Random lesser known facts in no particular order:
- You really have to say my name out loud before you start talking out of the blue otherwhise I won’t hear to the whole sentence.
- Don’t break my hyperfocus unless dinner’s ready or the house is burning down. Everything else can wait.
- Dating is either the greatest thing in life or your worst nightmare. More often the second one. No way to know beforehand.
- You learn to condition yourself like a dog trainer, with treats and diversion.
- I wasn’t finished talking, I was pausing.
- No I won’t sing the whole song, just a part of the chorus or the intrumental riff. Yes, over and over for hours maybe. I know, I’m sorry.
Edit: Also, for the parents of children with ADHD get an adult with ADHD and make them interact with your child. You’ll learn more from 10 minutes of that than years of literally anything else.
I wasn’t finished talking. I was pausing
This. My boyfriend also has ADHD so our conversations are a nightmare for this exact reason.
This is somewhat related, but i have literally never met a single ADHD adult who wasn’t the chillest person ever. I suspect that a lifetime of learning to go easy on ourselves and set reasonable expectations for ourselves transfers pretty well to being patient and kind with others.
Ah shit. I need to learn this.
It’s an important skill, and I don’t think the NTs value it enough.
I think ADHD often does to us sort of what some other conditions do to others: beats us down. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve learned from millions of experiences not to bother with certain things. At the same time, many adults I know with ADHD are much more anxious, especially in social or work situations, than they appear.
No I’m not trolling you, I literally do not remember what you asked me to do. I don’t care if you asked me 30 seconds ago; I legitimately forgot and I apologize for that.
Yes I know, I should just knock it out now before I forget again, but my low dopamine levels won’t let me. No I’m not just being lazy; you might as well ask me to move a mountain. That’s just how difficult is for me to complete the most basic of chores. It is completely out of my control, and no amount of Adderall will fix it.
The wife and I have this argument all the time and it drives me crazy.
How do I upvote a million times?
That me starting work at 2 am is not my choice, it’s my brain’s choice
At least that point in time exists.
It is hard when your brain decides to start work at √-1am
Aye.
It’s really tiring to just exist inside your own head.
I’ve described it before as a box filled with a bunch of bouncy balls just bouncing off on every direction, off the walls, ceiling and floor, all the time. Every one of those balls is a thought, it’s really hard to hold onto just one, it’s hard to keep one once you’ve caught it.
When I’m resting usually I just put in some youtube video/TV show/audio book and play some mindless game for a while. On the outside it looks like it just played solitaire for 3 hours straight, but on the inside I’m just trying to follow one line of thought while keeping the rest of my brain occupied and quiet for a second.
I also don’t like that I’m not doing the things I should be doing. Yes, I absolutely do see that those things need to be done, no I don’t think someone else is going to do them. Yes, I wish I would just get up and get it done too.
Perhaps this is some sort of internalised ableism but I used to have this internal dialogue where I’d reflect on how difficult it was to do “boring” things and a straw man NT person would sarcastically imply that “it must be nice” to have an excuse to get out of “boring” tasks.
Um, fucking no. If you think about it for like two seconds, you realise how much of being a happy, independent and healthy adult relies on being able to complete tasks that aren’t immediately captivating. Those tasks still need doing, I don’t want someone else to do them for me. You’re left with either waiting on when the ‘inspiration’ strikes you, having to improvise some game or arbitrary reward structure just to clean two dishes or you just rawdog your way through the task and you feel every second of the boredom and come out the other side feeling worse than when you started because no satisfaction from completing the task can pay-back the effort you put into completing it.
That’s why ADHD adults burn-out. Without medication, every day you end with a ‘motivation deficit’ where no satisfaction from completing tasks can cover the costs of the determination and focus one spent to start those tasks. Eventually you just ‘default’ and you can’t do anything any more.
Stimulants to me feel like a small loan on every task. It’s a fine balance but they actually let me come out of tasks semi-regularly with more energy/motivation than I started. And when you have a surplus, productivity begets productivity.
Hello me, that was very succinct. I don’t get how so often they say “oh, everyone dislikes doing x, you just do it” ah, see that’s the problem right there
What is that medication ? you just described my daily experience, I wonder if maybe I’m suffering from the same exact thing. I knew everybody didn’t struggle like I do
Elvanse (Vyvanse in some parts of the world).
It isn’t just “struggling to focus.” The same way that depression isn’t just “being sad” and anxiety disorder isn’t just “getting nervous.”
When my ADHD is at its worst, I literally become almost illiterate. As in, I read a single sentence, and by the time I finish the last few words, I have completely forgotten the rest of the sentence.
I have to read that sentence 4-6 times over and over before I actually comprehend what the meaning is. The words are being sounded out in my head, but my brain doesn’t store them in short term memory, and certainly not into long term memory.
My brain is too busy processing random other things to dedicate enough attention to the thing I am trying to read. And I’m not taking about Shakespeare or Tolstoy, I’m talking about trying to read a basic email from my manager.
Imagine the feeling you had when you were in school struggling with your toughest subject. Maybe it was math, maybe chemistry, whatever. Remember what it was like when you were focusing as hard as you could to solve a problem on an exam or a homework assignment. Remember that feeling of mental exhaustion? Where it felt like your head actually hurt, you were physically tired from how hard you were focusing? Maybe for the next hour, perhaps even the rest of the day, you couldn’t think hard about anything else?
Well that’s how I feel doing the majority of trivial tasks I have to do all the time. Getting dressed, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting my work bag together, remembering to cash a check or pick up a few groceries. Working out, texting back a friend, responding to emails, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, etc.
I start the day mentally exhausted and foggy, and I end the day even more so. And most of the things that nuro-typical folks do without hardly a thought, I have to expend final calculus 3 exam effort to do.
The most frustrating part? Sometimes, seemingly at random, my brain will just kick into gear and I will be able to focus on something for hours without any effort at all. I can’t seem to cause it to happen, I don’t know where it comes from. But on those rare days, I am a god. It actually makes me depressed, because I always think, “if I could be like this just 25% of the time, I would be unstoppable.”
The most frustrating part? Sometimes, seemingly at random, my brain will just kick into gear and I will be able to focus on something for hours without any effort at all. I can’t seem to cause it to happen, I don’t know where it comes from.
I reorganized my grandfather’s entire tool shed in 5 hours but the chlotes in my room are still on the ground… this sucks
Yep! And I can’t direct it either, which is also super frustrating. If I’m productive, it’s always in a direction my brain wants to go, not where I actually need to be productive.
I remember one time I was hosting a party trying to read the rules for Werewolf, but had to delegate the task to someone else because I couldn’t focus on the words. I ended up just slipping out making a joke about having to take my lithium, so I could take my next dose early without being distracted and losing my Strattera pill
Oh yes, I know that experience well. I’ve had to excuse myself to discretely take another pill many times.
A reverse question is actually quite interesting as well:
People without ADHD, but who know others with ADHD: what are the common misconceptions about “being normal”?
Uhh why you hijacking the discussion, go make a new post…
I don’t think this question in itself will attract enough people to be worth posting, which is why I put it here under a related post.
There’s no attempt to hijack anything, I must assure you
… That’s your reasoning?! Good God dude
I’ll begin to get a conversation going
Note: ADHD is very real and very hard on people who have it. This is not my talking point.
I know two people with diagnosed ADHD, and as with many disorders, it is common that people expect others without it to be completely lacking, or, this case, have only mild experiences of a similar kind.
Regular people absolutely get most of the common experiences of an ADHD individual: they can quickly get overwhelmed, struggle with motivation to do some basic everyday things and then get hyperfocused on something and forget the rest completely, can have impulses they don’t control. They, too, manage to develop a lot of tricks for maintaining motivation and going through the everyday issues.
What matters for diagnosis is the severity of these events and how often they occur. With ADHD, all those events happen so often that it gets impossible or strikingly hard to pursue what you need without using techniques/medication to manage your behavior.
This is why many regular people may not understand or not accept ADHD as something valid and why it may not help to list to them the kind of limitations you have - they have all the same experiences, it’s just that they are less common and severe, and so they manage to force through them while you may get overwhelmed.
A more helpful approach could probably be to come from the fact it’s a real diagnosis, and outlining just what it means exactly to have ADHD, to talk about the severity of the episodes and how they are not only experienced by you personally, but also described in the medical literature. This still probably won’t change the mind of some bigots, but it might help other people to understand it better.
Hope there is some insight in here.
I’m so sorry that bigotry is normal for you
Huh?
Ignoring ADHD is bad, I’m only talking about why people without it are sometimes inclined to behave this way and what could be done to break their arguments.
Maybe I misunderstood the question
That they have it
It’s your brain. Advice like “think of what could you have done differently” or “slow down and consider the consequences,” etc. does not help in the least, because the part of your brain that does the thinking and the considering and the slowing down is the part that has the problem.
When there are no more spoons, you need to just go to bed.
What? I wash and reuse cutlery indefinitely
Not those spoons, spoons.
I know those but how would they ever run out?
Thriving on chaos.
Feeling the calmest when in a tempest.
This one exactly, while every normal person loses their mind in s stressful situation, adhd people can be calm and collected.
That it is not some magic fucking “gift”. The hyper focus isn’t a super power. It sucks, and gets in the way in all the wrong places, bills, school, career. I would trade places with anyone who doesn’t have it becuase it plain fucking sucks.
Hyper focus is a real problem for me. I don’t even realize I’m hungry or that my bladder is full until I’m feeling nauseous or light headed. What feels like 15 minutes is actually hours.
At the same time, if I don’t complete a project from start to finish in one sitting, it’s nearly impossible to restart.
I don’t get basic things done like laundry or remembering to make appointments because I’m stuck on one task. Sometimes I’m afraid to do things I love because I can’t just do it for 20 minutes. Especially video games. I want to relax after work and play but I know I can’t let myself or I might not eat that evening.
That we aren’t content with our “laziness”. I hate being “lazy,” but people seem to think being lazy is a conscious choice. Another big one related to “laziness” is the fact that laziness is just the tip of the iceberg, it changes how you think, act, perceive things etc. in a way neurotypicals just can’t comprehend.
