“I have good news and bad news,” said the researcher who’d just analyzed my brain scans. “The bad news is that you have ADHD. The good news is, it’s treatable.”

“Really?” I said. “I have attention deficit disorder? But…I have no trouble paying attention. Sometimes I pay so much attention to whatever I’m doing that I accidentally stay up all night.”

“That’s called hyperfocus,” he explained. “You pay too much attention to some things, and not enough to others. You have what we call an ‘interest-based’ nervous system—you pay more attention to things that interest you than to things that don’t.”

“Wait,” [...]

A few years ago I decided to write an allegorical book about a lost woman and a friendly boar. If you’re not a writer, you may not realize how odd this sounded to my agent, editors, and publishers. 

“An allegory?” they said. My proposed book wasn’t just outside my usual genre, it wasn’t in any genre at all.

“A boar?” they said. People can be so judgmental of tusked animals.

“But why?” they said. I was an established self-help author. Why throw away my time and energy on a book so odd no one would even know where to shelve it?

“No reason,” [...]