#I wonder if ADHD influences music taste…

[womb-complex]

Oh god I was listening to some bedroom pop and like soft indie stuff oh boy now I remember why I despise that genre

[screambirdscreaming]

personal rambling

For the past couple years I’ve been working to build a way of functioning that doesn’t hurt me. Before that, I was running on a mode of pretty much pure determination - pushing myself to do the next thing that had to be done, and the thing after that, and the thing after that. Partly that was because of the chronic pain. There’s a way things get, when you’re in pain all the goddamn time, where you just don’t have the bandwidth to feel emotions in any kind of complex way. Like when you’re nose is stuffed up from a cold and you can’t smell anything or taste any of the complex subtle flavors, just your basic “sweet” “salty” “bitter” kinds of categories. But with emotions it’s like “frustration” and “determination” and the rare, ever elusive “calmness”. That’s about as good as it gets - feeling like things are pretty ok and you don’t need to be fighting right now immediately. Oh, and hysterical amusement. And satisfaction - satisfaction is good.  But things like the joy when you see a really good bird, or the feeling you get when you smell wet earth, or the things music makes you feel... they just get kind of squished out. Or at least, for me they did.

And then I got on medication that actually managed the pain. And I started being able to feel these things again, to notice and appreciate things outside of the very narrow pathway of “the thing I need to do next” which I’d been focusing all my energy on. And I felt - I can’t describe what a wonder it was, and what a relief, to feel things like that again, after I’d almost forgotten they existed. I wanted to learn to live that way. 

But I was still swamped with depression, and anxiety, and what I very belatedly identified as sensory processing issues and executive dysfunction. I still had to pour almost all my energy into making things happen, one step at a time. But as I tried to keep moving forward that way, all determination all the time, I realized that - it wasn’t possible to do both. That bitter, powerful determination that had carried me through so much was the determination of “fuck it, everything’s awful anyway, I might as well do this too.” It existed on the far side of being so miserable I couldn’t function. And having crossed back across that gap of misery, I couldn’t reach it anymore. If I pushed too far, tried to force myself to do too much, it would hurt me. Or rather, it always hurt me, but now I had the potential to experience things other than bitter exhausted hurt, and I wanted to try that. To try not hurting.

It still frustrates me. To remember being able to just do things, to just make myself do things with willpower alone - I can’t do that now, really. Or I can, but only a little bit, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice. It’s easy to romanticize it, from a couple year’s distance. It’s easy to think maybe it wasn’t that bad. But here’s a weird little trick your brain plays on you: you don’t remember pain. You can’t. Your brain just doesn’t form memories of what pain feels like. Which is, probably, for the best. But it makes it easy to second-guess yourself. You remember how much you hated the pain, and you remember thinking about how miserable you were, but you can’t feel the misery anymore. So. I choose to trust my past self, who made this choice, on the tipping point between pain and relief. They’re probably the only version of myself who actually understood the options. I hope they chose well.

And what they chose was - to define “doing my best” as “doing a reasonable amount that will not hurt me.” To stop pushing when pushing started to hurt me. And instead, to try to learn to do things by following what I found interesting and satisfying to do, what I could focus on without fighting my brain. To learn to recognize my different mental states, and what kind of work I could and couldn’t do in each of them, and what things I could do to influence what mental state i’m more or less likely to be in. Rather than pushing harder to make myself do something, I try to find ways to deconstruct and reframe it to be easier to approach. I feel like I’m juggling with my adhd, or setting up elaborate mazes to lead it down to the outcomes I want, like a clever hero outwitting a monster. Only it’s not a monster. It’s a way of thinking, a way of being. I made it through pretty much my whole childhood never thinking of it as a bad thing, being proud of it even - or at least of various parts of it, like the way I can hyperfocus on a project for hours and make something even I didn’t know was within my abilities. And sure, I’ve always felt like there are downsides, or things I struggle with, but everyone has those.

I just feel, more and more, like it’s hard to give myself space to think the way I think and function the way I function, and still keep up with what’s expected of me. I’m terrible with time, I’m always late to everything. The older I get the less forgiving people are of that, and while I can scrape by as a student - that’s the sort of thing that could loose me a job, once I get one, and I’m still barely more on top of it than I was a few years ago. And I can’t really explain to people why this is such a fundamental problem, why this is such a big deal. Back when the pain was really bad, I remember trying to explain to the boss at my summer job that it was harder for me to “just push through” my problems with time than it was to “just push through” doing farmwork with pain equivalent to continuous labor contractions. I have no reliable internal perception of the passage of time - I can’t perceive the difference between three hours passing and 20 minutes. Also, trying to align myself to the flow of time which I cannot perceive makes me massively anxious. If I try too hard, pay too much attention to the way time randomly slips away and try to set lots of alarms and calculate how long it takes me to finish things - I have a panic attack and don’t leave the house at all. I know it sounds dumb. I know, I know. But I promise you, whatever trick with a clock or a planner you want to suggest, I’ve tried it, and it hasn’t worked. I’m getting better at working around it. As long as I don’t focus on it too directly. I have a vague sense of how long it takes me to get ready in the morning, and I set my alarms to wake up at a time that seems kinda reasonable, adjusted through trial and error when I start a new schedule, and I get up and get ready and leave and catch a bus without ever checking a clock, and whatever happens, happens. I’m usually not more than 10 minutes late. I know that doesn’t sound impressive, but believe me, it’s progress. 

Once I get out of the house it’s better. I’m already moving, I can keep moving, as long as I have a continuous set of things to do until I get home again. I try to plan my schedule so that I have plenty of time to get between places I need to be, without having to rush to catch a specific bus or anything like that, but not so much time I get distracted. It’s a balance. I’ve made so much progress, and at this point I feel like it’s reliable enough that if people could tolerate me being not more than 10 minutes late, I’d be fine. But that’s too much to ask, in the modern world. And I don’t know how much better I can make it.

I feel like I’m trying so hard to build myself a mode of functioning that doesn’t hurt me, that works with my adhd rather than against it, and I feel like what I’ve built works really well - but it still feels like it’s not enough. Like I still can’t conform to the expectations of society.  And I try to go looking for other perspectives, other people’s advice, because I’ve derived all of this myself by trial and error and maybe someone out there has something that would help? Something that I could use without figuring it out the hard way? But I feel like everything I can find about ADHD is about conforming to the expectations of society. Like, that’s the baseline. It’s all about how much extra effort you can pour in to using a planner like a normal person. I’ve always felt like structured planners make you do twice the work putting everything in a certain order, and then don’t help at all. I’ve found my own strategies for writing things down and organizing them that do help. Some of them even look a little like some of the things in a planner. But I made them to work with the weird patterns in my brain, not to impose their patterns on me. And I can’t find that perspective anywhere.

I want to find somewhere where people are talking about ADHD as a way of thinking and being that is self-contained and self-sufficient and doesn’t need to be “managed.” I feel like that’s almost hypocritical of me, because I think about “managing” my adhd a lot. But that’s shorthand for “managing the ways the expectations of society interface badly with my adhd, and also, rederiving a bunch of general organizational tactics and strategies for doing things because the ones I was taught as a kid mostly don’t work for me.” 

I still feel a little like I’m being stupid and selfish, going to this much effort to try and construct a way of being when I know I can do the other option. I can push myself through misery and out the other side, to a place where I don’t feel miserable anymore, just exhausted and fiercely, bitterly determined. I’ve done it before. I could do it again.  And I feel like... a lot of people with adhd must end up there. It’s not that bad once you get used to it, and it interfaces with society pretty well, and you can do so much. I feel like I know a lot of people who are still dealing with chronic pain who still function like that. Honestly I’m incredibly lucky, to have gotten treatment in only two years. That’s a crazy good turnaround time for chronic pain. And I feel kind of like a hack, to have connected with that community (at least here on the internet) and to have related so much to that experience and the way of being it brings about, and to the coping strategies people had - and then, to not be there. To be doing this other thing, which I’m so stupidly lucky to even get to try to do.  I don’t know. Maybe I get to be selfish. Maybe I get to at least try this, and feel these cool weird feelings, and be inspired to do art sometimes, and I might not function that much but it’s alright. I feel like I have a responsibility to do good work in the world - not because work determines worth, but because I have the resources and the capacity and so I should use them to make things better in whatever ways I can reach. And sometimes it seems like my selfishness isn’t worth the balance of how much I could do, if I just pushed through and decided to do it - but maybe I’d burn myself out. Maybe it’s enough to live a life I enjoy and do a little work when I can but not sacrifice myself to it. I don’t know. I’m trying this, anyway.

[myheartisbro-ken]

Hi. I hope you are doing well. I have a question for you because I loved reading your last Greek mythology answer. Please feel free not to answer though. Which of the gods from Percy Jackson do you think would claim Lena Luthor? What about Kara Danvers? I wonder if there's SuperCorp fic like this. Thank you for your time. I hope you have a great day/night. 😊💙 (Blue because you're a Ravenclaw).

HI! I’m doing great, thank you very much, hope you’re doing good as well.

There are a few Percy Jackson/Greek Mythology AU’s for supercorp, but I’m too lazy to look for them right now (sorry)

Now, I think there’s an obvious answer for Kara here. If you base on the books, Kara has the physical characteristics and abilities to be a daughter of Zeus. Like Jason she has blonde hair and blue eyes, she’s (supposedly) muscular and tanned (if you compared to the other white people on the cast that aren’t Italian) and, like Jason, she can fly and generate air currents (in her case with superbreath, but okay. Also Jason has been compared to superman so that’s a great nod).

However, I personally think Kara could very well be a daughter of Apollo. Apollo also has blonde hair and blue eyes but also he is the God of the sun, and not only does Kara/Supergirl gets her powers from the sun but her Family’s name is El, which in Kryptonian means star/sun, so it’s fitting.

Apollo is the god of many things, and a few of them are: music, poetry, art, medicine, sun, light and knowledge. Apollo is the ideal of the kouros, which means he has a beardless, athletic and youthful appearance.Kara is canonically very good in arts and music, she’s very smart, she likes games, she ages slower than humans, she’s athletic (cuz she’s a superhero), and she’s ridiculously good looking, and those are all traits of Apollo, and childern of Apollo. Now while Apollo doesn’t have a beard Kara does, he’s from Daxam…

The rest of her powers could be associated with any regular well-trained demigod, the superhuman strength, agility. durability and reflexes. She’s also, in my personal opinion, very ADHD and that’s a demigod trait as well. 

For Lena, I think physically she’d be easily compared to Percy/Poseidon children, since she has ‘jet black’ hair and ‘sea green’ eyes, but honestly, I think that’s all. There are two a lot more plausible possibilities and I think they are the most common. 

They are:

A) Daughter of AthenaB) Daughter of Afrodite

I like both of those. 

Athena as I talked about before, is the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, strategic warfare, mathematics, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill. Those are all traits Lena seems to have a lot of affinity with so far in the show’s canon, except for arts unless you count her face.

Children of Athena are said to have immense expertise in war strategy, possess high intelligence and wisdom, be able to adapt to using various types of weapons quicker than normal, amongst other things. We see Lena being a chess prodigy, beating Lex, someone who was a lot older than her and had knowledge and training of the game, on the very first time she played at the age of four. That shows she has an innate ability for strategy. She was shown to know how to handle herself with a handgun and a taser so far, that shows she can use different types of weapons. And she’s the CEO of her family’s company at the age of 24. Now, of course it’s her lawful right to control the company, but it’s not just anyone who can just be a CEO, no matter who built and/or owns the company. If she wasn’t capable of doing so she would have appointed someone to work for her while she served as an advisor to steer the company to where she wanted (see Iron Fist, Dany can’t do shit, but he has the power to tell everyone what to do because he holds the majority of the shares). She also is shown several times being basically a genius, she built the alien detector, she build the black body generator, she neutralized the medusa virus… That shows high intelligence and wisdom.

Moving on

Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, love, lust, desire, sexuality, and pleasure. And, well, Lena is simply hot as fuck. She is so beautiful I often cry just by looking at her, so it’s really fitting. Lena holds herself at most times, in a way that exudes lust and desire, she’s a very attractive woman and it’s clear that she knows that and knows how to use that for her own benefits. Every time she speaks with someone, unless shown specific displeasure, she just looks like she’s flirting with them, and without even trying. With see that with Clark Kent, ‘Mike of the Interns’, Alana the evil assistant, Supergirl, Kara, and others. So that’s very suitable for an Afrodite daughter. 

There are also a few traits/abilities that children of Afrodite have:

They have control over clothes, makeup, and jewelry.

Amokinesis: As the children of Aphrodite, they have absolute control over love and desire

Charmspeak: Selected children of Aphrodite can influence other with the strength of their voices. 

They possess high social abilities and awareness.

Lena is always impeccably well dressed, her makeup is flawless and her jewelry are very tasteful. Again, love and desire, she’s a very desirable woman and she doesn’t shy away from that. Charmspeak is basically magical charm, Lena’s charming, she’s influential in the sense of she can be manipulative and flirty. And as an heiress to one of the most powerful, influential and rich families of the country, it’s obvious Lena has high social abilities and awareness.

Basically I am very fond of both possibilities but I also like a way to make them both work together.

This is getting really long but it’s almost over, stay with me for a little bit longer.

Gods are said to grant gifts and abilities to both humans and demigods that are not their children but either prove themselves or they just take a liking of. I’ve always called this ‘grace’ but I don’t know if it’s mythologically correct or remember if it’s mentioned on the books. Let’s just say headcanon in which a god that is not your ‘goddly parent’ can sort of claim you, be your guardian/patron (like Hera with Jason) and you get the powers/abilities that their children have.

So, in conclusion, 

I think Lena Luthor would be a daughter of Athena with the grace of Afrodite.

And Kara Danvers would be a daughter of Apollo with the grace of Zeus.

Also they’re in love and dating. 

The end.

if only I put this amount of dedication on school work… 

That was really long, but I have a lot of thoughts about this. We’re lucky you didn’t ask me for the other characters as well, this would last forever.

Thanks again for the question and for the Ravenclaw heart, I love it 💙💙