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Before I start saying anything, let me just announce that I have nothing deep or super meaningful to add to this . . . anyways here we go.

As someone who has anxiety and ADHD and some other stuff, I can tell you that almost every book I’ve ever read where a character has things like that get it wrong. (And that’s maybe . .  . six books. And NEVER main characters.) They usually portray anxiety as always worrying about everything, and that’s pretty much it. In reality, it’s more like . . . being on edge all the time, getting nervous when things are very loud or when there is a large group of unfamiliar people, feeling vaguely uncomfortable and fidgety most of the time. Your brain treats places that aren’t ‘safe’ places like enemy territory. I once saw it described as ‘always hearing the danger music in a videogame but never seeing the bad guy’ and that’s pretty accurate.

With ADHD (again, only like six books and never portrayed by MCs) you always think of a spacey distracted ball of energy, right? “SQUIRREL!” And while that is something that happens often, it isn’t all there is to it. It’s forgetting things people say like two seconds after them saying it, or not being able to do anything if either a) things are too quiet or b) there is any noise at all whatsoever. There’s also executive dysfunction, which pretty much means that you can’t make yourself do something, even if that thing is something you want to do. You feel like you have to wait for something else to happen first. It’s hard to filter out important things from unimportant things, so often you get overwhelmed and end up remembering the random stuff instead of what you’re supposed to. Either your brain races ahead and you figure stuff out way before everyone else, or it skips like a scratched DVD and you can’t even think about the thing properly. Sitting still is also not a thing, not because there’s so much energy, but because if you don’t move you can’t think.

Both anxiety and ADHD are pretty exhausting because your brain is going in overtime trying to absorb and process everything around you while watching out for potential danger.

This is the way my brain works, and several of my friends are in the same boat. In my own writing, several of my main characters do have anxiety and such, but I didn’t even realize for almost a year. I’d just been writing them that way because I didn’t know how ‘normal’ people think.

Since everybody’s different, research lots. And yeah that’s all I have to say.