How to ADHD on holiday?
I asked ChatGPT to describe my version of holiday rest. Here’s what it came up with:
“Polly, the neurodivergent art psychotherapist, doesn’t do stillness in the usual way. Her rest is a kind of motion, but not rushing. It’s scattered notebooks, a soup on the stove, a suitcase with too many books and just enough shoes. She rests by letting ideas breathe. By letting time be soft. She isn’t retreating. She’s composting. She’s clearing space so something else can emerge, in herself, in others. And she’s finally paying attention to her body’s clues: what brings expansion, what brings a shift. She rests like a creative does, with one eye open, dreaming.”
And I thought: yes. That’s close.
By day two, I’d:
🫠 Counted how many clients I could have seen if I’d stayed working (or worked around my holiday activities)
🫠 Sketched out my next “academic year”with at least three, full-on ideas that will probably never take shape
🫠 Watched the Tumble Circus from Belfast and felt something in my body whisper: become a circus therapist
🫠 Asked a therapist friend: “can you be burnt out from resting?”
🫠 Wrote a list titled: “Ten things I’ll start when I get home” (now 43 items long, all marked urgent and very similar to my "12 things I need to do on holiday in Ireland" list)
🫠 Created a colour-coded Notion dashboard for something I haven’t decided to do yet
🫠 Tried meditating but got distracted and decided to write a poem about moss instead
🫠 Started designing a workshop for other people about how to unplug (while still plugged in myself)
🫠 Stared into the sea and realised I hadn’t actually exhaled since November last year when I started private practice
I’ve been thinking a lot about creative rest. Not the collapse-on-the-bed kind, not the five-days-of-email-backlog kind, but what Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith names as one of the seven types of rest: a replenishment of inspiration, of sensory spaciousness, of time to make, dream, and imagine without agenda.
I’ve also been thinking about Winnicott’s potential space, the space between internal and external reality, where play and creativity live. And wondering: how do we build more of that into our lives? And not just individually, but collectively. Could we design something together that offers this?
A kind of shared permission, for us - therapists?
There’s something quietly brewing. A version of rest that makes room for us as we are: creative, overfull, craving stillness but allergic to passivity. Stay tuned.
How do you rest, as a therapist, maybe a neurodivergent one?
