BORING — What They Called a Distraction, I Call a Superpower

BORING, mixed media on canvas, 36x48”

Author

Josh Hernandez
May 05, 2025

I just finished a new piece called BORING, and it might be the most personal one I’ve made in a while. It’s about growing up with ADHD—and how what used to feel like a curse eventually turned into my superpower.

Classroom walls were prisons for me. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus, couldn’t keep my mind on anything that didn’t light a fire inside me. But the second I picked up a pencil, it was like my brain finally clicked into place.

They said I couldn’t focus,

that my mind wandered too far from the board,

chasing shadows on the walls or the way sunlight spilled across my desk like paint from a tipped jar.

I was the boy who couldn’t sit still,

who lost math lessons to daydreams

and scribbled galaxies in the margins of worksheets I never finished.

But what they called distraction, I called vision.

Art was the only place my thoughts felt like they belonged—wild, electric, alive.

I drew through the noise, through the doubt,

through the ache of never quite fitting in.

And somehow, through the blur of it all,

I found clarity in color, in shape, in expression.

I didn’t just want to create—I had to.

And now, standing in a gallery with my name on the wall, I realize:

my mind wasn’t broken.

It was just tuned to a different frequency—

one that sings when I make something beautiful.

 BORING, mixed media on canvas, 36x48”, is layered with that feeling—of trying to hold onto focus while your mind is pulling you somewhere more vivid. Somewhere necessary.

Thank you for following the journey. You’re the reason I get to keep doing this.

Josh