Being a Journalist with ADHD

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash‍ ‍

I went through three jobs my first year out of college

I had a rocky journalistic career with a lot of jobs over the years. I still write a lot for publications but as a freelancer. I went through three jobs in my first year out of school. In 30 years I had 17 jobs. Ten times it was my choice to leave, and seven was their choice.

ADHD makes one well-suited for a fast-paced, high-pressure environment that can change drastically minute by minute. That is how the ADHD mind is anyway. The chaos of a newsroom actually feels kind of natural to me. Everyone else is stressing out and I am feeling like I don’t have to fake it anymore and can relax.

However, Journalism attracts perfectionists, and I cannot work with a person like that. I make them crazy. They make me crazy. I will get fired or quit.

There are people who think I am a great journalist, and there are people who think I am awful. The trick was always to try to find one who had a boss that understood me or who was not saddled with perfectionism. I’ve never seen what I actually did make much difference. People either “get me” or they don’t.

People either “get me” or they don’t.

For most of my career, my ADHD had not been labeled, so I didn’t know what the problem was. I just knew I was different than most people, and would not fit in certain environments. Unfortunately, I ended up in those environments and lost several jobs over the years. Newspapers often have tyrants and egotistical people in charge, and it is very unstable work.

Three jobs in less than a year

In my first year out of school, in the early 1980s, I went through three jobs. It might have been 10 months. At the time it made me feel like a failure and didn’t do much for my self-esteem at all. But now that I look back, none of those train wrecks were my fault.

First one

The first one was just plain crazy. This was a small weekly paper in Tennessee in a small town. I knew the lady seemed pretty eccentric who hired me, but she owned the paper. I started work and got along fine with the editor, who I did not meet at the interview. I did not see her again for three weeks. She came into the office one day and fired me. Said get out. No explanation. No nothing. So that was less than a month.

I had a beer with the editor later, and he said he was sorry but there was nothing he could do. He said I had been doing a good job and wondered if he might get fired too.

I had been asking questions about some things going on at another small town nearby. I had pissed some people off with those questions. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.

I started looking for another job. I found one in a month or so. This was before computers. There were trade journals and I used those. I also randomly mailed out resumes with letters of inquiry attached.

The second one

I got hired by a paper that came out three times a week. It was in a bigger town and was overall a better deal. The only negative there was that I did not have a lot to do. Giving an ADHD person a light workload is not a good idea. It was kind of strange. They seemed to want me to do more, and I was very much willing — even asking at times to do more — but no one would tell me what I should be doing.

I found out a lot of small papers have no training and very little if any, orientation. They show you a computer and expect you to start cranking out stories as though you had been there for months.

The assistant editor was one of those perfectionist types. He sent me to some event with vague directions and I never found the event. I tried calling him at home but he didn’t answer. The place was not where he said it was. It was a rural area, and the one person I did ask had no idea what I was talking about.

From then on I was irresponsible and could not be trusted. It was my fault that I did not find the place. He pointed this out almost every day.

“Gotta be careful where you send James. you know he has trouble finding things,” was something I heard often. I failed to see the humor.

He did manage to make the work pretty miserable for me. That is another characteristic of small newspapers. You get perfectionists who have a good case of OCD along with it, and they never forget your smallest mistake.

I started looking again though. The same MO. Sending out random resumes with cover letters. After a couple of months, I got yet another job. This was in a smaller town and was a family-owned paper.

Third one

The third one seemed pretty good. The editor was an “older” woman. Gray-haired and seemed pretty nice. The workload was good. They seemed to think I was a workhorse. I would do what they said, and then ask for more. By then I did realize I need a big workload to stay focused. They may have thought I was being noble, but I was really just trying to create the environment I needed.

An ADHD person does not need to get bored. At the time I didn’t know I had ADHD, but I did know that I worked better when I had a lot to do.

But this one ended as the first one did, with a curious firing for no reason.

After about the fifth month, the owner brought in a new reporter. A drop-dead gorgeous girl. She couldn’t write for crap, but that seemed to be OK. Well, I didn’t care. She was nice and we got along fine and she was very easy on the eyes.

About a month later, the owner came in one day and laid me off. He said I was not cut out for this business and had not done a good job. No one had said anything but good the previous six months. He did give me the needed paperwork to get unemployment. That was kind of odd, usually when you get fired the employer takes all legal means to keep you from getting unemployment money.

Not quite a year out of school and I felt I had bombed out on three jobs already. I felt bad to some degree, but I went back to stay with my parents and worked in fast-food joints, and kept looking. I was out of work for about six or seven months.

Every sad tale has to have a beautiful and mysterious woman involved in some way. Pixabay

Now the story gets interesting. Karma is a b&tch.

It was seven or eight years later, maybe even longer, that the third job finally made sense. I was fairly established as a sports writer and was doing well. Sports writing is the most hectic job there is at a newspaper, so it is perfect for the ADHD guy.

But I found myself on the market again. Not that uncommon in this business. I had an interview with a larger paper. It was one of those that had an actual news desk with three or four copy editors working on copy that reporters had turned in.

The person who interviewed me led me past that desk to his office. As I passed I noticed that old guy who had fired me at the third paper. He recognized me, nodded toward me, and went back to his work.

After the interview, I asked about that old guy, and the guy interviewing me spilled the beans.

That gorgeous “reporter” who couldn’t spell kat, that he had hired to replace me, was his mistress. Now this was major stupid because his wife very often came by the paper, two or three times a week, and would hang around. Anyway, his wife caught them, and she now owns the paper. He lost his paper, his house, and the girl. He was now working on a small paper at an entry-level job.

The job I was interviewing for was higher ranking than he would have been, but he would not have been directly under me. I don’t even remember if they offered me the job or not. Obviously, I didn’t go there. I just remember seeing him and enjoying his demise as it was told to me.‍ ‍