Hey, it's me, Amanda!
Mental health professional, mentor & published writer.
For many years I worked in mental health social work, a job I loved but wasn't my dream. My dream was to write. I already had some skills, and plenty of ideas. I thought that all I needed was more time. And so I left.
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I was horrified to find that I couldn't organise myself, focus for long enough to get to the end of a story, or deal with the inner critic who had apparently developed a loudhailer.
Why did everything take me so long? Why were form rejections sending me over the edge? Why couldn't I make a decision about which piece to work on and when? Why did a free afternoon of unstructured writing time leave me utterly paralysed? Why couldn't I put into practice what I was hearing in webinars? The advice was so obvious. Definitely not trade secrets, like some promised. It was common sense: Get organised. Accept rejection. Ignore the inner critic. Plan your time.
Of course. Except I couldn't do it.
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I stumbled on, won a few competitions, had a few things published. I thought I just needed to try harder.
In the meantime, I was supporting neurodivergent students at my day job as an academic mentor, with the very things I was struggling with myself. And it was working.
It was staring me in the face. After a few more excruciating months of denial, I was diagnosed with ADHD and Tourette's syndrome and started to apply the advice I was dishing out to others.
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Things slowly got better.
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One day not long after, it came to me.
"Maybe neurodivergent writers need a specialised mentoring approach," I thought one morning. "Maybe I could offer that. I know writing, I know mentoring, I know neurodiversity."
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And here we are.
I'm not going to pretend I'm up at dawn, kneeling at the altar of creativity, or that I've found a shortcut to a prolific, stress-free, focused writing life. Often, it's chaos.
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What I can tell you is that mentoring works. Two heads are better than one, and my head contains a lot of techniques, tools and approaches that have worked for me and for the people I support.
All you need to do is show up, in all your disorganised glory. Whatever your goal is - to be published, to get to the end of your novel , or just to get on the bloody page - I will help you figure it out, with wisdom, kindness, and enthusiasm.
You do not have to be out there alone.
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