neurodivergence and I didn’t know that puberty would collide with that fact like the meeting of two hurricanes.

As I moved through my teens and twenties, the stories I told myself became much sadder. Less ambitious. The scope of my stories became less about the future and more about the past. Traumas floated to the surface of me like empty life vests.

I developed a disdain for hope because, back when I still had some, I didn’t yet possess the map around my obstacles. I didn’t even know most of my obstacles. Disappointments were rife.

So why am I thinking about all of this right now? I’m thinking about it because, as a general skeptic, I feel like I’m missing out on something.

A lot of the women I love and am close to engage in some form of “manifesting.” They approach it in ways that shouldn’t rattle the skeptic in me. They’re not binge reading The Secret and all its offshoots. They’re not joining cults or MLMs. What they’re doing strikes me—even when dressed in talk of crystal energy—as something healthy. And as something I lack.

I’m a little repulsed when the word “manifest” arises and I used to think it was because of my aversion to the mystical trappings that sometimes mingle with it. But I’m starting to realize it’s just my fear. Fear and trauma. Jealousy, even.

Because I once had the ability to tell myself good stories about the future too. And I lost it. And I miss it. I see my friends tap into that hope—in whatever form suits them best—and wish I could do it too.

What’s even harder to accept is that there’s something to it. I’ve watched these friends do great things and dip their toes into lives that look increasingly like their vision boards. The skeptic in me still asserts that imagining a desired future does not make it come true, but also inside of me is an innate and obvious certainty that the inability to imagine that future is a stone wall built against it.

When I tell myself a story about the future these days, it’s all doom and gloom, informed by the pains of my past. But I thankfully got a lesson in hope from my therapist earlier this year.

Something in my life seemed to be going sideways and the pain of my future—of the story I told about my future—was excruciating. I wanted to abandon ship. To run from the possible pain before it inevitably caught up to me. I’d catastrophized myself right to the edge of a cliff, giving myself no other way out. Or I saw no other way before my therapist pointed out that hope was always an option.

The path of hope was, for me, so long neglected that it looked like the craggy dark forest path at a cartoonish fork-in-the-road. There was low visibility and howls from its depths. It took courage to go that route. I can say now though that, had I not braved it, the painful future I’d envisioned would have been a certainty. All because I was not open to anything better for myself.

What a cruel way to think.

I know I won’t magically make myself a manifester overnight. (Pinterest knows, I’ve tried.) But if I absolutely must tell myself stories, I’m going to try to tell myself more stories with happy endings. Some of those will still play out in heartbreak, sure. But I dare myself to think: Maybe some of them… won’t?

Somewhere, a room is waiting for me. My soul mate of a room.

The planets are working on it right now. Finding the right alignment to bring me and my room together.

The books are stacking up. The paint is drying on the artwork. The seeds are dormant in their thrift store pots… waiting.

Somewhere, the most comfortable dining room chair is being sat on by seventy-one year old hips. And tomorrow, or the next day, or years from now, that chair will be put on the curb to start its journey to me. To being my chair at my desk by my window.

My cat is now just a twinkle in a tomcat’s eye. She’s the loudest in the litter. She’s orange, or black, or a white-mittened tabby—I don’t know yet—but the cotton for the cat-bed has been harvested. The bed that will start on the floor by my feet, but will end up beside the row of books on the desk, because I’m weak for her eyes and she loves the sunshine… and being near me.

The photos pinned to the bookshelves are being taken. In Marrakesh and Positano and Zagreb. In jungles and cities and seas. In some I am alone. In others, my smile rests on the shoulder of someone gaining wrinkles with me.

Someday I’ll feel a rush when I pin that first photo to the shelf. Like a badge to the room’s lapel. To my room. To a Room of One’s Own. To a Room with a View. To a room where birds put on a show at the feeders outside. While my cat’s eyes flick back and forth, lazily, dreamily. Where we make things from dawn to 2AM. Where the sewing machine never gets dusty. Where manuscripts stack up and slump over for lack of space. Where the constant paint under my nails is a reminder to pick up the brush.

It’s the room someone will pick over when I die. Where they’ll find all my hidden secrets. Where they can pretend cat hair and dust is the reason their eyes water. They will take home a box of things. And my dining chair, with my shadow in its cushion, will return to the curb. Where I hope the planets see it and match it with all their wisdom to another someone’s Room.

A friend, who I thought knew what she was doing, scared me one day. She’d grabbed my wrist in alarm when I told her that I posted some of my writing online for free. She was a working artist and spoke with authority:

“Never post anything for free. It’s finite. You have to get paid.”

Paid? I love getting paid. Putting boundaries around my skills—believing in the value of them—is crucial.

But, having little immunity to others’ panic, I fell into the trap of her other words, into the idea that my ideas were finite.

What a cruel lie to tell oneself.

The lie breeds preciousness for our work—fertile ground for perfectionism.

When I was fifteen, I doodled everywhere. In the margins of every notebook. In sketchbook after sketchbook. On my hand. On my desk. On any blank space I could find.

Now a blank page haunts me.

The ink in my pen will either become a stain or a piece of art and I’m so avoidant of the stain that I will not attempt the art. I have to swallow emotions I don’t even understand when I approach a blank page. I have to, by brute force, make contact with the paper.

Drawing, and any playfulness or release that once came with it, is gone. The atrophied muscle, difficult to restrengthen. It affects my writing too. It affects all things.

In high school, I poured my soul into slapdash poems to keep myself sane. I put scissors to my favorite tees just to see what would happen. I wrote stories that I never felt the pressure to finish. I experimented endlessly and I felt free.

Now I struggle to make the first cut into a new piece of fabric. My ideas gather dust, rolled up in pristine yardage, untransformed.

Ten empty journals, donated to the thrift store.

And all because I bought into the lie that I would run out of ideas. That I had to treat every single one as the one that would change my life. That I had to hoard them and wait for the perfect moment in my evolution to make them real.

This lie shares space with the falsehood that we must perfectly fix ourselves before we are deserving of the love of someone else. It ignores that we are all a work in progress…

And so is our art.

Progress stalls the moment we stop attempting things.

If fear is the strongest emotion you feel when presented with creative opportunity—a blank canvas, a hot mic, an empty dance floor—then you’re already in deep. Getting back to a sense of “play” will, paradoxically, require “work.” I know, because I’m in the midst of that work now and my teeth clench every time I put a mark on a fresh page.

But start by rejecting the idea that your well of creativity can ever dry up. Or that you have to put every drop of it toward something “productive” or “perfect” or “lucrative.” Sometimes you’ll just need to express yourself. Sometimes your art will be a way to scream into the void and feel better after. These are as necessary and valid as any other way to “spend” your creativity.

If you sat down to execute The One Great Idea you would ever have… Would you even start? Would you ever finish?

It takes trust, bordering on faith, to realize we’ve got more than The One Great Idea in us. But we do.