Why Can't I Just?

Welcome to Hollering with the Armadillo, the section of Home with the Armadillo wherein I (Andrea Grimes, a Texan writer/activist, if you’ve forgotten which newsletter you signed up for! It happens to me a lot!) publish essays, fiction, and various, well, hollerings. If you’d rather only get my abortion news roundups, or only want the occasional hollering, or would rather get all my content in the Substack app versus on email, you can select which sections of my newsletter you’d like to subscribe to on your Substack reader dashboard.

I have started and stopped this essay a dozen times. It has been many essays, with many threads, and many starts and stops and delete-posts and delete-drafts. But the only thing that stays the same is the headline: “Why can’t I just?”

Why can’t I just wash my face every night? Why can’t I just fold my laundry? Why can’t I just keep my car tidy? Why can’t I just write a novel, a column, a tweet? Why can’t I just anything?

I know a little bit of the answer: I have ADHD, with which I was diagnosed at the ripe old age of 38. I am coming to understand the ways in which my successes, both professional and personal, have come both because of and despite my neurodivergence. My brain simply works differently. This is both comforting and not. I know why things are hard; I know the tips and tricks that are supposed to make things less hard.

But things are still hard.

Even with the tips. Even with the tricks. Even, perhaps especially, with medication, which was not a silver bullet that slayed the werewolf of my ADHD, but rather kennel-trained it.

The question I’m really asking myself when I ask “Why can’t I just …?” is not really about my ability. I know that I am literally capable of washing my face and folding my laundry and cleaning out my car, and of writing just about anything I put my mind to. The question I’m really afraid of, the question I’m really asking, is about who I am.

It is a narcissistic and torturous query of self-abnegation: “Shouldn’t I just be a person who can …”

I try to convince myself that I am only ADHD-lite, that maybe even if my brain is weird in this way, it’s still that my fundamental problem is lazy, which seems like an eminently easier problem to fix than: woman glitchy, 404 error brain. And certainly eminently easier to fix than writer glitchy. Which is how I feel these days.

I don’t know how else to get into this, so let me tell you a story about trash.

Everyone’s trash has a story.

This is an apocryphal story about trash. It is perhaps better described as a theory of trash. It started as a rumination in the comments section of Jennifer Peepas’ excellent Captain Awkward advice blog. I can’t find the original post, which was about someone frustrated by their messy roommate, and if I go looking now, I will not finish writing this.

The gist is this: all trash has a story.

The problem of trash in a communal living situation is that all the household trash is not your trash, and thus does not have the compelling and logical narrative arc of your trash. Your roommate leaves their dishes in the sink overnight. Your teen leaves empty cans of Dr Pepper on the coffee table after game night. Your partner throws their dirty laundry on the floor. These things are all trash, because you do not know the story of other people’s trash, and thus the presence of other people’s trash may be an attack, an affront, a sign that your roommate or your teen or your partner is an asshole who devalues you, thinks of you as naught more than a robot whose job it is to consume, deal with, or otherwise manage their trash.

This may be true; I don’t know if your roommate or your child or your housemate is an asshole. But I do know that, if they aren’t an asshole (and maybe even if they are), their trash has a story to them. Because my trash has a story. When I abandon an array of moldy tea mugs and glasses half-full of cucumber water and crusty little V8 cans on my desk, I leave them there because they have a story. I poured those drinks because I wanted them for a reason (to wake myself up, to distract myself, to satisfy myself) and I let them fester for other reasons (I got bored, they got too warm or too hot, someone asked me a question) and I didn’t move them to the the sink — let alone the dishwasher, or the garbage — for yet more reasons (I wanted to do the Peloton, my friend asked me to get a(nother) drink, it got late and my husband was already running the dishwasher, I’ll just do it in the morning).

The dénouement of all of my nasty, aged beverages’ stories has been and is and always will be: I absolutely believed I would put every last one of them away, when the time and conditions were right. My trash might be disgusting to me in any given moment — I find moldy tea as repulsive as the next person — but my moldy tea has a story with a beginning, middle, and if only imagined, an end. And the time and conditions were never right, and my little trash stories never came to a resolution.

Never in any of those cases did “Screw my husband, I hope he has to pick up a thousand nasty cups off my desk in order to get the house properly cleaned” enter my mind.

By why shouldn’t my trash look like that to him? (To his credit: if such a thought has occurred to him, he’s never vocalized it.) He doesn’t know the story of my trash. He simply sees trash. And he should. My trash-intention is not trash-magic.

I know this. Still: why can’t I just pick up my trash? Why can’t I just write an ending to my trash story?

Why can’t I just write anything?

What does it mean to give our trash a story?

I do not identify as a writer.

I mean, I am a writer; writing is the predominate skill from which I make my living. Indeed, here you are reading my newsletter, the thing from which I derive a significant portion of my income as a purveyor of words. In past/current lives, I have been/am a food blogger and a news blogger and a long-form narrative writer and an editor and an investigative reporter and a social media content creator and very occasional publisher of short fiction and a comedian and a messaging consultant and nonprofit communications maven and and and and — all of it boils down to: I put words and sentences together, or help other people do so, so that I or we or they can tell stories.

But writing and the craft thereof? Is not my bag as an intellectual or identity-related pursuit. I am not a writing-group person; I do not relish sharing my drafts and getting feedback even from people I consider most trustworthy and talented. I do not generally enjoy breaking down story structure, or parsing the nuances of particularly compelling prose. I love talking about ideas; I love fantasizing about possibilities. I hate digging into the line-by-line shit of what makes a piece of writing great. I die a little every time I submit a draft of anything to an editor. I hate asking other people try to make my writing better — to make sense of my trash.

Shame and ADHD are powerfully linked. My particular experience of ADHD is very much wrapped up in the belief — wrongheaded, I know — that other people find things easy, and that I should find those same things easy.

I struggle to believe that other writers find writing hard, even when they say it is. Even when they write about not writing, and the shame and fear of writing, of sitting in front of the blank page and blinking cursor and they have to get up early or sneak in writing time between wrangling children or parents or other jobs or or or or or — I convince myself nevertheless they feel compelled, enthused, invigorated by the practice of writing. When they struggle, they quit drinking or doing drugs or whatever else prevents them from their true calling — or they do more drinking, or more drugs — and they write, write, write! Because they are writers! And they thrill and thrive on developing their praxis with others just like them! This, somehow, is the real writing life, the story of the “bad art friend” or the many and various iterations thereof in real writers’ communities the world over.

Is that a true story about writers? About all other writers? Surely not. I know this, intellectually. Emotionally. Logically. But it is the story I tell myself, the way we tell ourselves stories about other people’s trash (or other people’s lack thereof). It is I alone, the boring and bad not-writer, who cannot just write, instead flailing and indulging myself in the the little selfish obsessions of writerly victimhood.

Writing feels like leaving the Dr Pepper can on the coffee table. Endlessly generating mugs of moldy tea. At my worst moments, I think of myself as a litterbug, tossing napkins out the car window. The most tiresome, boring, awful, embarrassing thing I can think of is subjecting other people to my trash, and yet as a writer-not-writer, this is what I do.

I have few other skills. Writing is rarely a joy for me; neither is it a compulsion. It is a thing I am highly capable at, and also a thing I have become more self-conscious about as I grow older. I miss the days when I believed every thought I had was original, every idea a barnstormer. But even when I was young and foolish and enamored of my own bullshit, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I was simply a person who could, must, had to write — because I was a very bad bartender and I can’t count-back change to customers and I can’t remember food orders and I am a nightmare at spreadsheets and it’s too late to go to medical school and and and.

But also: Perhaps I don’t feel like a writer because I do not believe in stories.

I believe in storytellers. But stories?

Stories are bullshit.

This is not to say that stories are not important or meaningful or essential to the human experience. They are, undeniably.

But stories are bullshit. They are the best bullshit we have, but bullshit nevertheless.

A thing that has always chapped my ass about journalism is the extent to which journalists are tasked, and task ourselves, with forming narratives out of people’s real-life experiences in order to make the upshots of those narratives palatable and interesting to readers and, increasingly, “audiences.” We invent and imagine themes from real peoples’ lives, weaving whole blankets out of scraps; the best narrative journalism you’ve ever read is probably 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 percent just one chucklefuck, hopefully a talented and empathetic chucklefuck, filling in the gaps for someone who has already spilled their entire guts to said chucklefuck, for free (at best) and at great personal expense (at worst, and maybe more common).

My feelings on this are mostly informed by my experiences reporting true crime-type stories and investigations. I do not see my own life as a cohesive narrative, and I dislike the responsibility of putting other peoples’ real lives — especially their traumas — into the same kind of box. Of course, many writers are very good at this, and I am grateful for their good work. (And of course, some writers will shake anyone down to get a good old-fashioned exploitative yarn. I am always a little afraid that I am one of them.)

Some weeks ago, my husband shared with me this New Yorker article about the limitations of narrative and the presumption of storytelling structure and/or the conceits of breaking same. When I was in college (nearly 20 years ago, my dusty bones!), the academic/intellectual fad was to be part of the new narrative zeitgeist, and to find new ways of non-linear storytelling through video art, games, and/or innovative publishing models. (Or to be a critic thereof.) But the whole fad was predicated on the idea that there was a linear structure of life, of narrative, of humanity, that needed to be deconstructed in order to be (re)(mis)understood — perhaps not coincidentally, this occurred at roughly the same time as the rise of molecular gastronomy and dish-deconstruction in fine dining.

Why should we de- and reconstruct our own narratives, or other people’s narratives, or even our food, when nothing about life (or a Michelin star menu) makes sense to start with? Aren’t we all just bored or lonely or hungry and looking for something to fill us up? Why do we try so hard to convince other people our trash is complicated or meaningful or important or entertaining?

What if we didn’t? What if I didn’t?

We are surrounded by trash and all our little true and untrue stories about trash either way.

Why subject anyone to my trash?

I am terrified, cowed, embarrassed by the prospect of making trash for other people to clean up. And yet I have chosen to make a living out of littering.

None of this trash-feeling, which I understand is a manifestation of many and various intersections of my brain and my history and my fears and my future, is going to stop me from making trash. In the same way that my tea starts out hot and fresh and delicious before it crusts over on the desk, I know that my writing, at least not all of it, is not actually a moldy mug growing strange new organisms. I know that some of it is a hot and steaming beverage of comfort and sustenance. I have to know that, even if I don’t think of myself as a writer, or do the things I think a real writer should do, or find any of it easy.

I can still try to make a good-ass cup of trash.