Hiking + the Power of Accountability > my ADHD

👋 Hiya hikers and friends!

Have you had a chance to head out and hit the trails yet this season? If so, I hope that your 2024 explorations have been a blast! And if not, have no fear - Girl Gotta Hike group hikes are here, with six events lined up from now through April to help get your adventure juices flowing!

With the New Year officially in full swing, I’ve been fielding a bunch of requests for custom guided trips, and it’s gotten me super excited to help hikers get out this Spring and achieve some of their bucket list adventures! I really admire these hikers for knowing what they want, and for having the courage to plunk down a deposit and put a date on the calendar.

Setting intentions for the New Year, for my career, and for life in general, has proven to be a daunting endeavor for me. Having worked as a freelancer photographer for my entire adult life, making too-far-in-the-future plans often felt fruitless – because inevitably a new assignment would land in my lap right after I booked a vacation for the same date. My workaround was to escape with last-minute trips or jump at opportunities the second they arose, feeling grateful for the freedom of a freelance schedule. What that ethos robbed me of was a feeling of control of my own destiny. It left me overwhelmed, exhausted, and fretting that I was probably missing out on a whole bunch of other awesome, by not feeling able to commit to much in advance.

My mindset around intentions started to evolve about a year ago, when I was asked to write down a list of 100 experiences I wanted to have in my lifetime – my first official bucket list! This exercise was part of a small group coaching course I took for adults with ADHD, and it really helped me define and decide what’s important to me in a more concrete way. It also helped me lean into the idea of preparing a bit more in advance for checking some of the items off, like thru-hiking the Colorado Trail, instead of waiting to work it all out the week ahead of time. Of course, I did make a number of in-the-moment decisions on-trail, but setting up an automatic savings bucket for the trip, and deciding to tell my clients in May that I wouldn’t be around for the month of August, really helped to squelch some of the anxiety around being off-grid for a month.

In the two years since my diagnosis, I’ve learned that for most people with ADHD, time falls into two categories – “now” and “not now.” In short, making future plans has always been hard for me and my brain, mostly because there’s no urgency to them. With a slew of other obligations demanding daily attention, it’s hard to focus on the details of an event that’s still six months down the line. Put me in a crisis though, and the decisions come easy – the pathway through it magically appears in front of my eyes. The quick-thinking is instinctual because the situation is visceral, immediate, and comes with an impending deadline that allows me to move into hyperfocus and ignore other distractions.

I used to just think it was me who had a less-than-stellar relationship with the concept of time, but setting far-flung goals can feel fraught for a lot of entrepreneurs and creative-types. Because we’re often faced with situations or opportunities that result in having to change plans on a dime, we’ve become good at problem-solving, and we’ve learned how to calculate for the what-ifs. With so much of the day to day feeling like it’s out of our direct control, it feels almost Sisyphean to plan too far ahead – like why bother making plans when you’re probably just going to have to change them anyway?

The funny thing is, until I got my ADHD diagnosis and fell down the subsequent rabbit-hole of books, podcasts, and educating myself about how to work better with my brain, I hadn’t even recognized that I’d already developed accommodations to counter that anxious, why-bother, woe-is-me attitude, in order to get out and do the things that actually help me to manage my neurodiversity – like spending time in nature with hikers like you!

Girl Gotta Hike came into being because something in me knew I needed the accountability of others to encourage me to get out of a warm bed on a cold morning and hit the trails. It is named what it is named as a reminder to me that I am a better person when I get outside, move my body up a mountain, and take in the scenery along the way. Backpacking for six-months on the Appalachian Trail taught me that by chipping away day after day, lofty goals are indeed achievable! I just had to take that 2,200-mile trail on one step at a time to know it in my bones. And now that I’ve learned that an ADHD brain needs regular reminders, it totally makes sense why the pull to tackle another 100-plus-mile trail every year or so is so visceral – those trips are like refresher courses for my soul!

I wish that every goal I had for my future felt as easy to plan for as a backpacking trip feels for me. It’s hard to get super-stoked about actively blocking out time on my calendar for the boring bookkeeping tasks that will allow me to pay my taxes on time, instead of filing for a 6-month extension for the umpteenth year in a row. It’s pre-emptively uncomfortable to think about sitting for days at my desk, reviewing and sorting through images to revamp my photography website, knowing that imposter syndrome and reminders of missed opportunities may start swirling through my head as I begin to refine and reveal the work that will hopefully help me to meet my dream clients.

Even with the desire to try out different ways of doing, it can be downright scary to take steps into the unknown, especially without a guarantee of a positive outcome. Know what’s helped me to inch forward on my goals? Realizing that I don’t have to work on them all alone, and the acceptance that I need to lean on accountability to help my brain be at its best. The revelation that I haven’t failed at adulting because I don’t get everything I’ve written on my to-do list done in a day, (or that I never remember how long it takes me to write a blog post), has greatly reduced my negative self-talk too.

Through the vibrancy of the hiking and ADHD communities around me, I now feel like I’ve been given both the permission to dream bigger, and the built-in support to start scouting out the course to get there.

So what do you want to do this year? Let’s hit the trails and chat about it!

🙏 xo, Melissa / Click