#ADHD is forgetting things constantly all the time to the point where it negatively impacts your daily life

[choking-on-roses]

The amount of times you'll be relating an experience you had with ADHD and all the neurotypicals in a 5km radius are like "actually that has nothing to do with ADHD" like yeah I realize everyone forgets things from time to time but could you please shut up

[feminist-pussycat]

man i was talking to a woman in one of my classes about adhd, and how I had only been diagnosed in my late teens after recognizing my symptoms from a psychology class.

and she told me she learned that she had adhd from tiktok. that the all-knowing algorithm had shown her videos from people who talk about adhd and she related, went to her doctor, and in two hours got a diagnosis. it took me three months to get a diagnosis because of all the tests and tests i had to send to people who knew me as a child and report cards from before the age of 12 etc.

at this point i’m kinda sceptical. adhd symptoms are similar to the focus- and attention- disrupting effects of heavy tiktok usage. so we start discussing symptoms, the practical ones that i incur in everyday life.

and she kind of doesn’t have them? granted, she said she was diagnosed with inattentive adhd (ADHD-IN) and I have combined (ADHD-C). but she isn’t late for things, and she doesn’t have time blindness. she couldn’t relate to the roadblocks of basic tasks (sorry if you can easily send emails or pay bills and you say you have adhd i don’t trust you). she doesn’t struggle with the constant forgetfulness and abysmal short-term memory loss.

we talked more and she absolutely has a history of trauma. i don’t want to go into details but basically she doesn’t talk to her family and there were incidents of harassment and terror campaigns and abuse. but trauma and adhd have some overlapping symptoms.

for example: symptoms for both include disorganization, poor self-esteem, problems concentrating and being inattentive, irritability/ hot temper. there’s emerging scientific research about how one of the epigenetic factors that contribute to developing adhd is early childhood trauma.

so my theory is that she was recklessly diagnosed, and has now made it like a personality trait. when i talk about adhd, it is and always feels like a disorder. it’s negatively impacting my brain, primarily the PFC and the symptoms constantly interfere with my well-being and functioning as a person. but for her it was like a quirky personality trait that she was happy to talk about.

anyway this is a long-winded way of saying i’m worried about how publicized mental health conditions are, and how quickly people will assign a disorder to themselves because of the influencers on tiktok. it frustrates me so much when people cheerily say “adhd isn’t a disorder! it’s just a different way of thinking / a superpower/ only a disability under capitalism!” and it’s always people like this, who either have mild adhd that isn’t that hard to deal with or accommodate, or were misdiagnosed with something else. and it contributes to this “woob-ification” of mental illness where it’s cute and quirky, and severe symptoms are disapproved of because everyone has this sanitized version of how people with mental disorders behave.

[pancakeke]

Did you get diagnosed with adhd as an adult? I ask because I'm an adult woman of color that can get up and go to work and can kind of interact with people around me, so I feel like I'll never get it

I got diagnosed when I was 29 but looking back I should have been diagnosed when I was in middle school lol. When I sought out a doctor I was technically functioning at my job and home but I was doing piss poor work and was stressed out beyond my limit 100% of the time.

I have a really hard time talking to doctors because I get anxious and forget what I want to highlight a lot so it may be helpful for you as well to list out your struggles and how they are negatively impacting your life. then you have a point by point list your doctor can use to help with diagnosis

for examples, a bunch of stuff I listed:

Work:

I forget to follow up on problem orders constantly, creating larger problems for myself later

I have to keep ridiculous amounts of notes to keep myself on track, but then the amount of notes becomes overwhelming and they become impossible to use

I question my memory at all times which keeps me in a high level of stress and anxiety

After dealing with some extra temporary responsibilities I hit a wall and have not been able to bounce back and do my normal duties very well anymore. Even my boss has noticed that I have had a hard time keeping up and talked to me about it. Nothing has permanently changed with my work, the problem is something with me.

home/personal life

I volunteer to help people with plans often but very quickly forget my responsibilities and only remember when reminded at the the last minute, putting myself in the position where I have to work until 2 or 3am to prepare for what we're doing

often I feel very creative and have the intention to work on home improvement or personal projects but either cant force myself to initiate a plan or after starting a plan I can't focus enough to get remotely close to completing it

along with the above, when actually starting a project it's generally on impulse and as soon as the impulse dies down I cant force myself to continue no matter how hard I try

I create constant messes and always feel disorganized no matter how hard I try to maintain an acceptable living space

I buy things on impulse for personal projects but then can't bring myself to work on the projects, meaning I often waste money on impulse buys that never go anywhere

I have a difficult time remembering to pay bills

General

forgetfulness causes me to accidentally procrastinate almost constantly, always putting me in a position where I have to rush while fueled by anxiety to get anything accomplished.

I basically rely on anxiety to push me to complete anything. if I'm not afraid of failure or causing problems it's almost like tasks don't exist

there isn't a day where one or more of the above things causes me problems.

kind of overboard but you get the idea. take some time over a week or two and note every time your ADHD symptoms affect your quality of life, and also add to your notes that all these things are negatively impacting you on a daily basis (if its true, which I don't doubt it is). If you share any of these problems with me feel free to tell your doctor you know someone diagnosed with ADHD who had the same problems to emphasize that you don't just have generalized anxiety.

My doctor made a copy of my notes to keep on file which I greatly appreciated. I've had a LOT of problems with doctors in the past not taking me seriously for physical problems I had so I'm like extra aware and suspicious of how doctors behave now.

I was genuinely surprised at how serious my doctor took all my issues. She didn't dismiss anything and agreed this sounded like ADHD. I'm white and can't talk to the issue of being POC and trying to get taken seriously by medical professionals but my generic advice is: don't be afraid to fire a doctor who doesn't seem to listen to you or is dismissive of your struggles. You don't even need to tell them they're fired, you can just cancel your next appt right after you make it and then ghost them. I went through 5 doctors (and hundreds of dollars....) getting a physical problem diagnosed once. I seriously wish I'd jumped ship on two of these guys sooner and stopped wasting my time and money on morons who had no investment in my health.

Also if possible, talk to local people you know or check out support groups (there are a lot of various ones on FB. also there may be forums out there for this kind of thing) for POC who struggle with finding doctors who actually listen to them. There may be recs you can use.

One more little bit of advice, if you're more comfortable with video chat than going to see a doctor in person you can do telehealth visits to speak with psychs about mental health issues and even get a diagnosis. It's what I did at first because it was easier to fit into my schedule. The only caveat is they can't prescribe you any medications for controlled substances (like adderall) without seeing you in person at least once. So if they do diagnose you with ADHD you'll have to go see them in person one time to get a prescription.

I always rant when I get asks for advice aaaa but I hope this helps at least somewhat!! If you have any other questions or want to talk feel free to send another ask or DM me!!

[lesbeet]

long post ahead

ive been thinking nonstop about the possibility of me having adhd since my sister and her boyfriend brought it up to me last week (i’m FINALLY seeing my therapist today so we can talk about it) and i’ve been doing a lot of research and i found the howtoadhd channel on youtube

and literally the number of times in the past 2 hours alone that i’ve teared up or started legitimately crying because of how much i relate to things that these videos are saying is ridiculous, like some of them are word-for-word things i’ve said that i had NO inkling of an idea could be related to adhd

like this one video of this guy who was diagnosed at 43 and said that prior to his diagnosis he had just accepted that he would feel dissatisfied for his whole life, that he would never feel content, i’ve been saying that for YEARS and just was resigned to it and chalked it up solely to my depression

and just like. having been able to do well in school as a kid but constantly being told that i’m “not living up to [my] potential” and now that i’m in my early 20s and my intelligence can’t compensate for like....not being able to regulate my emotions and not being able to organize my life and not being able to motivate myself to do things, which is supposedly why a number of people get diagnosed around this time, because metrics for success are different in adulthood (you can’t just take a test and rely on being smart to compensate for all the other problems), and i was always just. thinking that i fucked up and wasted my life through laziness or whatever the case may be

i’ve always considered myself to be “crafty” and “resourceful” in the sense that i may not go about doing things in the typical way but i can almost always find a way to accomplish what i need accomplished, even if it’s unconventional -- apparently that’s common with adhd too! like i’ll say “oh i couldn’t figure out how to do [x] so i did [y and z]” and someone will be like “why didn’t you just do [thing everyone else does]” and usually i either couldn’t figure out how, or it didn’t occur to me, and my way was weird and unconventional, but it worked for me!

and then of course i’m just recognizing all these signs that have always been there that i either didn’t notice or attributed to other things -- i’ve been trying to observe the way my attention functions this week and literally i space out and miss things SO much more often than i ever realized, like i miss so much information because i’ve drifted off. or i get really stuck on things in conversations and even after everyone else has moved on i have this urge to bring it back so i can say that last thing i’ve been rehearsing over and over for the past 5 minutes so i didn’t forget it, and now it’s in my head and everyone is talking about something else and it’s SO inconsequential but i have to forcibly drag myself away from whatever the thing is (yesterday my sister and her friend and i were talking about early 2000′s fashion and i wanted to make a comment about wearing ugly scarves as belts and they saw a dog and moved on to talking about cute things our dogs have done and i just couldn’t stop thinking about the scarves as belts thing for like 10 minutes until i just had to sigh and be like...well i can’t bring that up again now)

when i was younger i would rush through tests so i could go back to whatever book i was reading and i just thought it was a silly quirk like “oh i just like to read lol” but i realized i still do similar things -- if i’m reading a book or watching a show or working on something, THAT is what i’m doing. anything else, whether it’s work or sleep or eating or hanging out with a friend or fulfilling any sort of responsibility? that’s a break from the thing i’m doing. if i’m reading a book, even if it’s the 3rd time i’m rereading harry potter for the year, for example, then in my head, i’m reading harry potter. i have to go to work all day but then i can read harry potter. all i’m doing is thinking about reading harry potter. i rush through my responsibilities so i can go BACK to reading harry potter, because that’s what i’m doing and anything else is just taking a break from reading harry potter. (you see how this can negatively affect the accomplishment/fulfillment of important tasks and responsibilities)

and my sister has pointed out things that i didn’t really notice, like she said it’s really difficult to hold a conversation with me when i’m excited about something because i can’t calm down enough to let the other person talk. and i’ve always known that i tend to finish peoples’ sentences for them during conversations, which i always thought was a way of showing that i’m listening! but ive realized it’s actually that, if i already know what you’re going to say, and you’re saying it too slowly, i get impatient and i need to blurt out the rest for you so we can move on and i can say my next thing before i forget it

and like obviously all people experience some symptoms some of the time, daydreaming isn’t exclusive to adhd, neither is walking into a room and forgetting what you’re doing there. but this week as i’ve been paying attention, i notice i do it CONSTANTLY. the other night i opened up my phone before bed because i remembered i hadn’t set my alarm, so i picked it up from where i place it for the night (i was about to go to sleep). 15 minutes later i put my phone back down and decided to turn in for the night again, and then realized i still had never turned the alarm on because i got distracted and did other stuff. and things like that happen with almost comical regularity, now that i know to look for it.

i’ve known i have executive dysfunction issues for a long time so i won’t go into those, but like we’ve known i have problems with directions and organization and spatial processing and knowing how to complete tasks for a long time

the rejection-sensitive dysphoria is something i didn’t really realize was part of adhd, but it makes SO much sense. i think it’s part of why i thought i had bpd for a while, because a lot of the symptoms were similar and i knew i was dealing with something more than just depression and anxiety but didn’t know what, and a lot of the symptoms i experienced also seemed to fit the bpd diagnosis even if my actual behavior and personality didn’t seem to

there are so many more things i’ve noticed this week and thought about differently but i literally can’t remember what they are lmao i think i’m gonna try to write stuff down so i don’t forget to tell my therapist today but like. 

so many of these things i didn’t realize had anything to do with adhd, like emotional dysregulation, i’ve always known i have horrible mood swings and trouble regulating my emotions, i’ve always noticed a lot of these different symptoms but it never occurred to me that they could all be part of the same thing??

like i haven’t been tested or diagnosed yet and i’m worried i’m getting carried away but the only time i’ve ever felt this sort of relief was a few months ago when realizing my dad is a narcissist. like the feeling of “oh my god, i knew this was something i experienced but i didn’t think i could attribute it to anything” and “oh my god, this is word for word something i say all the time, i didn’t realize it was part of a pattern”

and it genuinely made me cry! hearing people talk about things that describe me that i never would have guessed might have to do with adhd, finding something that seems to encompass a very broad range of symptoms that i previously thought were unrelated or results of a myriad of things (and obviously they all play off of one another but that’s a whole separate issue)

but it would explain so much of my behavior and challenges -- why i struggle with finishing up a task or project once the big, complicated part is done; why i get super obsessed with something and then once it wears off i never mention or think about it again; why i’ve always needed my mom’s help to clean my closet or pack for a trip, even though i felt like i was way too old to need help with that; why people constantly are like “i know you heard me say this because you said ‘ok’” about things i genuinely have no recollection of

but i just can’t stop thinking about that guy talking about how he was just resigned to thinking he would never been satisfied or content with his life because that is something i have been feeling and saying FOREVER, for years ive just been like “everything is so hard, the idea of spending the rest of my life struggling to get up in the morning and going to work every day, dealing with all my responsibilities, i feel like i’m exhausted and underwater just thinking about it, i’m never going to feel fulfilled or satisfied, it’s always just going to be slogging through my responsibilities and it’s never going to end” and apparently that’s....a normal thing, and i just thought it was depression and maybe part of it is, but maybe the reason i struggle so much with those every day things is because my brain is wired differently?

and maybe i’ve fucked up because at this point i think i’ll be really disappointed if i don’t get the diagnosis because i’m not really sure what else could explain these issues, it certainly makes sense and i feel like it fits and i feel relieved just thinking about having that answer, and it certainly negatively impacts almost every aspect (if not every aspect) of my life. so like if i don’t get diagnosed idk what i’m gonna do and i probably fucked up by spending the last week obsessing over it lol

but like....the relief i feel every time i read or hear or see someone with adhd say “i experience [x]” and i’m like holy shit??? me too???? and it just. feels like maybe there’s an explanation for all this horrible dissatisfaction and unhappiness i thought i was going to be stuck with for the rest of my life, and there are other people who experience these things and there are things that can be done, medication and therapy and strategies and...my whole life doesn’t NEED to feel like a challenge, maybe it’s not an indisputable fact that i’m just going to have to live with forever.

if you read this far and you have adhd (especially if you were diagnosed after childhood) i would love to hear your thoughts on this, obviously i didn’t list every single symptom and experience and i know there are more but these are all i could think of at the moment, if i seem like i’m way off base obviously please let me know

[therobinsonwayoflife]

Unnecessarily Complicated (Speculative) Psychoanalysis of the MTR characters:

*basically these are headcanons because the original canon? not much to go off of tbh

so I’m only doing the three main (ish) characters although I’ve already talked a lot abt Michael and Wilbur here. 

Cornelius:

We know about him the most, from gawky self-depreacting childhood to freakishly collected adulthood so i can confidently say that he consistently seeks validation, covertly through his inventions. He will literally never say so out loud, not under oath, not with a gun to his head, not to anyone. But he craves attention and nothing is ever enough. He’s used to working to the bone until he gets what he wants to the point where when he does achieve something, he doesn't know what to do with it. Once he’s finished one invention he’ll start another, if one project is failing or starts to bore him, he’ll immediately loose sleep on moving on to the next thing. Though he likes to tout about his love of charity and using his inventions to help people, they’re also a means to an end: both to seek others’ attention, and to distract from thinking about himself too much. 

He doesn’t want to think about his flaws or his strengths, or his personality, or his vulnerabilities; it’s all about what he does. If someone were to criticise his inventions, that’s fine he’ll just work harder if someone criticises his behaviour or his personality it’s like hitting a brick wall. Of course if he cares enough about the situation he will find a way to adapt, he’s very stubborn and sometimes even obtuse but he’s a people pleaser at the end of the day. He simultaneously cares about pleasing everyone and asserting himself as an individual  than everyone in a very specific way. He loves rules and he’ll follow them to a T until he finds a way to break them and be better than everyone else. He never wants praise for anything that he personally didn't achieve or can’t control. Like if someone compliments him on his looks, he’ll call them vapid. 

Everything is a work in progress, something to figure out and this also applies to his relationships. After years of rejection and abandonment he’s immediately suspicious of everyone but if and when someone does gain his trust and peak his interest, he’ll start to analyse them and pull their personality apart until he  (thinks) he knows them. He can be very charming and finds all these ways to indirectly play his strengths to them, tailor himself to their personality, make all the gears mesh together. He’s really good at chasing after people but he’s also extremely self-conscious about seeming too clingy so he’ll compulsively avoid the very people he wants attention from. Like his work, once he does get someone to love him back he gets confused, like he never expected this to happen, he didn't plan this far ahead. He needs someone to tell him what happens next, else he’ll get bored and scared and hole himself up in the lab. 

He’s very driven and can become really hyper fixated on something he’s working on/any goal he’s working towards which often intimidates people, if they can’t keep up he’s likely to just leave them behind. And sometimes even justifies it by thinking its their fault they can’t follow, he can be very snobby. (i definitely think thats why he surrounds himself with people who share his intensity) He’s not necessarily confrontational but I think he enjoys the challenge of people picking a fight with him, like a debate.

Though as he gets older he becomes a lot more confident and calmer (and of course he has to for the diplomatic side of being a CEO and a parent) and he’s probably able to deal with everything much better and compartmentalise his work vs personal life and separate his identity from his projects. Partially due to his lingering abandonment fears, he’s very loyal to a select number of people. And when he makes the effort (which he sometimes forgets to), boy can he read people and emotionally empathise with them very closely. Slowly, he starts to learn how not to push things towards an indeterminate future and just hang out in the moment. 

Franny: 

Franny craves attention but it has to be in a very specific way: she goes out of her way to stand out and be The Weird Kid. If someone ever called her normal she would die. Be a musician? Be a scientist? Ew no. And anything that doesnt fit her carefully curated personality she’ll hide like a dirty secret. She pretends she doesn't care about people’s opinions, that she’s above it all, if someone doesn’t like her, it must be because her strong sense of individuality intimidates people and not because she actively pushes them away because she’s afraid of intimacy. She’s independent that way, or stubborn depending on the day. 

She’s very ambitious and very competitive. And if she decides that someone’s either boring or feels like hey don’t appreciate her enough, she cuts them off. Despite her warmth and friendliness, even to strangers, she can have a mean, no-nonsense personality and punish you for expectations she won’t admit she has. I doubt it’s very fun to be grounded by her.  

Of course, to the people she loves, she goes all out and remembers every single little detail about them so she can make perfectly tailored, personalised gifts or outings on their birthdays. She’s very good at remembering people’s  dislikes and their flaws and depending on the situation, will either do her best to avoid them or deliberately push their buttons to get back at them. She’s also very intuitive about people’s emotions, but she’s not always very open about all that insight, which she’ll keep to herself for safekeeping. 

Franny is a sort of in-between for cornelius and wilbur, she doesnt care about performance at least not ultimately and she doesnt concern herself with what people think of her or wether they’ll leave her, she’s constantly living in the future and thinking about the big picture. She doesnt plan either because she knows that after the plan, life goes on. She just wants life to be fun and interesting and while she loves analysing it and taking it apart, it’s  all a game to her, she just wants to laze around, eat chocolate and maybe travel to the world’s highest mountain and do something really impulsive . 

Wilbur:

I once considered climbing into the Discourse Ring and getting into a debate w someone over wether or not Wilbur’s a Slytherin but i thought better of it because we’re all going to die and Hogwarts houses are worse than the MBTI types and who cares it’s just fun. But for the record: i don’t think he is and the reason is simple; it’s because he’s not ambitious. He's too afraid to be. 

He's extremely intelligent, very witty and fairly adaptable to complete disaster. Everything for him is about performance, he’s a perfectionist and he goes out of his way to try everything: sports, checkers, math, sculpture, acting, knitting, gif-making. All the time and he has to be the best at everything he does but when he finds that there’s something he can’t do, he’ll dismiss it like nothing really matters in the grand scheme of it all. He doesn’t wanna say anything about it lest he confront his family’s gung-ho opinion on failure. And the thing is: the Robinson’s celebration of failure predicates an expectation of trying, of constantly working and you know what? He doesn’t want to try.  He’s too scared to go after anything and he’s certainly weighed down by all the unspoken pressure of having a famous family of prodigies. 

Sometimes he wishes there were rules he could follow so he could be the best at life but that doesn't really work with his family’s complete lack of boundaries. I think there’s a part of Wilbur that will never truly grow up and not just because he’s spoilt or that he’ll always be freakishly close with his parents but also because he’s still waiting around for people to tell him what to do. I have a very specific image of him as an adult doing weird shit to compensate for how immature he feels. Like, he’ll make his house all black, no colour, he wears a tux and slicks his hair back with GOBS of hairgel, he has a fancy car he never uses but likes to show off because look how clean it is! Of course, even though he thrives on rules and fulfilling expectations, he’s still very selective on what rules he’ll follow because again: if he thinks it’s dumb or if it’ll negatively impact his rep, he’s not touching it with a ten-foot pole. 

He’s very easily bored and gets distracted all the time (also hd him as having ADDD or ADHD). He’s deliberately getting himself into trouble and pushing people’s buttons as a way to act out. But again he’s very charming and very observant. He likes to play dumb but he’s secretly paying attention to everything about everyone and he knows exactly what will tick them off and what won’t. And given the right circumstances he can be a genuinely caring and empathetic person.