The struggle of election campaigning with ADHD hypersensitivity
The overhanging dread, the crippling belief that you are an intruder on someone’s property simply by opening the garden gate, and the fear that something dreadful will happen every time you knock a door is a staple of ADHD-driven hypersensitivity among politicos. Before diagnosis, I thought I was just a bit timid, but having an overriding fear that the entire street will at some point come out and confront you at once for daring to deliver leaflets isn’t a neurotypical trait. I’m standing for election again and although I’m realising the symptoms are far less than they were before (thank you Elvanse), I still need to do complex mental gymnastics to get around the remaining blockages.
This, of course, doesn’t just apply to doorknocking. Previously when standing in university elections, despite being someone super at ease with addressing large audiences at conferences and hustings, I would freeze when expected to hand out leaflets to people passing me in the street. This intimate one-on-one campaigning triggers the worst in those who suffer from hypersensitivity (God, they might hate me for making them take this leaflet, they might scream at me…).
When I started considering running for election again, I looked up what medical suggestions were for dealing with it. The one that seemed to be most recommended was “don’t put yourself in situations where it might be a problem”. So basically, if you’re neurodiverse and suffer from ADHD-hypersensitivity, don’t stand for election. Obviously, fuck that. So here are the ways I got around it. If you have some yourself, please do add them to the comments. Some of the best advice I’ve ever got on managing mental health has come from the weirdest places on the Internet, so you’ve no idea how much it might help someone!
1. Remind yourself how you feel in their situation. That’s most likely how they feel.
When your doorbell rings and you’re not expecting anyone, you might get anxious. You almost certainly don’t go WHO DARES INCONVENIENCE ME BY SUMMONING ME TO THE DOOR WITH THE CHIMES, I WILL END THEM, which is what your hypersensitivity tells you the person inside the house is doing as they stomp their way to the door. At most, they’ll feel nervous or surprised. The vast vast majority of the time people will politely say they are not interested, or even better, they will be interested.
Every time you feel like an intruder, remind yourself, you are facilitating one of the most important facets of the democratic process. And, guess what, most people actually *want* candidates to ask them their views and opinions!
Also remember that people have other lives. If a Jehovah’s Witness knocks at your door and you’re a rampant atheist like me, you’ll probably bluntly but quickly say no thanks. It isn’t rudeness — you just don’t want them to waste both your time and theirs. But with hypersensitivity it feels like you’ve made the biggest social faux pas. You’ve bothered them and they’ve spurned you. It’s not easy, but reminding yourself “they’re normal people not necessarily as politics mad as me, it’s OK” helps. Also, the fact you’ve bothered to speak to them makes them multiple times more likely than before that they’ll vote for you when the time comes.
If your answer to the heading in this section is “well, I wouldn’t want them to treat me like that”, then I’d suggest you might want to reconsider how you yourself speak to people who give up their time for a cause. It really doesn’t hurt to be polite.
2. Deal with the creeping and un-ending ADHD dread with targets and to-dos.
Let’s be honest, an election bothers ADHD types because it’s an unending and open-ended task. There’s always more you could do, and your depth-first-thinking will drive you down multiple rabbit holes of possibilities until you overwhelm yourself with anxiety and the mammoth list of tasks you have impossibly set yourself. And, much like in any other sphere of your life, you realise that because of your fretting over this mammoth list of tasks, you spent the entire day doing none of them.
In general, you should consider realistic goals in elections, no matter how much pressure is on you to do well. This is important, because it is better to do less than expected than to get mentally exhausted and end up doing nothing at all.
Draw up a timeline between now and polling day. Work out how many hours each day you can feasibly give up to campaigning. Then think about what you can do in those hours — maybe you can commit to knocking twenty doors in an evening, or deliver two streets of leaflets. Put these in your todo app and allow yourself the satisfaction of completion when you tick them off.
At the end of each week, do an evaluation of what you achieved. If you find that actually you got nowhere near your plan done, consider that maybe you are expecting too much of yourself and that these expectations are actively harming you getting even the slightest bit done. Alter your plan for the following week until you get the balance right.
3. After one bad experience, remind yourself that you’re not going to lose the election because of that one voter.
If there’s one word I feel when I am in campaigning mode (i.e. the moment I start delivering or doorknocking) it’s exposed. You feel that you have opened yourself up for attack by anyone and everyone in your vicinity. This is irrational, but hey, that’s ADHD. Seeing coverage on TV of dreadful campaigning situations, such as those in Batley and Spen, where courageous candidates deal with absolute vitriol from opponents, doesn’t make you feel any better or safer.
The first time I knocked a door as a candidate, I fucked the whole thing up. I got the guy’s name wrong (the numbering on the street was weird, I was nervous, the electoral roll sheets were ordered strangely… and any other excuse I can think of) three times before he said he was voting Conservative and shut the door in my face. At that moment I wanted to go home and cry. If only I could travel back in time and tell myself that in four years time that same person would be signing my nomination papers for reelection. Which is the first lesson — no mistake in campaigning is irredeemable.
The second is regarding the very ADHD trait of getting one bad response out of ten and giving far more weighting to that one than the other nine, despite the fact they each get the same number of votes. Once again, irrational. If the experience has been dreadful, do not beat yourself up for stopping that street there and then and coming back later. If you need a break, take one. If coming back later bothers you, bring a campaigner with you. Which leads me to my next suggestion…
4. Find a sympathetic campaigning buddy you can share your ADHD blockages with
The worst thing about ADHD blockages in campaigning is the loneliness. The notion that everybody else seems to find campaigning so easy and you’re the timid crybaby that can’t deal with a bit of meanness. After all, if you can’t deal with nastiness on the doorstep, how will you deal with being an elected representative, right? Wrong. This macho expectation that we should all be stoic punchbags for everyone’s anger keeps a lot of good people from even entering politics. Hypersensitivity can be annoying, but there is absolutely no harm in having politicians that over-empathise. Quite the contrary.
This is why it’s helpful to have someone in your party or campaign team where you can let these things out. If you have a bad experience, they will allow you to process it and deal with it, and may even be able to empathise themselves. We all struggle to deal with nasty people, and bottling it all up out of fear that we’ll be judged for not being strong enough is one of the most toxic expectations in electoral politics.
Also, having someone who knows your strengths and weaknesses means you don’t have to always explain yourself, which is exhausting in itself. They will keep an eye out for you when you’re struggling and step in when you need it. The difference is stark when you have that one person.
5. As much as possible, be your authentic self.
One of the biggest mistakes I made in politics before was to try to please everybody, to be nice to everybody, to do everything for everyone no matter how much it was impacting my health, my life or my work. Some people pull off this facade flawlessly, and it’s definitely easier to have a facade if it doesn’t bother you. Me? Not so much.
I spent so much time moderating myself, keeping my mouth shut when people were rude to me, and then taking it all home and processing it using too much wine. If there is one piece of advice I’d give now, it’s that no matter what people’s views on deference to voters, as a candidate you are entitled to dignity and basic human respect. If someone does not have the decency to afford you that, then their vote is not worth the humiliation they are putting you through.
You are putting yourself through an exhausting and draining process solely so you can help people or make your community better. Taking that into account, if someone that doesn’t know you and, without any evidence, decides to Paxman you and call you insults, you are well within your rights to tell them to fuck off. Seriously, say precisely those words. Too often in public life people feel that those who are normally required to offer them deference should be fair game for a one-way verbal punching match. Democracy is not a customer service call-centre. We all have a responsibility under this system to make our society better, and if someone is taking advantage of the position you’re in to push you down so they feel powerful, tell them exactly where to go. They are not worth your time and there are plenty of other people with real problems who need your energy.
6. Keep telling yourself: Not winning is not the end of the world
The pressure we often feel as neurodiverse types during a campaign is down to what our brain tells us are life-and-death consequences. But the real consequence is just that we might not win.
This is harder to deal with when you are an incumbent restanding for election, because the election is essentially an appraisal on your term. But remember, especially if you’re a local politician, you are always at the mercy of national political trends. Human beings can be fickle — this is why in the UK, a city elected a man wearing a monkey costume. It may dent your faith in humanity to feel that people can be so easily led, but that’s just how people (including you, and me, no matter how much you deny it) are wired. Otherwise brands wouldn’t be a thing — literally, people make decisions and spend more money based on the association they have with a logo. I find that reminding myself of this at least helps alleviate the idea that I’ve been rejected simply because I’m shit.
But if this is an election where you’re not the incumbent, the question is, what have you lost if you lose? Nothing. The day after the election you can go back to having free time, with which you can do whatever you like. When you have ADHD, it is very difficult to take these very reactive thoughts and feelings and temper them with rationality, which is why it’s important to remind yourself as much as possible of the reality. Neurotypical people will always have this easier, but at the very least you can train yourself to reduce some of the difficulties.
Fretting over the consequences as if they are life and death may mean you end up losing solely because of that. I know how difficult it is to pick yourself up in electoral politics when you fall down. I know how one bad event can sour your entire day and ruin everything else you hoped to achieve in that 24 hours. None of these suggestions are a solution — we will always have it hard. But there are ways to at least numb some of the nonsense so that you can serve your community and help others. And, trust me, having more neurodiverse types in politics would transform representation. If there’s one thing politics definitely doesn’t have too much of right now, it’s oversensitive and overempathetic people.
If you’re a neurodiverse person hoping to stand for election, I wish you the best of luck. If you have done and you have tips or experiences that aren’t listed here, please comment them. Everybody’s personal situation is unique and my symptoms may not be yours. Thanks for reading, and I hope it helped at least some of you!
