This blog is about nothing

Hiya,

It's 1.30pm on a Wednesday and this newsletter should have already been sitting in your inbox for a few hours.

Obviously, it's not.

It's still a blank document on my screen, and I'm sitting here with a headache, no makeup and a lovely pimple on my face that has decided today is the day to appear with a flourish.

Louie is curled up in my arms because he can tell I'm running on not much energy, and he’s an opportunist and takes advantage of any up-cuddle time.

[I even have a care factor of zero that this photo is a screenshot from a video I was doing today)

Six months. Every Wednesday, without fail, since the end of January. That’s how long I have been sending out my Elevenses newsletter without a miss.

Not very ADHD of me, right?

So, this morning, tired, and not feeling the motivation needed to craft something worth spending your time on, I did the thing every ADHD person does when they are avoiding.

Procrastinate.

Now I have an open Claude Code tab still calling me from this morning where I built myself an artifact to track every single open rate of my newsletter since its inception at the beginning of the year.

I looked at the numbers. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two percent open rates. Good numbers.Numbers I should be happy with.

Except somewhere between building that artifact and sitting here now, "happy with that" quietly turned into "the minimum." I caught myself wanting more. More opens, more consistency, more proof that I've got this figured out.

And today, with the headache still sitting firmly behind my eyes and Monday & Tuesday already filed away for the week, some very reasonable part of me thought, maybe I just don't do the newsletter this week.

Nobody would know. The streak would still be six months of something, even with a gap in it.

That thought lasted about four seconds before the other part of my brain shut it down completely.

You do this every week.

You say you do this every week.

There is no version of this week where you don't.

Hello, autism. There you are, right on schedule, holding the line on a rule I made up myself and now cannot break, even when breaking it would be the kind thing to do for myself.

So here I am.

Writing a newsletter about the fact that I nearly didn't write one, because I genuinely have nothing else to give you today.

This is basically a newsletter about nothing, and if that sounds familiar, it's a bit like an old sitcom that made a whole career out of the same joke.

Except the nothing is actually the something.

There's a principle that gets used a lot in business, the eighty twenty rule. (Pareto Principle). The idea that roughly eighty percent of your results come from twenty percent of your effort and chasing that last stretch of perfection costs you far more than it gives back.

Most of us hear that and nod along, then go straight back to demanding a hundred percent of ourselves anyway, every single week, no exceptions.

This is the exact conversation I have with clients, whether that's one to one or inside Sparkle Club.

Neurodivergent women's brains are mean to us in a very specific way.

We were raised on the idea that we are human doings, not human beings, that our worth shows up in what we produce rather than who we are, and most of us never got the memo that rest was ever allowed to be part of the plan.

So a client is tired and sick and still carrying the full mental load at home, and her first instinct is to call eighty percent a failure, when really, it's just a completely reasonable Wednesday.

If today is one of those days where your best isn't available and you're deciding whether that means you've failed, it doesn't.

Enough is allowed to be enough. That's the whole email.

As always, I love working with incredibly smart women who are brilliant at what they do, and need support with everything else. Sound like you?

Mel x

P.S. I am genuinely curious on how this newsletter does. Sent late, written on fumes, entirely about nothing. I'll pop the open rate in next week's email. Wouldn't it be something if this ends up my biggest one yet.

ADHD Village- PO Box 475, Clifton Hill, 3068, Australia