#ADHD Inertia is a bitch

[alighted-willow]

I want to draw but my art isn’t arting,

I want to write but my words aren’t wording,

I need to do but need propellent.

[prefrontal-bastard]

I'm one of those lucky sons-of-bitches that has Executive Dysfunction and Autistic Inertia.

If I were to hesitantly quantify the difference, I'd say Executive Dysfunction is "Can't Do It Syndrome" while Autistic Inertia is "Can't Switch Tasks Syndrome."

My ADHD medication, a front-line stimulant, helps with the former but not with the latter. Unlike my medicated ADHD friends who don't have Autism, it's impossible for me break up my daily tasks into dedicated blocks of time. Unless I naturally get bored with a task, switching tasks is actively painful unless I take the time to mentally disengage before physically disengaging. Jobs with a lot of interruptions, like retail jobs, can be pure hell for just this reason alone.

Out of everything I've tried, only one thing has noticeably improved my Autistic Inertia: Daily CBD supplements. I don't know why they do, only that there's a noticeable difference in my performance when I have it vs. when I don't.

While I'm glad I found something that helps, it kind of sucks that it had to be something so expensive.

Autistic Inertia is an autism experience that makes it hard to start, stop, and switch tasks.

It somehow doesn't get talked about enough - so I made this comic!

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Also, if you want to read the research study I based this comic on, it’s right here!

[memoirsofabasicbitch]

The thing is, I’m not entirely sure I remember how to dream. How to write. How to imagine anything independently of a world created by someone else, in their mind.

I’ve grown so used to hanging my dreams on what other people have created for me that I don’t know if that person is still in there.

That weird little girl, who peeled acorns for squirrels, and walked in circles over and over and over again on the roots of the big oak tree. She had a big imagination. She told herself all sorts of stories.

Was it just because I couldn’t play the other games? Too slow - reflexes and running. Too weak - climbing, throwing, running, playing.

(Or was it because I wasn’t allowed to — couldn’t — play those games? I have a few dim memories of trying to play and being sent away. They’re dim though. I stopped asking.)

Or was it simply that I was filling time? Waiting until I could go back into a world I could navigate a little better than the playground?

Sometimes, though, I was waiting. Hoping, really.

More than a few times.

A lot.

I hoped, I thought, maybe - maybe if I walk in the right way, I’ll hear the trees laughing, like Anne told Diana about. Maybe they’ll talk to me. Maybe a faerie will come creeping out from a little crevice and wave, winking. Maybe a squirrel will come crawling down the wrinkled bark while I watch, and take the little heap of acorn meat I’d left for him. Maybe there’s a tiny scrap of magic somewhere in the world that I just haven’t found yet.

I haven’t had dreams for a long time. That’s what happens when your dreams have expiration dates. I’ve already missed most of mine.

Never really even came close.

I had a “schedule” that makes me want to cry to think of it. Meet someone in college or shortly after. Get married by 25, so we would have a few years together after college. Have our first child by 27, because mom always said I should start having babies by 30 if I really wanted to have more than one and space them out.

I’m 28. I’ve never had a real relationship with anyone, romantic or platonic. I’ve never had a best friend who would place me on the same importance as I would them.

I have borderline personality disorder. I have adhd. I am on the autism spectrum. I have depression and anxiety so severe they cripple me. More than one of these things may be false. The symptoms are nearly indistinguishable once you have more than 2. No one will give me a straight answer, and no two doctors can agree.

Added onto years of emotional and mental abuse - which is what it was, wasn’t it. Maybe because I’m autistic, maybe it really was that bad. Neglect, sure. Public humiliation, that happened too, I’m pretty sure. Being told flat out that I was stupid and fat and ugly and I was lucky to have any friends at all so maybe I should just shut up and sit down before I ended up with none.

I’m pretty sure that happened. I don’t really remember it though. I don’t really have any memories at all.

Supposedly that’s something that happens with “complex post traumatic stress disorder,” which generally crops up when a person is systematically ground down for a long time until there is nothing left but the stories they told themselves when they tried to explain to the fake audience in their head who they were. How they got that way.

I don’t know who I was, who I could have been if I hadn’t had the life I did. Maybe my memories are skewed.

My therapist didn’t seem to think so, but she also sometimes seemed to think I was full of shit. That’s probably me reading too much into things again. That’s what I do.

Was it really that bad? I remember a lot of screaming, and crying, and hiding, and wishing I was dead or that someone would just hit me already so I would have something to say, to tell people other than “they yell at me and make me cry and sometimes they grab my arms and shake me and sometimes they tell me they’ll throw me out onto the street to fend for myself and sometimes they tell me they love me so much they’re so sorry and then sometimes they cry”.

But how much of that was me? How much was that my perception of things? Am I really that crazy, or have I really been gaslit that much? Is it gaslighting if they didn’t even realize how much pain they caused you, which is why they say “it wasn’t that bad stop exaggerating”?

Did I imagine all of it?

If I did, if I didn’t, what was real? What had the weight I felt it carry? What should have been a minor blip in my life but instead metastasized into a catastrophe?

I don’t know. Maybe I never knew. Reality hasn’t ever been my friend.

Fantasy is so much better.

It’s painful now, though. To read some of these stories, these books I used to adore.

Stories about Mature Adult Women of 25! Whole! Years! Going on adventures and meeting their soulmates and having wonderful happy lives.

I’m spiraling. It’s late. I’m tired and a little high, wishing I was higher and maybe I wouldn’t be so bored.

Bilbo was middle aged, wasn’t he? When he went on his adventure? He had an adventure, and then he came home and had a long, rich, happy, lonely, bitter life. Hmm. Perhaps the one ring is not the best foundation for a guiding principle.

I went to law school because I’d come to the end of every plan I actually had. (You don’t really plan for a future when you’ve been suicidal since before puberty.) I figured I’d get to read and write at least reasonably interesting things, make good money, maybe even make a difference.

I’ve been a paralegal for the same law firm I worked for right out of college for two years now and I have never felt more like a shambling corpse.

When I graduated from college, I couldn’t get a job. Could I have tried harder? Sure. Is executive dysfunction a bitch? You bet.

So I worked for a family friend’s law firm. Personal injury and medical malpractice. She’s the mother of my older sister’s oldest best friend and has employed all of my mother’s three daughters.

She’s also a heinous bitch and a terrible boss. Her employees have a shelf life of about 2 years. I’ve hit my expiration date. Once you’ve audibly cried during a phone conference, you’re really near the bottom. Once she decides you suck at your job, there’s no coming back. Either you quit or you get fired. She prefers when people quit so she can blame them and not feel guilty. So she just increasingly treats people worse and worse until they quit in self defense.

I worked for her for a year. It was awful. I became an alcoholic and gained 25+ lbs.

I decided to go to law school.

I moved to New Orleans.

I made friends. I had an apartment all to myself. I had a life I actually enjoyed.

Then I graduated.

And I couldn’t get a job again.

(Of course, all of this is underpinned with my cyclical periods of intense illness, often accompanied by being hospitalized and missing long periods of school. In college and in law school, actually.)

(All the cocaine and drinking didn’t help either.)

(Ah, New Orleans. How I miss thee.)

So I ended up at the same firm again. Living with my parents. Again.

Then I passed the bar.

Now I’m doing the same work as my younger sister, for the same amount of money. (When she graduated from her masters program and was unemployed for 6 months, I convinced my boss to hire my younger sister again, and my sister to work for my boss again after a semi-disastrous summer job.)

(To be fair, while I’m technically a licensed attorney, she has a masters in education, so it’s not like there’s a massive education disparity here.)

(It doesn’t help that I’m barred in a different jurisdiction than the one my firm typically works in, so there aren’t any cases I can really work on as an attorney, and then on top of that my bosses don’t want to pay for malpractice insurance for me so I’m not allowed to practice as an attorney or put that I’m an attorney or call myself an attorney or even put in my letterhead that I’m licensed in the District of Columbia.)

Then there was a pandemic, and I decided I probably shouldn’t try to make a huge life change during a pandemic.

The pandemic is still fucking here. Nearly. Two. Years. Later.

So I guess I have to make a new plan.

Can I be a lawyer? I guess we’ll see.

I don’t really want to, though. I’m burned out and I wasn’t even practicing.

I want to move to a beach and write a novel and actually have a life I enjoy.

The problems with this plan are numerous. Not only is inertia an incredibly powerful enemy of mine, but I’ve lost all imagination.

I cannot imagine a future in which I am happy. Will I kill myself? Probably not, at least not for a long while. I’ve thought too long and hard about the long-lasting, far-reaching repercussions it would have. (Say what I will about my family, at least it’s always been clear that my death is NOT an acceptable outcome.)

I want to find my imagination again. I want to be able to imagine not only a future in which I am happy, but other futures, other worlds. I want to be able to dream, not only for me, not only for reality, but for unreality. I want to create worlds in my mind again, and allow them to take whatever shapes they wish.

I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if all those horrible teachers, all those “peer editors” in fucking elementary school were right, and my story ideas are hackneyed and overwrought.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if they were wrong. Wouldn’t it be nice, to start writing, and to find that my imagination didn’t go so very far.

It’s been hiding in the intertwined branches of a birch grove, slim and tall and ringing with laughter. In the space between stars. Down the path shaded with wisteria and jasmine and honeysuckle, where the scent and the heat and the humidity are so thick you can feel the heavy perfume coating your lungs. Tucked away, safe, waiting to peek out. Waiting to creep down the wrinkled bark of a huge old oak and wink at the little girl playing among its roots.

I hope it is there. I hope I can find it.

I’ll keep you posted.

This is my own personal void to yell into, after all.

[acrobaticcatfeline]

NOBODY ASKED BUT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT MY ADHD STIMS!!!

Ok ok so flappy hands big time, it's like unsupressable. You can not stop the flappy hands. Just for context, my phone only recognizes flappy in all caps at this point. It's just so good.

Scratching and picking! Bad things, dont do them friends, your fingies will hurt and you will bleed a lot and get scratch marks everywhere. I usually only pick at my fingers, scabs or my scalp cuz I have some bad dandruff but I also have a high pain tolerance so I wont know what I'm doing a lot of the time. I mainly scratch my arms and legs cuz I get mild hallucinations that I have bugs landing on me and so I end up scratching like crazy to make it stop. I dont ever scratch myself raw tho, if anything I scratch over a scab or smth and god this is a tmi but I'm in a really good mood for some reason. These are both very unconscious but are just as hard to stop as flappy hands, you can ask my parents heh.

Chewing!!! Ok so I just dived back into this after having not done this for years, but I chew shit bad. I used to chew my shirts a ton, my mom h a t e d it. I'd just nom my collar when I was super nervous. I realized a good bit into quarantine that I had started fucking nomming the shit out of my mimikyu plushies ear. I bought myself some chew stim toys which I love and it gets it out of my system much quicker cuz they're tougher. I love them they're the only stim toys I've ever actually bought myself.

Tapping, clicking, thumpy noises. Pencils and pens clicking, the pressure you have to use and the release pressure and inertia make me so calm I love buttons and clickers and tapping things it helps me focus a L o t. Course its distracting and drives everyone else fucking batty. I had fake nails once for my mom's wedding, and while I hate having nails cuz it's bad sensory shit and I feel grimy, the tapping noises were a definite plus.

P e e l i n g. Another weird tmi but like, I started playing ukulele and now my fingers on my left hand peel a lot and it's so s a t i s f y i n g. It's like peeling Elmer's glue.

Idk what to call this other than zoomies. I like, ok so especially in the morning I'll like stretch and do a little small flappy hands cuz I do that to help me wake up my body, and sometimes itll get stuck in a super fast loop for a few seconds and my hand like tenses to where I cant like stop it. It also happens for my feets, they like twitch for several seconds and then calm down. Idk if this counts but I think so.

I have an auditory stim! I'll obsessively say it's fine over and over when I'm super stressed! Again, another one that's fucking impossible to stop. I also have it with sorry when I'm panicked.

Bouncy leg, simple bitch, I'm doing something so I can focus better, that is if nobody fucking calls me on it cuz then I get hyper aware and stop doing it. Sometimes I'll try to force the bouncy but it never works.

LOUD!!!! I am very loud and it's never on purpose but it's sort of something I learned when I was a kid, my mom and dad were very loud and unkind to each other so I think being loud was a coping mechanism that I can not stop, I have a terrible time controlling my volume except for when singing. It's a pain.

Just being destructive ig. I rip and tear at things when I'm not paying attention and I either, have nothing in my hand, or have a sharp thing in my hand. I'll tear holes in clothes, rip at stray threads, cut paper things up into tiny pieces and I will not know I'm doing it until someone screams at me for breaking things. I have destroyed my parents vacuum filter and bed because I was bored and had scissors. I swear to god my parents didnt let me use scissors or knives until I was 16. If i needed scissors for class i had to borrow them because they wouldnt let me have scissors it was. Bad.

Playing with my hair. It's no good. Vvv bad. My hair is so fucking curly it tangles together as soon as I'm done brushing it. I Will rip my hair out on accident and it's just a bad time. I dont take care of my hair enough to have playing with my hair be a valid stim. Its invalid and it should feel bad.

Crushing things! Like water bottles and cans, I love crinkly plastic and metal noise and it's a great texture too.

I think that's the most of them! I just, got really excited to tell you guys all about it and how I stim and!!!!!!!

[gender-trash]

with apologies to @morrak --

Untitled When-You-Least-Expect-It Library Series

sometimes, in the course of Robot Job, a bitch needs to compute the rotational inertia of a robot. i was kind of bad at this in 2.003 and i'm even worse at it now because i only do it once a year. mechanical engineers please don't laugh at me, thank you.

fortunately my textbook shelves are blessed with Synge and Griffith's Principles of Mechanics:

The How

upon further inspection i think this may have actually been from b street books in san mateo? it has a penciled-in price of $19.95 on the front endpaper flap in handwriting that seems similar to the b street books proprietor's, although i have a theory that all used bookstore employees' handwriting converges to a similar scrawl. a former owner's name and address (in berkeley) are also inscribed on the endpaper in blue pen. the publication date is 1942 -- but don't worry! mcgraw hill assures us that:

The Text

it's pretty much got everything you expect from an intro mechanics textbook; i mostly use it as a reference book, for when i have, once again, forgotten the parallel-axis theorem.

The Object

at some point, textbook publishers stopped publishing nearly as many of these lovely little durable cloth-bound volumes and started, increasingly, putting out unwieldy behemoths with the boards and spines covered by a much less wear-resistant plasticky material. the conspiracy-theorist in me suspects it is planned obsolescence. anyway, this book is 80+ years old and completely intact -- the cloth isn't even very worn; the spine text is nice and bright and readable; there is no visible cracking anywhere. the signatures are actually sewn to each other, instead of the more modern method of folding/sewing the signatures and half-assedly potting the entire spine in glue (or just giving up entirely and slapping a hardcover on a so-called perfect binding). it's got that lovely old book smell.

also, it's a nice weight to hold in one hand while you flip through it with the other, or to stuff in a backpack and take to the office/to a study hideyhole/outside; if you set it on your desk, it doesn't take up half the surface area. overall a much pleasanter reference experience than one gets from, say, CLRS. like i mentioned in the OP, the typesetting may be somewhat dense but it is LINEAR and it is not DISTRACTING ME with STUPID BULLSHIT. compare for example this textbook used in my intro physics classes at santa clara university:

i CANNOT be the only sad adhd bastard who finds this kind of thing unusable!! why are there so many colors! why all the distracting PHYSICS APPLIED sidebars! i know what holding a jar lid under a tap looks like!! this stupid fucking thing is about 4x the volume of Principles of Mechanics, and its mass is commensurate. we don't have to live like this. take my hand. come with me to the used bookstore. they haven't changed newtonian physics since the 1940s either.

The Why, Though?

i like collecting interesting old textbooks. sometimes i even get to use them! there are certainly other ways to learn mechanics, but (for attention-span reasons) i do enjoy having a physical book to reference, and this one is a nicer Textbook Experience than many others i've encountered.

and, as mentioned above, sometimes a bitch needs to compute the rotational inertia of a robot.

i always feel like such a fancy bitch when i get an excuse to crack open one of my random 40-to-70-year-old clothbound textbooks scrounged from the used bookstore and the palo alto library book sale...! the secret that publishing companies dont want you to know is that they havent actually changed the definition of rotational inertia since the 1940s, so if you (like me!) find your attention bounces off of modern textbooks with color printing and huge pages and bells and whistles and insets and eight million kinds of little alert box symbol, you can pick up older textbooks with lovely clean typesetting for cheap or free, and they look awesome on the shelf