#also the fact that the senior whose work is basically what I'm doing now didn't get in anywhere in her first round of applications despite

[horsemage]

oh god. grad school apps imminent. any words of wisdom?

[mothknight42]

if you don't mind sharing, how exactly did you find out you had adhd? and how did you get through college w it?

hi anon!! not a question I expected haha, but sure, I can answer (but I rambled sorry, so putting it below the cut)

I didn't realize I had it until I got to college, mostly due to interacting with peers who also had ADHD and whose experiences mirrored mine in startling ways. I had always been a good student in terms of like, grades? But I struggled with getting ANYTHING in on time. It was like there was a mental block preventing me from doing even the most basic of things. Sitting down to focus on a simple 200 word response felt like pulling teeth despite the fact that I was objectively a good and fast writer, and pretty much every assignment I have done since middle school onward I have done at the VERY LAST MINUTE. I nearly flunked out of my first semester of college because despite having As in all my classes, I could not for the life of me get myself to write the final papers for three of my classes. My professors were kind enough to give me extensions of a full two months - and yet every single one of those papers I wrote the night before the final deadline, crying on the floor of my dorm room until 7am. I didn't understand WHY I couldn't just fucking sit down and do it. It did not help that I could focus on shit like video games for HOURS without moving. I would forget to eat, forget to sleep, forget to use the bathroom - I always felt very fucking useless and lazy, because I *could* focus, but never on the right thing. Not to mention that I could not form habits to save my life. Even now at 25, remembering to brush my teeth twice a day is like, nigh on impossible. Lol.

In college I met some friends who were diagnosed with ADHD, and all of them were pretty much like "hey your issues with hyperfixations and an inability to focus on simple necessary tasks and an inability to keep habits and so forth all are very ADHD coded my friend" and I was like "NAHHHHHHHHH. NO WAY. I'M FINE." <- words of a guy who was NOT fine

Even worse, my partner at the time had a therapist who just from stories of me was like "btw maybe you should tell your bf they probably have ADHD it could help them" which is like. Deeply fucking funny kdfsgfhdkjsal Anyway. My own therapist eventually also was like "99.9% sure you have ADHD" and I was like "sick what do I do then" and she was like "well you could get tested and get on meds" and I was like "ahahahahahahaha well I cannot afford that so nah"

I had no insurance in college and every dime I made I spent on HRT or sent it home to my family. So. I basically ignored the problem. Which. Was not helpful. Lol. Quite frankly looking back I am not sure how I managed to graduate at all. I was under severe and constant stress because of the way ADHD was ruining my life as a student. It was not fun.

I didn't really *accept* that I had ADHD though until after college, and I still have never gotten a formal diagnosis 1) because I don't have that kind of money to throw around tbh and 2) I don't need a doctor to tell me what I already know.

BUT. YOU ASKED HOW I GOT THROUGH. SO HERE ARE MY TRIED AND TRUE STRATEGIES

Whenever possible, I tried to set up parallel working sessions. I often sat with a large group of friends/peers in our library and we would work together. Having other people with me helped keep me on track, and even when I spent half the time talking, the other half I worked. Working alone I often got NOTHING done. Parallel play saved my ass on many nights and for many assignments. My junior/senior year when we had to go remote because of COVID I swapped out in person for video calls with multiple people. Same sort of vibe. Now as an adult if I want to get something done, I still hop on a video call with my friends. It helps me focus to have other people there, and the background noise of conversations is soothing almost. I don't know why, but it works.

If you can, have some sort of schedule imposed by outside forces. I really fucking suck at habit forming, and so making lists and just saying "I am going to do this then" does not work for me. But having set times I would go to class and go to work helped me manage my time better, and carve out blocks that FORCED me to work on what I needed to get done. I color coded my schedule and made sure that my class hours and work hours were regular; it made my 'free time' also more structured around those mandated times, which helped a little. It also caused me a lot of stress though. There are tradeoffs for everything I suppose.

Walking and pacing!!! This sounds nuts but like. I luv maladaptive daydreaming and have since I was a kid, so I kind of adapted that to help me with school work. If I had an essay or something I would put on some music and go for a walk or pace in my dorm room and just think about the assignment. It helped me generate ideas so when it came time to sit and focus, I had something to work with rather than staring at a blank page. I really suck at sitting still and thinking, so moving around helped me a lot.

Speaking of, I took a LOT of breaks. Which seems counterintuitive I guess, but allowing myself to get up, go get a snack, go chat with someone, etc, made it easier to come back and sit down and work rather than trying to just sit and focus and fail to focus for hours on end. I took lots of breaks but also got small pieces done in between every break, so it all added up in the end.

Anyway, sorry, this is a lot. the TLDR is I spent my schooling years either unaware or in denial of having ADHD, and it destroyed me. I wish I had accepted it sooner, and I wish I had more adults in my life that could have saw the signs and helped me.....but alas.

Even so, I developed ways to cope that I still use now. It helped me a lot to start talking to other people who also have ADHD because it made me feel less alone. I've also tried very hard to reframe my thinking of myself as lazy/useless because like, I am not either of those things! I just have a disorder that makes shit hard! GRAH!

I have no idea if any of this is helpful anon, but I hope ??? it can be. I don't want to presume anything BUT if you too are in college and struggling I am wishing you the absolute best and I hope you can find a good support system. (And if you ever want to chat, my dms are open <3)

[alphabetsoup-blogposts]

I didn't know her at all...

...and she didn't know me at all. End of. She talked a bit about culture vulturing when we met. I didn't talk and didn't share. That's the beginning, middle and end to it. Or it was, until 8 March 2020 when she came in and told me—with all the horrible, familiar undertones of a knowing subtext—to "cheer up" because "you and I are getting paid very well, aren't we?" She also conveyed or implied the usual suggestion from the high-falutin types that the people whose morale was really suffering were employees. (I'll assume that thesis has been thoroughly debunked by now, if nothing else.) That precipitated some kind of stress-related breakdown on my part as a result. I screamed and cursed my lungs out in my own kitchen for hours, then I got very ill, then we found ourselves in the middle of a pandemic. I would say that there was a direct line to my resignation and subsequent stress-related physical symptoms but it was, very clearly, only the accidental "last straw".

The gist of the screaming was "I've spent 3 years under siege, fearing for my life, shutting down my entire life piece by piece, being accosted by strangers, being pretend shot to death at work, dealing with eccentric ganging-up on the one hand and inexplicable scorching humiliation on the other. If you know anything at all about me, you know there is not one person I can turn to or lean on and that my private life is lonely and a bit fraught. Now, unseen manipulators are sending in random people to convince me that I'm fine." The neighbours must have been intrigued but they said nothing. Her "getting paid" comment was eccentric and inexplicable—neither true (in relative context) nor her business. She would have had to go and find some info from somewhere, which is an odd thing in itself, and then, well... she would have known that I had no institutional pension and/or legacy benefits. I've vaguely wondered since whether she meant "we're all making a profit on your personal, private, market sensitive info, aren't we?" but obviously I still hope and trust that would be a wild, vicious slur on my part. The point is, I don't know her, I didn't get a particular "vibe" and I have no way to interpret what she did or said.

That vignette aside, the most characteristic thing was simply the constant push on ESG. That was perfectly explicable IRL without any resort to conspiracy theories or "green" codes but it became personal in the sense that I gradually gathered the impression that the drive was not to make the whole organisation do the ESG work (which was the right outcome, given my wholesale lack of expertise or interest) but to make me do it personally and put my name to it. I had a vague unease about that* but I am perfectly happy to be told I was mistaken. I also vaguely wondered if it tied into the bit where a couple of members of staff went Musk-Tesla-crazy but I put that down to fashion and just being Millennials.

She was introduced to me by one of the strange platformers at TR who always seemed to have an angle and to be pushing code while basically picking my thoughts (I lay no claim to brains). Other weird platforming by TR included the woman whose presentation reminded me very strongly of Kimberly Guilfoyle (or, rather, vice versa) and who subsequently moved to California, and a bloke who wanted to talk Crypto to no obvious end and who was definitely pushing code.

In my own mind, I've vaguely written in a marital connection to the BBC and British Intelligence. I was, however, profoundly disengaged and have no idea whether those details were interpolations from my own schema or whether they are, indeed, remembered facts.

And that is all. *shrug* As I said, she didn't know me and I didn't know her. She mostly seemed nice enough.

*It was one of only a very few times when I wondered about being "groomed", "shaped" and "vetted" for a different job. That is why I told every senior person I could think of that I didn't want anything to do with what I guessed might be a planned career path. Most ardently of all, I didn't want to remain in the Group (cult?) but that is—i can see in retrospect—a difficult thing to communicate because the Group is, in manifold ways, both an implicit and explicit assumption they make. I'm sure they will confirm (because true) that in my final 6 resignation phone calls I said that they were "the very last people I would want to have any influence over the direction of my career" but whether they would acknowledge all the ways in which I said the same thing gently, moderately and politely in bilateral contexts before that—often while taking the blame on myself and my emotional fragility—I don't know. They certainly should.

[charmspoint]

chuuya for ask game

Yuki I am divorced

Just kiddin but seriously I feel like I just don't remember most of these it's been two years since I last poked at bsd with any sort of serious intention and uhhhhh motherfucking six since i was intensely into it, but lemme see

First impression

I don't fuckin remember. I don't even remember was it anime chuuya or manga chuuya i first met. I thiiiiink it might have been manga chuuya? I think bsd was either an anime i watched a little n then immediately went to read the manga or whose presence i was made aware of by anime announcement and then read the manga before the anime actually aired it was one of those two but im not sure which (six years) But I mean like, you've seen Chuuya, you've seen his first apperance, he walks in dressed like that and acts like that it was probably love at first sight. Which is funny because Dazai's character is usually more of my type but here Chuuya swept me away.

Impression now

So underutilized it HURTS. Chuuya has SO MUCH potential but it feels like all that's done with his character is constant nerfing and putting-on-bus-ing. He's one of those overpowered characters that the authors put in for cool points but then can't work around so they just end up sent away more often than not so the writer can still write the story without having to explain how this one guy isnt just obliterating shit left and right. Still, Chuuya is pure potential and I feel that's why he's so beloved (or well used if you wanna be crude) in the fandom. Kafka only relatively recently gave him any backstory at all so for a long time Chuuya was basically a cool guy you could make anything out of. We don't get much from him but to me he's like all the bsd nostalgia and potential (and subsequent disappointment) wrapped up in one character. He's one of the rare favs I don't wish to break like a glow stick I think only nice things should happen to Chuuya.

Favorite moment

Honestly...back when we thought we were really going to get Chuuya vs Ranpo vs Poe. It didn't happen, that was an utter disappointment, but like many things with Chuuya the potential of that was incredible. Those were my bsd top three, that was bsds top brain vs bsds top brawn. The fact that it didn't happen and instead ended up as just an excuse to clean up two people who could fuck with the story the most was probably one of the first nails in bsd's coffin for me. You said favorite but I'm all like bittersweet about it, but Chuuya is a bittersweet character. You'll get odd answers.

Idea for a story

The suffocating quality of your dying breaths (And the effect they had on me) was actually supposed to be a part of a series of Chuuya character fics labeled 'Fittest to Survive' (If you remember that series you may be viable for a seniors discount). The other two fics were 'All the beautiful things we are (All the dangerous things we will become)', which was supposed to be a Kouyou & Chuuya fic focused on their relationship, concepts of beauty and strength and exploration of gender identity, and 'Feral beasts (and their hearts that bleed)' which was a Chuuya & Akutagawa fic which was basically supposed to focus on them after Dazai leaving the mafia, the differing relationships they had with Dazai and differing ways they dealt with the loss.

Unpopular opinion

I would say I'm completely out of the loop on what's popular or unpopular in the bsd fandom but from talking to you it seems like things are basically the same as they were six years ago so uhhh unpopular opinion 1. I don't think Chuuya is like a super feminine guy. I do get a genderqueer vibe from him but it doesn't really lean feminine for me, he likes to dress nice but also he grew up as a lab rat and then on the street he deserves to indulge himself and explore his identity. 2. I don't think he heart achingly misses Dazai. Like I mentioned this before but I don't think they had some big romance even tho i do like soukoku. Their relationship for me has always been more akin to being tied together for a three legged race and if the idiot tied to you goes down so do you so better help him out. I do think there was loss in Dazai leaving but I don't think Chuuya was like on the floor sobbing for weeks or anything and he's probably fully over it by now. The person Dazai had a very close and personal relationship to was Oda not Chuuya. Honestly idk how well i explored this in my past fics, it took me distancing myself from bsd completely to crystalize my opinions on their relationship which is a shame cuz i have all these takes and no motivation to write them.

Favorite relationship

Who are we kidding here huh, the only relationship Chuuya has that is remotely explored is with Dazai (dont @ me with light novel content i dont know her). And his relationship with Dazai is interesting! There's a lot to explore there, as i said before, they really are something that's neither romantic nor platonic nor queerromantic. They are complicated and messy and probably not too good for each other. I just wish fandom would express them like that more instead of making Chuuya Dazai's collectible waifu. I would also REALLY like it if there was any canon content for his relationships with Kouyou, Akutagawa and Kyouka like CMON, ESPECIALLY AKUTAGAWA. DAZAI'S EX PARTNER AND PUPIL, THE SHIT WRITES ITSELF, WAKE UP KAFKA.

Favorite headcanon

Somewhere along the line I decided that the rich girl impression is an inside joke between Chuuya and Dazai and to this day this is my pet headcanon. Chuuya just had it down too good, it made Dazai genuinely laugh (in the manga at least, fuck the anime), this was a thing Chuuya did once as a joke and from the on out Dazai pestered him to do it again every five goddamn seconds I will not be dissuaded from my silly hcs.

Ask game

[traincat]

We know you didn't like Homecoming, but I'm curious about something now. Since you like Liz Allan so much, and since this was her first adaptation into the movies (from what I can remember),what did you think about Laura Harrier's Liz? Would you like to see her come back? Feel free not to answer if you don't want to!

The funny thing is, back when they announced they were rebooting the Spider-Man films, I actually called that they’d be using Liz as the Love Interest on the basis that they’ve been working backwards. (I believe I also called the Vulture but that was honestly just wishful thinking because I fucking love the Vulture and although Michael Keaton gave a great performance in that movie, I have to say, if we as an audience aren’t ready to see Peter Parker punch a winged senior citizen in the face, we’re not ready for Peter Parker.)

I liked the casting of Laura Harrier a lot and I think she played the role she was given extremely well, although I’m naturally inclined to be sympathetic to the character of Girl Whose Only Mistake Was Giving Boy Who Repeatedly Ditched Her A Billionth Chance because haha, good ol’ Hollywood. Considering how fandom usually likes to discuss the MCU’s problems with how it treats women, I’m surprised how little I’ve seen Homecoming criticized for not allowing women to do anything. Please, my kingdom for a version of this movie where Liz gets to have one single little bit of involvement in taking down her father rather than Peter just flat out ruining her life while she presumably sits depressed by the punch and Nedke spins around in a chair. I would really like us to be past the point where we have scenes where the girl’s reason for going to a dance with the Main Character is “I know you like me”, you feel me?

It’s, I don’t know, it’s a pretty big departure from 616 Liz in high school:

Or even later on, when she gets involved in criminal activities trying to help her step-brother, Mark “The Molten Man” Roxton:

Or, when she threatened Norman Osborn when he tried to get involved in the life of her son, his grandson.

Liz has always been a proactive character and on top of Hot Aunt May (Did We Mention She’s Hot Now), Zendaya’s Michelle having very little screentime, the sidelining of Betty Brant, consistently one of the most important people to Peter, and Karen The Saccharinely Helpful Robot Lady Voice having, to the best of my recollection, more lines than any single female character, to have her so completely sidelined in the destruction of her family and her life for the Greater Good. imho Spider-Man should, at its heart, be about doing the right thing for no reward: taking down her father would have been the right thing, and she certainly would have gotten no reward. Instead, she’s left standing at the dance and the last we see of her is her tearfully telling The Boy she hopes he works it out or whatever. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Let women do stuff in MCU movies even if they don’t have super powers or spy training.

I would like her to come back, because again I did really like the casting and I Love Liz Allan, but honestly, Homecoming’s messages, including the erasure of the gun violence aspect of his backstory and the fact that they’ve taken a vigilante and made his goal Join The Cool REAL Superheroes left me so put off this reimagining of the series that I’m not inclined to see another Spider-Man movie until they reboot it again. (If you heard an obnoxious female voice shout “DOES HE HAVE TO” when Peter Parker Will Return came onscreen at your showing, sorry, you were in a theater with me.) She was good! I hope she comes back and does stuff! If it’s up to these writers, I highly doubt it!

I guess the ideal for me would be if Laura Harrier’s Liz appeared, somehow, in the Venom movie as the ruthlessly pragmatic CEO of Alchemax, somehow, I don’t know, we’re throwing around time skips all over the place these days:

Let women do stuff in movies, basically.