It took me ages to realise this. People with ADHD are always portrayed as lazy but they don’t struggle with hard work, they struggle with boring work. Before I knew I had ADHD I always found I was getting in trouble for not finishing boring work so I always used to prioritise tasks by how much fun they were and start with the most boring. I just ended up getting nothing done.
Add the extra layer of my mother not appreciating my interests and thinking what I now do for a living was a waste of time… And a dash of expecting me to somehow just be able to perfectly do chores they never taught me how to do when I was young. Yes, this is the first time I’ve ever mopped a floor at 17 years old. How the fuck is that my fault?
Shit, sounds a lot like my mom. She always complained I never helped with chores, but she never asked or told me to do any. Worse, whenever I did anything, like washing the dishes, instead of saying “thanks”, she would tell me to stop because she’d do it.
As a child of Baby Boomers, they really never wanted an answer - they just wanted to complain about something. And they probably never wanted to be parents in the first place.
God, it sucks to be a child of parents that never wanted children
Like I get that it was the social expectation but c’mon, what the hell, you brought me into existence, and for what?
This so much.
Keep it up with these posts, if I share enough of them with my clearly very painfully obviously super adhd girlfriend I might eventually convince her to go see a therapist and seek a diagnosis someday
I hope she does. I don’t think I’m ADHD but my partner was just diagnosed a few months ago. Now that we think about it it’s not a surprise at all lol
It feels really nice to have more understanding and more context for both of us.
I think it will help too. She resists by saying “well what will it really change?” but it can and will change quite a lot if she understands how her brain works and can build some support structures to help with it. She really doesn’t want to be medicated either which I totally get.
My ADHD doctor told me:
“Medication tends to be Plan Z. We do everything we can with working with your lifestyle, your habits, your thought patterns, and then consider the lowest effective dose if we need to.” I liked that approach. I didn’t want medication either.
Understanding how you work differently than others expect is extremely powerful.
However, eventually after MUCH STRUGGLE… I’m taking a puny 5mg generic Adderall daily…and it makes the monkey-radio stop switching channels in my brain for a minute.
A lot of people describe it like getting glasses when they didn’t think they needed them. “Wait… you’re supposed to be able to see all those leaves from this far!!! WOW!”
I guess just make sure you’re seeing a psychologist first, because psychiatrists are basically all ’ bout 'dem pills lol.
Totally agree, and get that. I wouldn’t want medication necessarily either. You don’t have to medicate at all! In fact maybe just knowing and working with it would be a good first test.
It’s actually the normies who can’t even do laundry without a little neurotransmitter bottle from mommy frontal cortex. We fight demons every day.
"Your home is tidy because you anticipate getting a little dopamine reward for a job well done. (How cute)
My home is tidy through determination, anger, sheer force of will, to do the thing despite every fiber of my being desperately trying to pull me away from it. Knowing that it simply must be done has to suffice as its own reward.
We are not the same."
I’m getting a sort of buffer underrun when doing routine so I’ll always try and make trivial tasks or busywork faster, more efficient, or superfluous through process design. When I cannot do that, I’ll listen to music or podcasts, that helps somewhat.
The main drawback of this condition is that many employers think I simply “like to work” and bury me in even more busywork.The reward for being good at toil is more toil.
Signed,
The guy who was good at streamlining and ended up with 3-4 different jobs but only one salaryThat’s why I think it can suit us quite well to be self-employed, and get paid to do enough different challenging things to keep it interesting.
Your work directly translating into money is nice.
But also, huge asterisk there, because I found out my carefully honed 3D modeling skills aren’t worth “living money” unless you’re crazy good, and also the official stuff like licensing and taxes are totally those “pick up your socks boring tasks” that we put off at the last minute sooo…
I dunno, I can’t seem to decide whether it’s worth trying to find a job I can “leave at work” that doesn’t drive me crazy, or hustle to make my own venture viable. 🤔
I can’t stand the thought of selling myself every few years to job hop, let alone having to do it every day trying to monetize one of the few things left that I enjoy. When I was coming out of high school I entertained the thought of running my own PC/electronics repair business. It took maybe two months as a field service tech to put those thoughts away for good.
This is the ultimate lesson, especially if you’re in a for-profit venture. That is what I have learned from decades of working: Never do more work than the minimum that is expected from you.
It isn’t as bad if you work at an NGO or in public service of some type, because at least the fruits of your labor don’t go directly into the pockets of uber-wealthy CEOs. But if you’re in the private sector, fuck all that shit.
I did the opposite for the last part. I just went the “lazy” path of just doing hard things. As they were easy for me and rewarded more. If the hard things were rewarded less, why bother in the first place?
So I got based by teachers as “not precise enough” because they could clearly see I totally understood what the exercise wanted me to do, I just didn’t do “the easy part” of writing it properly.
I don’t have a diagnosis yet but this is extremely relatable to me and I hope it gets better when I get one
The only thing a diagnosis changes is external proof that you have ADHD. If that will help you then yes it will get better.
Personally I stopped taking ADHD meds. They changed me into a different person and I’d rather learn to live with myself.
I think it would help me feel more sure because I have some absolute proof that I’m making all of this up, although I have heard some people saying that they still have imposter sydrome. Also I hope that meds help me stay focused without tooo many side effects
I hope so too!
I got diagnosed a year ago lmao
Did it get better or just the same shit as before
On ritalin (adrerall is not allowed here) yeah it goes away.
I feel fucking seen by this post
It rings right to my core
Same, feels very uncomfortable to confront personally. Ooof size: collosal.