#adhd stuff

[wilsons-hotlittleprettyboymouth]

adhd is so embarrassing ur basically like “I have to have fun right the fuck now or I’m throwing myself off the roof” 90% of the time and you also have very little control over this

[amazonclimber]

No, you don’t understand. Then I’d have nothing to distract myself from the crushing feeling of not being able to write.

wishing I could freeze time so fanfic writers could write all of their slow-burn enemies to lovers and gay porn and fix-it fics and all of their WIPs and prompts without having to worry about life and other responsibilities

[earhartsease]

does anyone else with unmedicated adhd find their eyes and brain skipping over descriptive sections in fiction like a flat stone across a lake because it's such hard work maintaining attention on the story?

[bomberqueen17]

smorkles

So anyway. I don't remember when I last posted about anything and I'm not going to go look it up.

I don't start back at the farm until May 13th. My cabin has no electricity currently but there is apparently a trench being dug, and it will contain both a real electrical line (not a duct-taped extension cord!) and a water line??? of some kind??? with actual potable water??? sounds fake but ok.

but I am going to, not quite the farm, this week, leaving tomorrow. And i am going to stay with my middle-little sister. Because her housemate moved out, and her house needs some renovations, and now she's thinking she needs to sell that house and downsize to a smaller one, and that's all fine but like the main thing she needs to do is to get rid of like 3/4 of the objects she owns, and i say this from a place of I also have to get rid of like 3/4 of the objects I own and I dont' know how to do it or how to make her do it either and hate the entire concept of the process. But hey. There it is.

I am bringing her a kitchen table and a whole-ass tree that was rescued from dude's work office but is too tall for our ceilings. she has higher ceilings. we'll see how this goes.

i feel like i should be sort of retrospecting on what i did this off-season. right? like my life is in two annual chunks: farm work season, and not farm work season. Farm work season is usually April-ish through the beginning of December. And then since the beginning of December I've been doing Not Farm Work and I have no idea if I've achieved any of those goals. Did I set goals? IDK.

I did want to get my ADHD shit sorted out. So I started seeing a therapist. And she's admitted she's like, for short-term stuff, and needs to get me passed along to more of a specialist type person maybe. IDK. I've been told to form habits, told to buy a notebook to turn my life around with, and in other doses been fed things that i have largely seen before because i have been living like this for like, 40 years.

anyway. and also i tried all the basic meds, everything's "here try this and see what it does" dosages have given me negative side effects and no good effects, so if I want to continue trying to medicate myself I need to actually have a psychiatrist who I can ask questions of and get a response faster than two weeks. (That's how long it took to hear back on whether I could stop taking atomoxetine when it started giving me really bad anhedonia. Thankfully i had already figured that out on my own twelve days before, because i could not have lived like that for those twelve additional days, it was really bad. also he was like "and discontinue wellbutrin" my friend i discontinued wellbutrin in 2014 so i'm not sure who this was addressed to.)

but. yesterday's conversation, the therapist was going on about different things-- I had been given a rundown by a friend about the different types of behavioral therapy that existed, and how some of those might be more useful in trying to make concrete improvements in one's life, and my person was like "the thing is most of those are just fancy names for stuff you've largely already encountered so there is not going to be a magic technique that fixes you" and it's like

the thing is when have i ever said "find magic technique/drug that fixes me" is a therapy goal? That's not my goal. My goal is explicitly "figure out better coping mechanisms than what I have because brute-forcing normality for as long as I can and then feeling real shitty when I can't anymore isn't very sustainable", and no, I don't think that ACT or DBT is going to magically fix me, but if I can find more tools through a coordinated approach, wouldn't that be good?

What i can say is that so far using a lot of CBT-lite language and making lists has actually given me a borderline-pathological avoidance of my Special Notebook, in which i can no longer write but i do still carry it everywhere like a talisman (it's very useful. not), so I'm writing essays on discarded envelopes because I can't even use The Good Scrap Paper for this, when I tell you I've scarred myself trying to figure out how to make a fucking to-do list I'm not exaggerating.

So I have an essay written on an envelope from which i'm trying to extract, like, a thematic through-line to guide me in what to do next, and then a bunch of witterings in a discord convo, and I wrote a list of things I want to bring, and I did go move some furniture just now so I can get that table out of my house at some point.

Anyway, though, mid-conversation, the therapist was like, "have you ever heard of smorkles?" and i was like "i'm -- what? smorkles?" and she was excited and was like "oh this one will be so good for you!" and i was like "Sporkles? Smorkles? I'm not sure i"m hearing you, can you spell that" and she proceeded to spell out the word "smart" which

yes I do know about SMART goals actually, they are a management technique from the 80s that my dude uses extensively in his job as a staff engineer (which is like management but not quite) in his very corporate job at a very large software company, and he had laid out the criteria for me very earnestly once on a walk. so i do in fact know about them but not how to really apply that to my own life, and would need to figure out how to break that down, and i need a lot more steps than 'find a pen' and 'buy The Notebook That's Gonna Turn Your Life Around' to make that work.

but anyway.

i've decided now that smorkles are my new technique. and yes also smart goals but I think I'm going to call it "smorkles" because then I can make memes about my commitment to smorkle motion etc.

i need to figure out what SMORKLE is an anagram for. er, not anagram. the other thing.

[angelsonthesideline]

[botanical-garden-system]

ADHD is so debilitating and it isn’t talked about enough. Imagine your body doesn’t produce enough of the most essential neurotransmitter. You are constantly seeking this neurotransmitter through any way possible, and it’s why you get addicted to doing things or focusing so heavily on something you forget to meet every single basic need.

You sit there and question what the fuck is wrong with you because it was so easy to study yet you just didn’t do it. It was so easy to do the things you stopped doing but you literally can’t do them.

Like wtf do you fucking mean I was born with a chemical imbalance that makes me incapable of getting up??? Wtf do you mean I have to take stimulants to counteract crippling ADHD symptoms, and then those stimulants actually just make me like everyone else????

Dude. What the fuck.

[bibliocharlie]

the most helpful thing i have ever seen from neurodivergent internet spaces is “THERE ARE OTHER TIMES OF DAY TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH”. this has genuinely saved me from executive dysfunction spirals so many times.

[m0thmancore]

hey can we talk at some point about how having adhd makes you way more likely to be depressed because literally nothing you need to do to be a functioning adult gives you any happiness at all

like this is an actual statistical problem

[honeypleasejustkillme]

no one talks about the rage you feel when u realize that every adult in your life has failed u

[cookthepenguin]

The adhd urge to use parenthesis in every sentence (because every thought comes with additional bonus content)

[frankieroslesbian]

Nah man having intense hyperfixations as a neurodivergent person is probably the most isolating feeling in the world

Like all I can think about is this specific thing but I'm not allowed talk about it because it doesn't interest anyone else around me. So instead it just builds up to the point where I feel like I'm going to explode

[rabitzle]

All of you complain about overstimulation and sensory overload

We need to talk about under stimulation. I’m not saying I want to be overloaded with information. No I mean when I get panic attacks because there is not enough self stimulation in a situation. I have to walk out of meetings to pace around and think to calm myself down because my fight or flight response has activated from being not being able to stim.

I get so anxious when I cannot listen to music or have something playing in the background because I need stimulation that I choose to have and which I have control over

It physically hurts my brain.

[toomuchdivergentformyneuro]

can we talk about the shame that comes along with having ADHD?

the shame that hits you when you walk around your messy, cluttered room, knowing you don’t yet have the motivation or hyperfocus to clean it, even though you want to.

the shame that hits you when you retell a story for the thousandth time and the person you’re talking to gets bored or annoyed or confused by it, cuz you couldn’t remember you had told it before.

the shame that hits you when you ask someone to repeat what they’re saying multiple times because you keep forgetting or you just can’t hear them.

the shame that hits you when you forget something super important after you leave for a trip, and you ask to go back for it.

the shame that hits you when you know you’re overanalyzing something someone said to you, but it still hurts.

the shame that hits you when you snap at people who are just talking to you while you’re hyperfocused.

the shame that hits you when you realize you don’t remember jackshit about your life, you don’t have any memories, and you wonder what it was all like.

the shame that hits you when someone asks you to just shut up or sit still after you were just expressing your emotions, your happiness even, but were just a little too loud about it.

all the shame. over everything. we should talk about that all more.

[beenovel]

Pro tip for people looking for meds or diagnosis. DO NOT MASK in front of a psychiatrist. I went in for an evaluation with a new psychiatrist this week with the goal of getting meds and I was just fully myself during the interview like bouncing my knees, only looking at him occasionally, breaking off mid-sentence to ask about the room decor (“were you in the Air Force? That’s a really cool chess set. Is that a Star Wars tie????”). And he did not even hesitate when I told him I was there to get adderall or another med he was just like “yup makes sense, let’s talk about your options”.

In the past I’ve always really struggled (and still do!) with masking around other people especially if they’re new, and this has sometimes made it difficult to get meds because I mask so well that sometimes professionals haven’t believed me when I said I was struggling because I looked fine.

Edit: I’ve seen a lot of people saying “it’s so hard to unmask though!” and yeah, it is. For me it was physically painful and nearly impossible. So I faked it. I bounced my leg, I wouldn’t look the provider in the face, I interrupted myself, I rubbed my palms on my legs and none of it was natural. I faked it all. And I did that over and over and over until it was real. Until I was comfortable enough with being odd to actually unmask

[anarchistfrogposting]

Having ADHD is like,,, I need a new hyperfixation to feel normal but if I get a new hyperfixation I won’t be able to focus on sorting my life out. So I guess I’m just stuck here

[llove-r]

my toxic trait is thinking I can learn something I’ve never done before like play guitar or crochet in 2 hours or less and if I can’t it’s simply because I’m just not good at it