adhtree

[adhtree]

I see a lot of people joking about the adhd thing of "I have a appointment/phone call at 3pm, guess I won't do anything all day!"

But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.

Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!

I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.

Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.

Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)

And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.

You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.

So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?

My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.

(and that's not even getting into the secondary effects. If you know that having an appointment ruins your whole damn day, you're going to avoid them. Even when it's things like "going to that party" or "meeting your friends for a drink/game" or "going to a movie with that cute girl from your math class". Things you should enjoy. Things that'd help you be social. Things that make you feel human.)

[adhtree]

me when the disability disables me: oh what the fuck? this sucks. what the hell man!

[adhtree]

Adhd is having 1000 hobbies and doing none of them in your free time 😎

[adhtree]

Neurodivergent culture is growing up believing you were lazy and never tried your best because your best wasn't good enough for the people around you.

[adhtree]

[adhtree]

If the right way is too hard, fuck it. Do it the wrong way.

Folding clothes keeps you from getting the laundry done? Stop folding clothes. Put a basket in your room and throw your unfolded clean stuff into it right out of the dryer, it's fine.

Rinsing dishes off keeps you from loading the dishwasher? Load them dirty and run it twice.

Chopping onions keeps you from making yourself dinner? Buy the freezer bags of chopped onions.

You forget to take your meds and don't want to get out of bed to get them? Start putting them next to the bed.

Can't keep up with the dishes? Get paper plates. Worried about environment impact? Order biodegradable ones online if your local store doesn't have one.

Make the task easier. Put things where you use them instead of where they "go." Eliminate the steps that keep you from finishing the task. Eliminate the task that is stressing you out.

Do it the "wrong" way. It's literally fine.

[adhtree]

"But why do you let your disability stop you?" Because that's.... what disabilities... do. That's... literally the basic definition... of being disabled... A disability impairs your ability to function. That's what the term means. That's the main thing

[adhtree]

[adhtree]

this is a joke but also it’s not

[adhtree]

one of those mornings

[adhtree]

chronic fatigue from mental illness and neurodivergency isn't something you can just will your way out of. your nervous system is part of your body. your brain is an organ. the fatigue is real. you're not lazy. so be kinder to yourself. be gentler with your bodymind.

[adhtree]

she attention deficit on my hyperactivity til i disorder

[adhtree]

[adhtree]

[adhtree]

living with ADHD is being stuck in a Matrix of your own making, and forgetting you made it

[adhtree]

So like, in people without ADHD, your brain enters a kind of anticipatory state when you're going to do something - anything at all, as small as getting a drink of water or as big as paying your rent - and then releases the reward juices when you actually do it, after which the brain, with or without your input, will attempt to hurry your thoughts along to a different unfinished task. You like to think you control all of this consciously, that you decide you're gonna do stuff and you decide when it's done and then you pick some other stuff, but a lot of it really is automated. So, the sinister thing about ADHD is that when your brain is unable to release normal adequate levels of the reward chemicals, it doesn't have a strong frame of reference for when a task has been accomplished in real life. It doesn't experience a big enough difference between merely planning out the action and performing the action, so when you sit there and you think about what you should do and you go through the steps of it in your head, the single celled idiots who live in there feel like you basically just did all of those things and they celebrate a job well done with their pathetic little squirt of endorphins and they mark it off your to-do list.

And because those same inadequate reward juices also fuel your working memory, they very easily forget about the task altogether, which means the conscious part of you is highly likely to also forget whether you did that thing or even if it ever needed doing at all, and the little idiots dig through their files to alert you to something else they want to go over. But sooner or later the conscious part of you is going to pick up on the cues that there was something you meant to do and you didn't do, maybe seconds later or maybe days later, who the hell knows. Then you think about how you're going to do it and your little guys think "oh shit we're doing this again? Huh weird but GOOD JOB AGAIN EVERYONE!" and this can continue on a loop until the sun goes down and all you did since you woke up was scroll social media. This is not exclusive to ADHD, though; ADHD is when this is life-alteringly chronic. There are many other reasons your brain might be understimulated and not making its own coffee like it's supposed to. Neurotypical people might just experience this whenever they're tired enough. If it's 24/7/365 to the point that a lot of people just think you're flaky or lazy or apathetic, that might be ADHD. Your idiots are in there play-pretending your whole productive life without you.

[adhtree]