Welcome to the ADHD Journal
October is ADHD Awareness Month, and we want to use it to do something a little different. Rather than give you a month of definitions, diagnostic criteria and lists of symptoms, we want to show you what ADHD can feel like from the inside. Not everybody with ADHD experiences it in the same way, and this journal certainly isn’t intended to speak for everyone. It’s our journal: lived experience, shared patterns and the things we’ve learnt while making sense of neurodivergent brains and the worlds they have to navigate.
Across October, we’ll share some of the things that make life with ADHD funny, frustrating, creative, exhausting, complicated and occasionally completely ridiculous. Some are things we’ve learnt to work with. Some we’re still figuring out. Quite a few are things we spent years believing were simply odd little features of ourselves before discovering there was actually an explanation for them.
Why Monsters?
To help tell those stories, we’ve turned some of the recurring challenges of ADHD into Monsters. You’ll meet Monsters who interfere with time, attention, transitions, decisions, sensory processing, communication and all sorts of other parts of everyday life. They aren’t intended to make light of the challenges. Some of them have a very real impact on work, relationships, confidence and wellbeing. Giving them a face and a personality simply gives us another way of talking about something complicated without reducing ourselves, or anyone else, to a list of deficits.
And the Monsters aren’t really villains. Most of them are taking something our brains naturally do and turning the volume up a little too far. A strength can become a problem in the wrong circumstances. A strategy that works brilliantly one day can create chaos the next. Understanding the Monster means understanding what it’s trying to do, when it helps, when it gets in the way and what might make living alongside it a little easier.
Every Monster has a soundtrack
Every Monster also has a soundtrack, because sometimes a song captures a feeling more quickly than pages of explanation ever could. Alongside this journal sits the Neurospicy Monsters – Volume One collectors’ LP: 22 Monsters, 44 tracks and one month of neurospicy chaos. Each Monster has claimed a Side A track that captures them in full flow. Turn the record over and you’ll find Barry’s B-side: the track he reaches for when it’s time to tame the chaos, shift the rhythm or find another way through.
The LP isn’t an afterthought or a playlist bolted onto the journal. It’s another way into the same stories. The artwork, the sleeve notes, the music and the journal all offer different routes to understanding. In the journal app, the tracks sit alongside each entry so we can listen as we read, explore the album artwork or simply follow the words. Some of us make sense of the world through language, some through pictures, some through music, and plenty of us use all three.
Meet Barry, keeper of the web
You’ll also meet Barry. He’s a spider. Before you panic, Barry isn’t the problem. He’s the keeper of the web. While the Monsters create chaos, Barry quietly helps us find our way through it. You’ll get to know him over the next few weeks. By the end of October, we suspect you’ll have come to appreciate his wisdom… and perhaps even admire his rather magnificent purple mohawk.
The web matters because it’s probably the best way we can describe how an associative brain can make sense of the world. Thoughts don’t sit neatly in separate boxes. They connect. One idea tugs on another, which moves something somewhere else, and suddenly we’re three subjects away from where we started while still being absolutely convinced we’re discussing the same thing. Barry understands the web. More importantly, he understands that the answer isn’t always to dismantle it. Sometimes we simply need to work out which thread we’re standing on.
Who this journal is for
If you have ADHD yourself, we hope there are moments during the month when you recognise something and think, yes, that. Maybe you’ll recognise one of your own Monsters. Maybe yours will look completely different. If you don’t have ADHD, this journal is for you too. You are not expected to become neurodivergent to understand us, and you don’t need to learn to imitate the way somebody else’s brain works. We hope the daily entries simply make some behaviours that can look confusing from the outside a little more understandable from the inside, and make it easier to ask what someone needs rather than assuming why they’re doing something.
This isn’t a month about fixing ADHD people. It’s a month about understanding brains, noticing barriers, recognising strengths and being more curious about what’s happening underneath the behaviour we can see.
How the month works
There’ll be one journal entry for each weekday, with weekends giving us a little more room to explore some of the bigger ideas sitting behind the Monsters. Each weekday entry is paired with its place on the Neurospicy Monsters LP, so the record becomes the soundtrack running alongside the month: the Monster’s Side A and Barry’s B-side.
Welcome to the web. Welcome to the Crew. And welcome to the soundtrack.
If in doubt, Barry it.
Ways to explore the series
You can read every entry here as an ordinary article, in order, using the list below. Or open the interactive journal, where each day sits in an October calendar: weekday entries open as diary pages alongside their Side A and B-side tracks and the Neurospicy Monsters LP artwork and sleeve notes, and each weekend becomes a double-spread visual with a mini-game.
Read the series
Listen, look and play
- Collectors’ LP · ListenNeurospicy Monsters, Volume One: the ADHD journal’s collectors’ LP
- The Monsters · CreateMeet the Neurospicy Monsters: the characters of the ADHD journal
- Weekend spreads · CreateWeekend spreads: comics and mini-games from the ADHD journal
Keep exploring
This series sits within Neurodivergent Practice Support, alongside practical resources and a free CPD pathway.