#but i'm also aware i'm being too harsh on myself. i still perform well enough. but i know i could do much better

[benayoung]

"goodbye, next gen season two! thank you!"

it's bittersweet, walking into the next gen interview room for the last time. is it the last time? she wonders, if next gen airs again next season, if they'll ask her back as a coach again. she thinks she did well. she supposes she should hope the answer is no - that she's too busy with idol activities, having debuted sometime in the next year.

she's enjoyed herself, though, so when she sits down, she actually smiles.

how are you feeling with the season being over?

"bittersweet," she voices aloud. "i've really enjoyed my time coaching, but i'm excited to see the culmination of everyone's hard work, and the results." she's also exhausted and won't be mad about returning to a regular schedule and focusing primarily on herself once again.

any predictions?

nayoung laughs, and shakes her head. "even if i had any idea what the judges would do, i'd rather keep those guesses to myself." she does have some thoughts and suspicions - stevie and hangyeol are surely going to get signed, if not end up in the top three, for example - but she doesn't want to say them aloud and be wrong.

let's talk about your team. there was some conflict. what happened?

"hopefully you found out the answer to that question through the footage of my team," she says, perhaps too gruffly. "truthfully, i'm not sure, but there was a lot of animosity in general. i believe siwoo and jihyun have problems with one another, and then...we saw what happened between jaeyoung and ren last episode. siwoo and ren have problems too, i believe. tensions were high and it carried into our practice time. it was hard for everyone to be in sync and actually perform as a team, at least in my opinion, so i tried to do something about it." she can't help but grimace a little. "i'm ultimately not sure if it helped or not. i think the team members have things to work through that extend beyond next gen," and thankfully that isn't my problem to deal with, she adds silently.

do you think they were able to set their differences aside to deliver a good performance?

"i think so. the tough concept of bang! helped our cause, i think. our team members might've broken into hives if they had to be cute with each other," she chuckles. "but instead they had to show some intensity and power. negative emotions can fuel that energy, too, and i do think they figured that out."

she's still a little worried about their synergy, but the truth of the matter is, sometimes people don't get along, and they have to deal with it. there's no guarantee that you'll debut with people you like. you have to learn to be professional, hide it, and perform like you love one another. bang! team is honestly lucky next gen is ending, and this isn't a permanent arrangement. she's lucky too. this has by far been the most stressful part of the show for her, but she has to be content with the fact that she did her best for them.

maybe the judges will be upset with her for her harshness in how she confronted her team, but she'll accept that responsibility if it comes to that. she just did what she thought was best. she's ultimately still just a trainee; she's learning too. the fact that she's aware of this and doesn't think she's beyond criticism is evidence enough of her growth in recent years.

any final words to the viewers, judges, and contestants?

she wipes any remnants of a troubled expression from her face, replacing it with a smile. "ah, yes, i guess i just want to thank everyone. thank you to the ceos for trusting me with the role of coach. thank you to the audience of next gen for watching, and supporting your favorite contestants so passionately. and thank you to all the contestants on next gen for their hard work. i look forward to seeing where everyone goes in the future."

it's a little bit of a manufactured answer, but it's not like she's lying entirely. she'll ultimately be unconcerned with a majority of the contestants after this, happy to return her focus to self-improvement, but she wonders who her ceo will sign, and where the others might end up. not to the point of keeping an eye on them, but a subtle curiosity.

"goodbye, next gen season two! thank you!"

[noxtivagus]

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[hawkeyedflame]

Hey, I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing by asking this in question but would you say it's possible to have executive dysfunction while still being able to perform well in school? I don't have trouble with assignments but I've been wanting to read a book that sits in a cupboard 5 centimeters from me ever since October and haven't been able to force myself to open it. Could this be explained by EFD or should I look into something else? Or maybe I'm just lazy lol idk

It is absolutely possible. I excelled in high school while also committing myself to cross country and indoor/outdoor track sixs days a week for five years. I graduated with 15 varsity letters, over thirty medals at district and state meets, a 4.0 GPA, special or high honors every semester, 97th+ percentile on my SATs, 4s and 5s on all six AP exams, early acceptance to University with a merit scholarship, etc etc. I could go on but you get the point: you can have executive dysfunction and be successful in school.

[This got really long so I’m putting a readmore]

You might be wondering how I managed all those achievements if I have this disorder that I say I have. That’s normal. Most people hear “ADHD” and think “hyperactive child who can’t focus in school.” While that’s sometimes true, it’s far from an all-inclusive representation. The answer to my previous academic success, I’ve realized, is that I relied very heavily on externally-imposed structureLet me walk you through one of my days in high school, and you’ll see just how much of my routine was being enforced externally.

My alarm went off every day at 6:20am, and my dad made sure I was out of bed by 6:30 before he went to work. He usually made steel cut oats and left some for me. My mom always made sure there was enough food in the house so I could make my own lunch. I let the chickens out before leaving for school.I went to school for six hours of short (50 mins) classes of 18-25 students, where my teachers knew me (and my parents) and where phones and laptops were strictly forbidden. Notes were taken on paper only and homework assignments were due the next class, and everything was graded. Agendas were given out at the beginning of each year and we were expected to use them every day. Parents would be notified if behavioral or performance issues arose.After school I went to cross country or track practice where the captains led us through warm ups and then the coach told us what sort of training we were doing that day. They often timed us and recorded our progress over the season/years.After practice I went home, where my mom was starting dinner, and I did my homework that I had to do if I didn’t want to get a 0 and have a parent-teacher conference. I ate dinner, did the dishes because that was my chore, put the chickens away, worked on more homework, and then by 9:30pm my mom would be berating me to go to bed. I didn’t have a smartphone or a computer so it wasn’t possible for me to lay in bed staring at a screen all night. On weekends I cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed the house because that was my job. Somewhere in there I also cleaned the chicken coop and attended to their food and water.Rinse and repeat.

If you look at that routine, you’ll see only two tasks that I truly did on my own: making my lunch and putting the chickens in/out. I didn’t want to go hungry at school, so I made myself food. And I frequently forgot to let the chickens out (and put them back in, but fortunately we had a solid run that kept predators out). Everything else that appears to be self-discipline was actually motivated by desire to avoid external punishment. And that punishment was very real to me because it was always immediate and harsh.Late for school? Detention. Phone in class? Confiscated, sometimes detention. Didn’t take notes/do the homework? 0s in class, parents notified, not allowed to participate in sports, absolutely grounded. Skipping practice? Not allowed to participate in meets, possibly kicked off the team, definitely in trouble with Mom and Dad. Don’t do chores? Time to get yelled at. Don’t take care of the chickens? They might die and then I’d be in huge trouble. Stay up too late? Yelled at.Everything I did was motivated not by desire to serve my own future, but desire to avoid immediate negative consequence. And I didn’t have hobbies for myself. I liked reading but I didn’t have much time for it. I didn’t play video games, surf social media, watch TV, go to the movies, or do anything purely for enjoyment’s sake.

When I went to college, all of that structure disappeared. I didn’t do a sport because I couldn’t compete at a Division I school (partially due to joint pain). My classes were large, long, and spaced out throughout the day, with weird breaks between them. Most professors didn’t care if we had phones or laptops, and often we actually needed them for class. Homeworks were due online, sometimes two weeks from when they were assigned. Grades were posted online. No warning for poor performance, no teacher giving me a talking to, no parent-teacher conference. Nobody told me when to do homework. Nobody told me when to eat (or to go grocery shopping). Nobody made sure I went to bed or got up in the morning. Nobody kept me from playing video games or scrolling social media all day.Nothing except my own desire to succeed held me accountable for managing my time and working hard in class, and like I said, I didn’t have that desire. People with ADHD don’t have that. Motivation and self-discipline stem primarily from aversion to negative long-term consequences, even more so than from desire to obtain positive outcomes. This is because negative emotion is felt more strongly and for a longer duration than positive emotion. It keeps neurotypical people on track. But people with ADHD lack the ability to “see” the long term consequences of not doing what we need to do, when it needs to be done. That’s why we are chronic procrastinators. We favor instant gratification over delayed gratification because we fail to integrate awareness of far-off consequences into our daily actions. In other words, people with ADHD struggle to orient their behavior towards their goals because it is difficult for our brains to recognize things in the future as real.

And so, because of all that stuff under the surface, I floundered and flailed. I didn’t know how to hold myself responsible and I didn’t know how to ask for help. And I was depressed. I was so depressed. And anxious. And losing weight because I wasn’t remembering to eat. And that made my body weak, it made my hands shake and it made my brain dull and foggy. I was being treated for depression and anxiety because nobody saw the other half of my history. The part where I crumbled the moment I had to hold myself up. It was missed entirely until I stumbled across information about rejection sensitive dysphoria, which is only experienced by people with ADHD, and I realized that rejection by my parents was what drove that fear of consequence that had been motivating me all my life. When I started looking at my history through the lens of inattentive ADHD, the picture became clear. It wasn’t laziness or depression that was stopping me, it was executive dysfunction.

So my point in all this is YES, it is 100% possible and is actually quite common for people with executive dysfunction to excel in structured academic environments. It’s especially normal for people whose ADHD is dominated by inattentive symptoms over hyperactive ones. One of the major reasons why many young women are not diagnosed until their late teens/early 20s is because they’re more often inattentive, not hyperactive, and so their executive dysfunction doesn’t become apparent until they enter an environment, such as university or a job, where they are expected to hold themselves entirely accountable for their own positive outcomes.

As for you personally, I can’t diagnose you. I can say that what you described is possibly a symptom of executive dysfunction, but I don’t know enough about you or your behavioral history to say whether or not you should consider seeking a professional opinion. If you are experiencing deficiencies in your self-discipline/motivation/memory/attention that are disrupting your quality of life, and if you can identify those as patterns throughout your life history, then you may have reason to see a psychologist. If your symptoms are confined to inconsequential/nonessential things like reading a book you’ve been wanting to read, I wouldn’t worry about it too much as I’m fairly certain that’s a normal experience for most neurotypical people.

Anyways thanks for coming to my TED talk, sorry for taking fifty million years to get to the point.