
A reader of my book Cello Practice, Cello Performance, noticing a reference to my ADHD in the last chapter, has asked me to write a blog post about what musicians with ADHD can do to function in non-ADHD world. Since realizing that I suffered from a neuropsychiatric condition, and not from moral failure as a human being, I’ve learned to work with my ADHD. Total inattentiveness is the shadow side of my hyperfocus and creativity, and it can be very, very distressing. When that happens, I can’t make head or tail of a musical score either. It’s like looking at random words in a dictionary without being able to collect them into a whole that makes any sense. That is, I can identify individual words on a page, but I can’t connect the sentences. People who knew me at my best–the straight-A student, the kid who could reliably get up in front of an audience and play Bach suites, the kid who memorized poems for fun–didn’t know that in my worst periods of distractibility, I actually can’t read. Forgetting rehearsals, or being calamitously late to them because I vastly underestimated the time it would take me to get there forgetting I had students coming for lessons losing my music and other important possessions zoning out in rehearsals never having a pencil having to borrow other people’s rosin because I’d left mine somewhere forgetting previously agreed-upon bowings and articulations impulsively blurting unflattering remarks (“Did you know that you drag behind the beat all the time?”)…and my self-esteem really suffered at the negative comments of my understandably irritated colleagues.īecause I was a high achiever academically, and because my ADHD leans more towards inattentiveness than hyperactivity, none of my schoolteachers noticed that I had classic ADHD symptoms during my childhood–though plenty of them scolded me for not paying attention when they were talking to me.
#Adhd hyperfocus music professional#
Before I received my diagnosis in my late twenties, I’m sure my ADHD behaviours caused me to miss out on a lot of professional opportunities.

I talk faster than anyone I know, because that’s how fast the ideas come out. I sometimes even enjoy having it: the periods of hyperfocus are what enable me to write incredibly quickly, and my head practically bursts with creative ideas more or less non-stop.


I’m pretty open about the fact that I live with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
