I have an external hard drive jam packed with projects. Some barely started, some half-finished, and some I actually did finish but backed out of at the last minute or even after I'd launched them and for some reason or another, I bailed. The half-finished ones are usually the victims of another idea coming to me mid process and by the time I've finished with the new idea, the old one stops being appealing to me.

Take this blog, for instance. I was writing and posting near daily when I launched it, but it's now been almost a week since my last entry. I don't think I've lost my spark for it, because I still open my Obsidian vault to at least try to write something every day, but my brain tends to float back to the work I've been doing to replace the backend of my personal website and I can't get anything worth posting typed up.

I know why it happens. It's ADHD. A neat little neurological explanation/excuse for everything that I can whip out to remind myself of why I'm like this whenever I need. For people with ADHD, motivation comes from interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and/or passion. This blog is interesting to me, and I am passionate about the things I write, but the novelty may have worn off, there's no real challenge to what I'm doing, and I don't HAVE to be doing it, so there's no urgency.

The backend project, however, is interesting, novel, challenging, and involves a hobby that I am more passionate about than writing (coding). I also don't HAVE to be doing it, but I've created my own sense of urgency to get it done sooner rather than later because what if something else interrupts the flow and I actually don't want to do it anymore. Unlikely, seeing as coding for the web is literally the only hobby I've stuck with through for the majority of my life, but the niggling feeling is still there.

Knowing this about myself doesn't really help though. It just makes me even more frustrated that I cannot divide my time fairly between the things I want to do without the quality or motivation for one (or more) thing dropping significantly. Most people can do more than one thing in a day. Why the hell can't I?

I also suffer from a busted thought pattern that makes me unjustifiably believe that if something I make has no value to others, it's not worth maintaining. Even if I've found a sense of accomplishment or lot of joy in making it. This is one of the reasons the things I make end up disappearing within a year. And why I love comment sections, contact forms, and *gags* social media. This is how I know people are seeing and using what I have contributed.

This is particularly stupid because external validation, by definition, requires action from other people, but I have no control over the actions of other people. I only have control over myself. I should be able to find the validation within myself that the feeling of "wow, I made this and it's fucking cool!" is enough. I should be motivated to keep things up and running even with little interaction or recognition because I enjoy doing it! But I'm just... not.

The irony is that no one really cares about how often I post a new blog entry. The people who've been reading, commenting, and liking the forum posts I share each entry in show up regardless. People are interacting with this particular project, but I still can't find the motivation to give them something to read more often because I'm over here more concerned about something that they're not even going to see once I'm done because it's a freakin' backend.

I feel so insufferable just writing this. I have the privilege of time to work on the things I actually want to work on, but I'm now whining about how I can't devote enough time to one of my hobbies because my brain has a preference for the other? There are bigger problems to have, such as being in a massive amount of pain for past few days, and this is what my brain has chosen to focus on today?

What an absolute wanker.