Inside the Static

I used to think silence was a kind of mercy. Then I learned what mine sounds like.

In the quiet, I am screaming,

You don’t hear the war inside.

Every thought is sharp and fleeting,

Chasing ghosts I cannot hide.

That’s where the song began—on a day when the studio was so still I could hear paint drying and my skull buzzing. My brain doesn’t rest inside quiet; it accelerates. ADHD, for me, isn’t a lack of attention. It’s attention without brakes. Imagine every channel on a TV turning itself up because it refuses to be ignored. Birds outside, a memory from fifth grade, the exact shape of light on my coffee, the feeling that I didn’t answer a text right—all of it crowding the same small doorway.

Medication gives me traction. Not silence, not obedience, but traction—enough to lean my weight into a thought and not skid straight through it. Even so, the inner dialogue keeps its frequency. I steer better now; the storm still has weather.

Paint-stained hands, my restless canvas,

Colors bleed but never stay.

Dreams explode then fade to ashes,

I get lost along the way.

Here is what this means in the real world: I can vision a painting so quickly it arrives whole—the palette, the strokes, the mood like warm breath on glass. I step toward it and the image scatters into confetti. My hands can’t keep up with my head. Colors argue on the palette, edges slide. By the time I solve one problem, three others have joined the party, loudly, with snacks. It is intoxicating. It is exhausting. Art is the one place where this velocity is welcomed, and even there it bites.

Inside the static, I’m breaking, I’m whole,

Drowning in chaos, but chasing control.

You see the smile, but you’ll never know —

The hurricane under my skin.

This is the paradox I live in: simultaneous fracture and completeness. ADHD makes me both conductor and drumline, the whole orchestra inside one body. In conversation I can appear composed—smiling, nodding, joking—while running a hundred tabs behind my eyes. I don’t wear a mask to deceive. I wear it to function, the way an astronaut wears a helmet. You cannot breathe pure atmosphere in space.

“Chaos” reads like a character flaw. What it actually feels like is kinetic electricity without a wire. It has advantages. I see patterns where others see static. I can pivot mid-sentence, mid-brushstroke, mid-life. I notice the corner story: the way someone grips a glass when they’re almost saying the thing they’re afraid to say. But electricity that never grounds burns the house down. So I chase control. Rituals are my grounding wires: a playlist I always start with, a list of three tasks, a timer I promise to obey. These aren’t small things. They’re my hand on the wheel.

Every detail screams for power,

Every silence pulls me thin.

Minutes burn into an hour,

Racing thoughts that never end.

Hyperfocus is the angel and the trickster. A single detail—how the cobalt sits against the skin tone, the angle of a wrist—can dominate until I forget to drink water, forget to blink, forget my body. Time becomes elastic. Ten minutes expand to an hour, then snap back. Other times, time thins. I stare at a blank canvas and feel the seconds tug me apart, each one a small betrayal: Why aren’t you starting? Why aren’t you starting? Silence is not empty to me. Silence is a magnifying glass.

If you’re looking for an explanation that sounds more scientific: ADHD messes with executive function—the brain’s air traffic control. Working memory, task initiation, time perception—they all wobble. Not because I don’t care. Because the switchboard runs hot. So I build external scaffolding: sticky notes, alarms, a studio layout that nudges me forward instead of sideways. I do this not to become someone else, but to support the person I already am.

I’m a fire that can’t be harnessed,

I’m a storm they can’t define.

Brilliance tangled up in darkness,

Art and madness intertwine.

The word “brilliance” embarrasses me, but I’ll honor the line because I wrote it honest. ADHD can feel like brightness—fast intuition, playful leaps, surprise solutions. It can also feel like shadow—the moment the idea explodes and leaves nothing but smoke. I’m not interested in romanticizing suffering. Pain doesn’t make art sacred. But the truth, at least for me, is that my creativity is braided into the same rope as my restless mind. I don’t need to cut the rope. I need gloves.

That’s where medication comes back in. People ask if it changes my personality. It doesn’t. It changes my traction. The wildfire still burns; now I can dig firebreaks. I can choose when to open the gates, when to rest the horses. And some days I still forget to eat, still cry over a lost thirty minutes, still spin like a coin on a countertop. There is no victory lap. There is only practice.

Inside the static, I’m breaking, I’m whole,

Drowning in chaos, but chasing control.

You see the smile, but you’ll never know —

The hurricane under my skin.

There’s a social piece here too: the smile. I can be the life of the room, and afterwards want to hide in a dark one. The noise of a grocery store can feel like rain on sheet metal. A text that ends with “.” can rattle me for an hour. Rejection lands louder; praise evaporates quicker. None of that makes me fragile. It makes me a person translating high-volume input with a very sensitive dial. If you see me step outside during a party, I’m not rejecting you. I’m pausing the storm so I don’t drown in it.

Can you see the pieces falling?

Hear the silence when I break?

I’m the chaos and the beauty,

I’m the art that pain creates.

I used to resent the idea that pain “creates” art. Pain doesn’t sit at the easel. I do. What pain does is rush in where structure hasn’t been built yet. It floods. It reflects light in dramatic ways. It demands attention. I don’t owe it a canvas. But when it arrives, I can decide to aim it—to let the feeling pass through a brush, a lyric, a note held too long. That’s not worship. That’s alchemy. And some days the alchemy fails. Some days I only make a mess. That’s also part of being alive.

What I want people to understand about ADHD—about my ADHD—is that it’s not a tragic backstory or a quirky superpower. It’s a nervous system style. It changes how motivation works for me. Novelty lights the fuse. Urgency turns the key. Interest is not “nice to have”; it’s the gas pedal. When I say I can’t get started, I don’t mean I won’t. I mean I’m sitting in a car with the engine on and no traction. The wheels spin. Medication, structure, compassion—these lay down gravel. Then, suddenly, I move.

Inside the static, I’m breaking, I’m whole,

Fighting the current, I’m losing, I’m bold.

You see the mask, but you’ll never know —

The wildfire burning within.

The mask is learned, like any costume you wear daily. It’s also heavy. There is boldness in admitting the weight of it. Boldness in saying: I am medicated. I am an artist. I am both lightning and ground. On bad days I decide that none of this is manageable and that I’m failing. On good days I remember I built systems that most people never had to consider, and that building them was an act of creativity too.

So the song. I wrote it to carry the experience in a way the essay can’t: rhythm matching heartbeat; rhyme capturing ricochet; chorus repeating because the thoughts repeat. I wanted the listener to feel the push-pull of “breaking/whole,” the intake of breath before the drop. I wanted them to hear how a mind like mine spins, not as spectacle, but as testimony. Setting it to music let the hurricane have a tempo. It gave the static a key.

If you listen closely, you’ll hear the scaffolding I’ve built into the composition: where the drums interrupt a spiral, where the bass line grounds a high vocal, where the chorus returns not as a collapse but a choice. That’s not just songwriting. That’s how I live now. When the velocity climbs, I count myself in. When the current pulls, I name it. When minutes turn to hours, I set a timer and step away before the painting eats me. Practice, again.

The hurricane under my skin…

That line is an ending and a promise. The storm isn’t cured; it’s charted. I’m learning the coastline: which coves hold me, which rocks will wreck me, where the lighthouse I built points on the worst nights. Some days I will drift. Some days I will race. Most days I will make something—bad, beautiful, unfinished, impossible—and pin it to the wall to see what it demands tomorrow.

If you’ve never lived in this weather, I’m asking for two things: believe me when I say the quiet is loud, and trust me when I tell you I’m not broken. I am a system with different physics, a body that prefers sprinting to strolling, a mind that loves puzzles so much it invents them. I am medicated because I deserve traction. I make art because it’s the truest way I know to translate static into signal.

I used to think silence was mercy. Now I think mercy is knowing which dials to turn. The song lives so the feeling can move through me and out into the air, where other storms might recognize themselves and feel less alone. If you hear it and see only chaos, look again. There’s a hand on the wheel. There’s a rhythm under the roar. There’s a person in the center, breaking and whole, singing the weather into a map.

And if you live in this weather too—ADHD, ADD, AuDHD, the whole neon constellation—here’s my hand.

You’re not “too much.” You’re running a high-performance engine on a road built for minivans. Tune the road. Build guardrails that make sense for you. Work in sprints. Use timers shamelessly. Body-double without apology. Stim while you think. Let your special interests set the hook and then ride the current. Medicate if it helps; you don’t owe anyone a personality purity test. Ask for accommodations like a pro. Rest without guilt. Drop dead projects that aren’t singing back. Start weird rituals that do.

Make art that fits your nervous system, not a calendar. Your process isn’t a problem to fix; it’s an instrument to learn. Novelty is fuel, not a character flaw. Hyperfocus is a supercharger—point it somewhere kind. Sensory overwhelm isn’t drama; it’s data. Translate it. Build lighthouses. Label your switches. Externalize your memory. Automate the boring parts so your sparkle has room to work.

You are not behind. You are in beta—constantly iterating, shipping small, and releasing patches only you can write. The goal isn’t quiet. The goal is signal. Keep making maps in the storm. Share them. We don’t need perfect. We need yours.

I’ll meet you at the edge of the static, count us in, and we’ll turn this weather into music.

-Amy Lee Murr
 From thunder to brushstroke.