A standalone companion to The Decoder Series
ADHD, Decoded
Wait, What Was I Doing?
A Field Guide to the Adult ADHD Brain
By Jennifer Brooke Lawless, M.S.
In development
From Jennifer
Hi. I have ADHD.
Diagnosed as an adult, which explained a lot. Fittingly, the explanation ran late.
I'm late to everything. Except when I'm an hour early, which is just late in the other direction. My sense of time doesn't run fast or slow. It runs on interest.
The part nobody puts on the pamphlet: the same brain that wrote a chapter where the keys turn up in the fridge can walk into a room and read it in about four seconds. Who's tense. What isn't being said. Which story doesn't add up.
That's my superpower: pattern recognition, turned all the way up. Handy, for someone who writes a series called the Decoder. (It's also why one chapter is called I Have 47 Tabs Open and One of Them Is This Book. Every superpower comes with a shipping fee.)
(The book refuses to use that word. The book is not the boss of me.)
So I wrote the book I wish someone had handed me the day I found out. It's short. It's funny. Every chapter stands on its own, so you can read it in any order, which is good, because I didn't write it in order either.
No shame. No forty-step system. Just the ADHD brain, explained by someone who lives in one.
Jennifer
The back cover
You've taken the 2 a.m. quiz. Bookmarked six tabs about executive function and closed the laptop without reading any of them. Maybe you've wondered for years whether there's a name for the way your brain works. Here, finally, is a straight answer about what ADHD actually is.
Wait, What Was I Doing? is a field guide to the adult ADHD brain, written from inside one. Not a clinic pamphlet. A friend a few steps further down the road, explaining how an ADHD brain really works, with better comic timing than anyone's managed so far.
Inside: why “just focus” has never once worked. Why someone can hyperfocus on a stranger's home renovation for four hours and still not answer the email that's been sitting since March. Why diagnosis so often lands late, and why that's a pattern, not a personal failing. Short chapters built to be read out of order. A Translation box in every chapter, turning one clinical term into plain English. One small, doable thing at the end of each chapter, never a ten-step system built to be abandoned by Thursday.
By the last page, you'll have language for a pattern a lot of people have quietly managed their whole lives, a few tools built for the way an ADHD brain works, and a clear next step if something in here sounds like you.
This book shares one person's experience of adult ADHD and plain-language explanations of the research. It isn't medical advice and can't diagnose anyone.
A few chapter titles
Focus? I Barely Know Her · Executive Dysfunction: A Love Story · Everything's Fine, I Just Have Nine Open Projects
And thirteen more.
Read the opening
Chapter 1: Focus? I Barely Know Her
It's 1:10 on a Tuesday. You have one job this afternoon: fill out a form.
Two pages. Name, address, a few boxes to check. The kind of task a responsible adult finishes in the time it takes a kettle to boil.
You write your name. Strong opening. Very confident handwriting.
Then you read question two four times without a single word going in.
What the chart says: a deficit of attention. Not enough of it to go around.
What it's actually like: plenty of attention, with opinions of its own. It just doesn't take requests.
Picture a car radio that picks its own station. Loud, clear, beautifully tuned, and never once the station you asked for. The trouble was never the volume. It's the knob.
Wondering whether it's ADHD, autism, or both? There's a quiz for that, with no score and no confetti. Take the two-minute quiz.
The beta team
Read it first. Tell me the truth.
Join a small team that reads the whole manuscript before it publishes, free. Read it on your own time.
Then tell me what made you laugh, what made sense, and where you got lost. Once it publishes, you're welcome to post an honest review, good, bad, or somewhere in between. It's never required, and your copy is yours either way. If you do post one, please mention that you read a free advance copy.
Your copy comes as EPUB, MOBI, or PDF.
Already on the team? Download your copy with the password from your email.
Know first
Hear when it publishes.
Part of the same world
This book stands beside The Decoder Series, planned in eight volumes, not inside it.
No number on the spine. Same house, same reader. If this book helps you see your own brain a little more clearly, The Decoder Series does the same for the patterns between people. Start with SEE, Volume One.