How to Write an Essay (When You Have ADHD)

-Based on a True StoryElliana Reickard

Crack your knuckles, grab a coffee, and take a seat. You’ve got a three-page essay due tomorrow, and you’ve barely started. Good thing it’s only 8 P.M.! All you know is that your topic involves examining a couple chapters from Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. You’re not sure which chapters, but you wrote it down.

Wait, which notebook did you write it in again?

You’ll find your notes after a little digging. It’ll probably be scribbled in the top corner of a page either littered with doodles or haphazardly torn from the notebook it once belonged to and crumpled up at the bottom of your backpack along with dried-out pens and a half-eaten granola bar from a month ago. Don’t worry, you’ll clean out your backpack later. Maybe.

For now, you have a paper to work on.

But you’ve been busy all day, walking miles around campus and going to class! And your legs ache. You can practically hear your favorite mindless phone game calling you. And even though you know that game is a dopamine casino, taking a break couldn’t hurt too much. Promise yourself that you’ll play until you run out of lives, then you’ll start your paper. Try to keep that promise, but know that you’ll probably end up checking Instagram and taking a snack break too.

You glance at the time, and your heart plummets when you realize it’s already 10 PM. When the panic sets in, you immediately open up a Google Doc and put your name on the top, in MLA format of course. Add in the rest of the header, and now you’ve officially started working! You’re so productive today!

But of course, you have to put on the right song first. Open up your music player of choice, click on your favorites playlist, and—no way, your favorite band released a new song yesterday? How did you miss something so important? Give it a listen before you go back to the paper. And maybe a couple more songs. And make a playlist just for this paper.

Finally, you direct your energy into writing a solid introduction to your currently nonexistent paper. You’ve written a whole paragraph. Great job! Sit back in your chair and—hey, when did your room get so dirty? Clothes draped over chairs, cups of water resting on your windowsill, books tossed erratically onto your bed and desk… and the thick layer of gray on your bedside lamp confirms that you haven’t dusted in ages. No better time than the present!

After the clutter is swept off the floor—and you remember what the linoleum looks like again—you force yourself to sit back down in your swivel chair. You don’t even realize that you’re spinning back and forth, kicking your legs against the desk, until you’re startled by an aggressive pounding on the wall next to you. It’s your dorm neighbor, knocking on the wall to tell you to shut up!

It’s definitely time to start working again.

And right away, you find the task insurmountable. You don’t remember that much about Great Expectations; it just wasn’t all that interesting to you. But you know Charles Dickens. He wrote A Christmas Carol too, and you remember reading that novella a long time ago. It’s one of your favorite Christmas stories. Perfect timing too, since it’s so close to winter break! You have to get your holiday shopping done soon. And you need wrapping paper…maybe you could go to Target after class the next day? You also need to get tissues, so it’d be more convenient to do one big shopping trip.

You shake your head like an Etch-A-Sketch, as if to clear away the unwanted and irrelevant train of thought. Stay focused, you tell yourself.

Your eyelids are starting to sting. Check the clock on your computer and do a double take when you notice that it’s already 3 AM. You have to get this done. You have to. You write and write, filling paragraph after paragraph with quotes from the book and words that sound good at the moment but will probably sound pretentious the next day. As usual, you waited ‘till the last minute, and now you have to deal with the consequences. However long it takes, whatever battle you have to wage against the natural interest-seeking function of your brain, you have to see this paper to the end.

So you do. And then you’re done!

Go ahead and turn in the paper now. Don’t bother thinking about how your professor will see that you submitted it at 5 AM, since you won’t remember if you wait ‘till tomorrow morning, so it’s best to turn it in right away. And you’re used to staying up so late. Most of your papers end up being late-night projects, and each time, you swear to yourself that you’ll do better next time. You never do.

Now turn off the light, get into bed, and get some sleep! You earned it from all your hard work, and you want to be awake for the last day of classes before fall break.

After all, you have a class that starts in three hours!