The phrase came from trying to explain to someone why I hadn't started the thing I'd meant to start. Not because I didn't want to. Not because something more interesting came up. But because somewhere between deciding to do it and doing it, about forty other things also felt equally urgent, equally present, and the decision-making part of my brain couldn't establish a majority.
That's what too democratic means. Not that there's no government — there's plenty of governance happening, lots of deliberation, lots of debate. There's just never a decisive outcome. The vote stays tied and time keeps passing.
It's not laziness
The most common misread of ADHD paralysis from the outside is that it looks like not caring. You're sitting there, nothing is getting done, and from someone else's perspective the simple explanation is that motivation is lacking.
But the effort is real — it just has nowhere to go. The internal experience is of intense engagement with a paralysed system. Loud, not quiet. Trying, not coasting.
Writing the song
The title came before the song. Once the phrase existed, the rest was describing the experience it points to — not dramatising it, not making it comic, not turning it into a list of ADHD traits. Just the honest texture of what it's like to live in a mind like this on an ordinary Tuesday.
The people who send it to others — to partners, to parents, to therapists — are using it the way most people use language when it fails them: as a shortcut. The song says the thing they've been trying to say. That's the only real job it has.