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?
It isn’t fun.
Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.
We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.
It gets old, man.
It’s comments like this that make me think I don’t have ADHD and I’m just a bit slow.
My therapist says I’m likely ADHD and I align with a lot in this thread, but this description is about 1000% more dramatic than my day to day life. I guess it’s all a spectrum, but I’ve never felt like I’m living in a fog, I’m very very aware of all of the things I’m fucking up, but my mind doesn’t tell my body it’s worth fixing yet.
I never “forget” to finish a task, I remember that task needs to get done every 5 mins after I leave it not finished and it pains me to look at it every time I walk by it. But there are more important things to do. Like scrolling Lemmy or IG.
Your third paragraph is describing executive dysfunction, a symptom of ADHD.
Seriously, neither you nor your therapist knows unless you get assessed by a qualified psychologist with experience doing this. Everyone has some characteristics of ADHD (to put it like that) because ADHD is just exaggeration/minimization/mistargeting of functions everyone has. Whether your pattern fits the disorder can be difficult to know without a good assessment.
Damn dude 100% very well put
I had a nervous breakdown in university, where I had gotten a huge, highly selective merit scholarship under strict performance conditions. I had thrived - relatively speaking - in a traditional classroom, because it was so structured. I murdered tests because it was quiet, structured, and distraction free. Homework was hit or more frequently miss, I struggled socially, and although clearly not malicious my teachers gently noted that my classroom behavior could be a challenge “to the other students’ learning”, but I was brilliant enough at tests and classwork and highly motivated by my toxic dysfunctional house to get out that I had successfully gotten my golden ticket.
University, where you had to set and enforce your own structure? I couldn’t cope. I got a lot of flack on “you never learned to study”, “you just don’t know how to do really hard things, now that it isn’t easy for you”. I missed deadlines for administrative work, I forgot assignments, I struggled to remember the instructions to follow them.
I remember a day just before I hit that wall - I was in the study cubicles in the library, trying to work on some critical midterms for a challenging course. I only had the cubicle rental for a set amount of time and needed to meet my long-suffering roommate for a ride home at a given time - they were also very busy and I was not helping their life by being late to everything constantly. I checked the time to see how much longer I had and went back to writing, but realized I hadn’t actually internalized the time so I checked again. Within 10 seconds I couldn’t remember how long I had again, so I checked again - tried really hard to remember! Said it out loud, was shushed by my cube neighbor. Looked up at them - forgot time. Checked again, pen to paper to write it down - I had forgotten already.
Frustrated as hell, I got up to get a drink at the water fountain, hoping the walk and the water would “clear my head”. At this point I had forgotten I even needed to check the time. I sat back down at my cubicle, picked up my pen to start writing for this midterm, began brainstorming – I was at the water fountain again, although I didn’t remember choosing to go or any of the not-short walk there. Puzzled but not surprised, I thought “I must have been thirstier than I knew”, and made sure to get a BIG drink this time. Walked back to the cubicle. Pick up pen. “Focus”. Deep breath. Consider the themes of –
I am back at the water fountain. Hand to heaven I did not choose to be here. I do not NEED to be here. I am not thirsty. I return back to my cube without getting a drink because “I am not rewarding myself for wasting time”.
I walk back to the wrong cubicle because I have forgotten the cubicle number I rented.
I end up back at the water fountain trying to remember my cubicle by retracing my steps - it’s not like I haven’t walked that path half a dozen times today already, how did I just now forget??
I get another drink. I finally make it back to my cubicle. I start working on the midterm again, but in the-reading the prompt sheet realize I have not been working on the prompt I actually signed up for this whole time - not that I have written even a paragraph yet. Frustrated to tears after years of this constantly and feeling like a failure, my phone buzzes angrily - somehow during all of this NOTHING, 4 hours came and went, and I am now late to meet my roommate, who is threatening to leave without me.
When I finally finish the paper, it is submitted by my professor for a “best paper of the semester” award and places second.
2 months later, seeing the campus psychiatrist after my mental breakdown due to “overwhelming anxiety”, he listens to me for 45 minutes. He promises we will talk about the anxiety, which is very real and distressing, but also maybe I should consider this other thing. He takes a paper from his filing cabinet, folds over the top so I can’t see what the title is, and presents me with a questionnaire asking me to rate myself from one to five on every moral failing that has ever disappointed and frustrated me and everyone who claims to love me. I am sobbing within 5 questions – there is a name for this?? This is treatable?? I’m not just a lazy failure?? No, I have no idea what the title of this questionnaire would be.
“Adult ADHD Assessment”.
Most people, it turns out, DON’T have a childhood nickname of “space cadet” or “nutty professor”, can finish a sentence in a linear fashion, can sit relatively still, don’t interrupt their psychiatrist 5 times in 20 minutes, and can remember what they have and have not discussed in a 45 minute time window. It also turns out that being a high achiever in a strict scholarship program as a member of the honors college in a challenging major at a prestigious university with “the WORST case of ADHD I have ever seen” is not super easy, although I can’t imagine why.
Within days I am on my first day of Adderall, although I am told not to expect much at this dose. I almost forget to take it, but my roommate forcefully reminds me as we drive, and I never remembered to take the prescription out of my bag so I still have it. I walk the 15 minutes from the lot to the library.
As I pass the student union building next to the library, I realize something absolutely insane - I know where I am right now, and I remember getting here. Not that I remember every leaf or face I passed, but it isn’t like the water fountain where I only know that I went somewhere because I am now there. Despite having the same routine every day of walking to the library to rent my cubicle first thing, I often “overshoot” and accidentally walk past it and head to the buildings for my major without getting my rental and storing my bag, usually only remembering where I am and what I’m doing once I go to open the door of my first class and see that it isn’t my class in there yet - I’m supposed to be studying in the library for a few hours more.
But not on Adderall - on 10 whole mg of Adderall I successfully went right where I was supposed to be on purpose at the right time and I remembered doing it, and it was so unfamiliar an experience that I cried on a bench in the quad about it.
Mine isn’t this bad, but I can relate to the first-day-on-Adderall thing. It was wild when I walked into my messy bathroom an hour after that first dose and my brain just went: “It is possible, even reasonable for you to clean this bathroom, in a finite amount of time, without every moment filling you with dread. This task will not consume your whole
lifeday.” My brain had simply never done that before. I could just choose to do something and–perhaps more importantly–to stop doing something. I remember I washyperfixatingworking on a hobby project at 11 PM on a work night and my brain went: “If you stop working now, brush your teeth and go to bed, this fun project will still be here for you to work on tomorrow. You don’t have to keep at it until 6 AM and then go to work without sleeping.” That seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. It was weird to hear that from my own brain, not in a “you’re being bad” way, but in a “it’s going to be okay” way. There was a lot of happy crying those first few weeks.Just wish I’d been diagnosed in college instead of in my mid-30s. I might have graduated.
People like to throw around the word ‘lazy’ but it’s more like I can’t turn it on OR off unless I’m medicated. Once I’m in the zone I will work until I grow a beard, then wither away, then my crumbling skeleton grows a beard. It would be a powerful thing if I could aim it.
jesus fuck these comments can i try it? … I want to see if adderall is right for me. Can this waitinglist for a doctor hurry the hell up
I will spend ten times as long beating myself up about not doing the thing than it would take to just do the thing, which should make it crystal fucking clear that if I could just do the thing, I would fucking just do the thing.
And then, if I DO do the thing, I will spend twenty times as long as it took to do the thing afterwards replaying in my head exactly how I did the thing and beat myself up over every little imperfection.
Sometimes I have to really hold myself back from editing messages that are perfectly fine because I feel like I’m being too random and thus need to explain myself and add context
And this is while medicated, too.
Hello me. Be kind to yourself
10 times as long beating yourself up? How about at least 35 times at a minimum? Had to fix a little bit of text in some presentation slides for a class, I had from December 24 until January 6th to do it, and I kept beating myself up for not doing it until the night between January 5 to January 6, where I did it all in one sitting, taking me about 6 hours to do it all, and I could have done it even sooner than December 24, all the way back to the beginning of December, but I procrastinated it as well… Fucking hate how I cannot get myself to work on shit until the last fucking minute
wow, this sounds like my regular day. Maybe I have that same thing ?
the problems sound similar to “what everyone has” but they arent the same
Yes everyone struggles motivating themselves to do chores but it’s not the same when you have adhd.
Yes everyone has trouble concentrating during a boring lecture/lesson but its not the same when you have adhd.
Yes everyone has the urge to buy stuff they don’t need, but its not the same when you have adhd.
so it’s those but more of them
It’s those but so bad it’s a disability. Like how just because most people don’t hear something from time to time doesn’t mean they’re all hard of hearing
not necessarily more, but more intense. Like it’s borderline physically painful sometimes to force myself to do something. It feels like I’m being very cruel to myself for no good reason, its just a dishwasher after all
people who have never been depressed tend to think that depression is just laziness
YoU jUsT nEeD sOmE fReSh AiR
Yeah it’s always „why don’t you just…“ or „why can’t you „
yeah there are only two reasons why someone doesn’t do something and it’s because they can’t or the don’t wanna. If they want to do something but don’t it’s because they can’t and some pedestrian advice like “Just think how much nicer it will feel after you’re done” is not gonna help.
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 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.
How fucking hard it is to remember daily and recurring tasks. Taking meds, brushing teeth, checking email, cleaning up, cooking, laundry, on top of stuff related to work.
Another one is that we are blind. Unless I expect to see it, I cannot see it. I literally dont see clutter. Only when I force myself to think about what I’m staring at do I realize there is a bunch of crap on a table. Its really easy for my room to get messy because of this. Because it hardly exists for me.
Hey, it’s me! Have you tried one of those weekly medicine pill dividers? I did. I think I filled it once, then went back to my daily routine of forgetting my meds. ADHD fucking blows.
Anxiety over missing my meds keeps me (mostly) on track, I do however forget to request refills until the last bloody moment though, love how the process for ADHD treatment is so anti ADHD…
Yep. Same thing happened with me.
Living on my own I was really good about any mess I made in an instant being dealt with immediately. Dishes would not pile up, etc. Any problem with a longer accumulation time might as well be there forever though, dust bunnies can have eternal lifespans.
I didn’t find it so bad, but a switch to living with someone who just does occasional cleaning can throw your living space into chaos. The tiny psychological difference between “making a new mess” and “contributing to an existing mess” has way too much impact on what tasks will get addressed, and it’s difficult as all hell to break free from that.
Unless I expect to see it, I cannot see it.
I don’t know if it’s a gift or a curse, but around my house, I’m the only one who can find anything - but it’s not because I scan the room and see it, but because at some point in the past, I happened to notice, and I just remember where nearly everything is, whether I want to or not. I guess it’s my coping mechanism.
We I have the fun combination with (undiagnosed) autism and t Which one had primary control at any time is a scrap shoot.
Even medicated I can not see the clutter… Until it’s all I can see and I start AuDHD cleaning.
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.
If you do get into hyperfocus on something you need to like work or a project or whatever, someone or something breaking you out of it is incredibly frustrating. Like not because what ever the interruption is isn’t important, but because hyperfocus is difficult to get into on something important, so hard to switch focus from, and there is an almost painful obsessive need to have completed where doing.
Edit: accidentally hut submit too soon… Typos
Executive dysfunction is damn near disabling when I’m not medicated. I struggle with it & decision paralysis even when medicated. It’s an unfortunate issue that I’m unsure I’ll ever work through.
**It’s more like things about neurotypicals: **
- They don’t have an iron will; actually, their willpower is often much weaker. But their frontal lobe rewards even little things such as clearing the dishwasher right when it is done with little dopamine shots, which they crave and and seek out, almost involuntarily.
- When they face a task, they don’t break it down into little steps with superior conscious intellect. They see the goal, e. g. a tidy kitchen, and their frontal lobe breaks it down and tells them what the next tiny step is to get a dopamine fix. They are not overwhelmed with all the little things that need to be done and what could go wrong, e. g. that wiping a surface could fail when it turns out that the cleaner is in the bathroom or there is still dishes on it.
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.
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).
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
To stop juging by looking: it’s not because i have a neutral expression that i am not enjoying the moment, it’s not because i am silent that i am not listening to you and it’s not because i don’t talk to you that i don’t care about you.
Also, people often forget how hard it is for people with ADHD to make a coherent structure when writing a long essay or doing a presentation.
Sometimes, i know i have work to do, i know i have a project i’m doing, but i just can’t. It can look like i’m lazy, but even i am desesperate in moments like theses. I can understand why people don’t get that.
My 10 year old has ADHD, and threads like this have helped my understanding. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
What does my daughter need from me, her Dad? She has an understanding pediatrician and a good therapist. My wife and I have given her freedom to choose how she organizes her day within reason. She has never done poorly in school and has impressive interest in art and science. We’ve been fortunate to have flexible school teachers most years. The kid has developed coping skills of her own, but I can still tell that brushing her teeth or getting in the shower or getting started on her homework are monumental struggles every. single. time. I don’t doubt that she will be fine in the long term, but I would love any advice on how to help day to day life to be a little less exhausting for her while still helping her learn how to function independently.
What are things people have said or done for you that helped you feel seen and loved?
I’ve never had any support from others into managing my adhd so I can’t say what helps for sure, but I can shed some light into it so you can try to find a way to help.
. 1. It’s very hard for us to associate work and reward unless the reward is immediate. If you tell your kid “if you clean your room we can do X this weekend”, they’ll want to clean their room, but their “body” will still see it as a pointless chore.
. 2. “out of sight, out of mind”. Imagine that people’s brains are like an internet browser, with different stuff being in different tabs. For a NT person, there are a few tabs open with the stuff that they are doing that day and anything that is not relevant at the moment is saved on bookmarks to be retrieved at another time. The active tab is the thoughts that are currently going on in the head. For someone with ADHD, this browser would not have bookmarks and in turn it keeps the tabs open forever. As an effect of that, we can no longer manually switch between tabs. Once we switch to a different tab, the old one is lost and the only way to access it again is “clicking on a link to the same page”. But we are so used to switching tabs all the time that everything loads instantly already.
Let me try to give practical examples of what I mean with this:
Say you live on the second floor of a building and you need to take the stairs to get home. Going up you notice the first step of the stairs is broken and need repairs. You make a note of it and continues going up. Thats a thought for the “stairs” tab that is currently active. You go into your house and notice your pet’s food bowl. The browser now switches to the “feed pet” tab, which makes you realize you haven’t done it that day yet. Anything about the stairs is now completely wiped from your head, as if you had never even thought about it. You go feed your pet and on the way you notice a pile of dirty clothes to wash. Your brain now switches to laundry tab and you forget anything about the pet. You start the laundry and go back to your living room, see the pet’s food bowl again and goes “oh yeah I need to feed it” - this puts the pet tab back into your head. This time you carry the bowl with you so it keeps that tab active and you can complete the task. At night you’re watching some show, commercial break hits and an ad shows someone going up some stairs so you go “fuck, the stairs” but it’s night now and you can’t do anything about it. Your wife comes in and asks what are you watching. You have no idea because you’re on the “stairs” tab now. Commercial break ends, you see one character and that puts you back on the show tab, so you instantly remember the name and the whole plot.
If you expect someone with ADHD to do something, there’s only a few ways they’ll actually do it:
- there’s immediate consequences for doing/not doing it.
- there’s something constantly reminding them they need to do it.
- they dedicate their whole day into not forgetting to do it.
That third one is what we’ve come to call “waiting mode”. It’s what we do when we have an appointment at a specific time of the day for example. We hold on to that “tab” so hard to ensure we don’t lose it, that we basically become unable to do anything else until that is done. When we’re in waiting mode, simply looking at a clock will switch the active tab back to that appointment and make us lose track of whatever else we were trying to do. Everybody eventually develops this skill (sacrificing their whole day so they don’t forget their appointment) after missing too many things - so don’t expect your kid to be able to remember to do things on their own.
. 3. Living like this is tiring. Feeling like we have no control over where our own thoughts go. It’s like there are bees inside our head constantly buzzing buzzing. And then at one point you find something that makes the bees sleep. Playing videogames, drawing, solving some logic puzzles - what it is changes for everyone, but your kid will find hobbies that will make the buzzing stop. Such a hobby will give great relief, on top of anything else a hobby gives us. But when the bees are sleeping, we are “frozen” into that tab - if left to our own devices we’ll often forget to eat, sleep and everything else. Initially you’ll have to ensure your kid doesn’t get stuck on their hobby alone. Do remember though that everytime you take your kid off of their hobby, you’re waking up the bees in their head. You may notice that their immediate reaction to it might be to be very annoyed. You’ll both have to learn to manage it, but what I recommend is trying to keep interruptions to a minimum. If the kid needs to do things, try to get them to do them all at once so they can have more ininterrupted time too. If you wake the bees every 10 minutes, it can be infuriating.
. 4. Any relief that we get from doing rewarding things or from “putting the bees to sleep” are also contained to that “tab”. If your kid spends a whole afternoon resting they’ll feel rested during that afternoon, but as soon as you ask them to do some chore, it’s as if they hadn’t rested at all. Imagine like you had a clone of yourself and you have your clone do everything you don’t like doing. It’s kinda like that, but instead of being two different beings, your kid is switching between being the one that only rests and the one that only works. Doing the same chores every day feels more and more annoying every time we do it.
. 5. Kinda repeating one of my previous posts, but anything that is stashed away somewhere will eventually be forgotten. Things that are kept in plain sight will naturally see more use. Things may end up being suddenly forgotten too. For example if the kid is learning to play guitar and they practice every day for months, then one day they don’t and it goes on for six weeks before they even remember they were learning the guitar, at which point the habit is completely broken. Habits in general are harder to form and once formed, we still need to put effort into keeping it or it may just vanish.
I could still write a lot more, but I should get going now, writing this made the bees sleep and I forgot to go to work.
Waking up the bees is exactly what happens. If any other advice comes to mind this is gold.
It’s very different for everybody, but here are things that would apply to SOME:
- She might reject “must do now” orders. Instead of saying “Start your homework now and do it until it is finished”, change both the start and duration to something manageable. “Hey, you are home! Just relax for 20 minutes, and 5 minutes before dinner starts, get everything for your homework ready on your desk.” Starting the actual homework is far less overwhelming, then. And instead of “… until it’s done”, make a deal like: “You only have to do 12 minutes of the task, but with a challenge: 12 minutes of maximum efficiency and performance!”. When it is about cleaning the room, also provide a clear unit of work, such as a time constraint (with stopwatch, never wing it!), or toys only, dirty laundry only, a well-defined section only.
- She might already be the willpower equivalent of a body builder, because she has to do with force of will what other people have done for them, be it the frontal lobe breaking down a task, or handing out dopamine rewards that she does not get. When she starts a task such as homework, she has to face the whole tree of little steps and what could go wrong: Find the backpack, alternative plan for when the math book is not in it, the notebook has half a page left, so she will have to stop in the middle to find the new one (where is it?), …
- When she is on a productive obsession, such as reading, an instrument, an area of knowledge, let it run its course undisturbed. There might be phases in which everything feels like too much, so these phases are invaluable. Much of her skillset might come from intense obsessions rather than continuous habits.
- Focus on finding a starting point to an overwhelming task, such as point 1: Get the homework ready and in place, then do something else. It might trigger a thing where she WANTS to start immediately, and otherwise, the start will be so much easier.
- Allow her to skip homework when it is too much and write a note for the teacher. E. g. got back home sick, doctor visit on the afternoon, exhausted and unable to finish homework, but did a start. When necessary.
Thank you. Suggesting to just do the prep for homework is genius.
Yeah, when my chore ask is, just do 10% of it, then take a break, and it’s really not an argument then.
What are things people have said or done for you that helped you feel seen and loved?
So I can’t give much on the coping mechanisms - she’ll have to figure her own flavor of ADHD and coping mechanisms out, likely by trial and error.
But things that make me feel seen and loved / things that made me feel small and worthless, I can talk about.
My parents actually knew I had ADHD - turns out I got diagnosed as a kid and they did fuck all about it and never mentioned it - and figured the best thing for me was “tough love”. I was routinely punished for things they made very clear to me as an adult that they knew were symptoms, and I was acutely aware of just how inconvenient and difficult I was for everyone else in my life. They figured if they let me “deal with the consequences of my own actions”, I’d “learn”, but all that did was make me feel miserable, worthless, alone, and anxious.
My husband couldn’t be more different about it. ADHD is insanely frustrating - for no one more acutely than the sufferer. You spend most of your life actively fighting yourself about everything from brushing your teeth to doing your own hobbies. He is incredible about not making it about him, and making it really, REALLY clear that he doesn’t love me less because of the ADHD and he couldn’t possibly love me more without it. He helps me constantly and without fanfare - I joke he can read my mind because often by the time I get “now where did I put my–” out of my mouth he is placing my missing phone/keys/headphones/water bottle into my hand (it turns out phones don’t go on top of the laundry hamper and your wife in the other room will likely want that soon).
While it is clear that my ADHD is our common enemy, it isn’t because he feels like it picks fights with him - it is because he chooses to fight it alongside me because it makes me miserable and therefore has chosen violence. He is willing to sit quietly next to me when I need a little more structure, brain storm strategies and priorities for busy weekends, listen to me talk about things he doesn’t understand while I sort out my thoughts, never makes me the butt of jokes, and has some incredible problem solving skills when all I remember is that I put something “away” and it isn’t actually “AWAY-away” (recent example - I lost my headphones for days, and I could remember I had been sitting at my desk, specifically rolled them up, and put them “away” in that desk, but they weren’t there. Or in any other drawer, or under the desk, or my nightstand drawer, or my backpack, or any pockets, or purse – he walked to my desk, turned 180 degrees and a few feet back to the infrequently used sewing table behind me, opened the “equivalent” drawer, and behold!! Headphones. “I knew it!! It’s the same wood as your desk!!” Besides my ADHD apparently, who thinks like that??).
Some of this is implicit, a lot of it is explicit - he reminds me frequently that he’s not upset with me, asks how he can help, and jumps in immediately. For me, the most important part of all of it is his attitude - he doesn’t make a big deal out of it, he stays positive, he’s reassuring, he’s involved, and he’s never resentful. For me, we are confident that short of some medical breakthrough I will never really be as functional or happy independently as I can be with someone else providing external support, structure, and executive function, but he’s verbally and cheerfully told me he’s ready to be my Tactical Support Husband for the rest of my life.
I make his favorite desserts a lot.
Feeling this very hard. It took me a few decades to find a partner like that. Very happy you have one.
Kids with ADHD often have days and weeks and months and years in which almost every interaction with a parent or teacher is mostly negative. It doesn’t take long for this conditioning to make kids feel bad about themselves–e.g., see themselves as stupid and lazy–and feel bad about the parents and teachers. They often become secretive or otherwise avoid the people they’ve had thousands of bad experiences with.
If there’s any way to shift that balance, it will be powerful for your daughter and for your relationship with her later. Sometimes this means just letting go of certain things. Sometimes it means letting her get away with stuff. If she has siblings, it probably means looking like you’re treating your kids unfairly. Sometimes it might mean reaching out with love and kindness when there seems to be no chance that will be received well. You can potentially be one of the best things in her life, but the path of least resistance–and the path that “normal” parenting leads to–is a world where you are an agent of unpleasantness or punishment for her more often than of happiness and comfort.
As she grows up she will learn lots of things adults need to know; some quickly, some very slowly. She’ll need help at a lot of points, and if you can be a person she asks for help, her life will be better. When she’s 20 or 30 she’ll be independent and living a life, no matter what your parenting style was. At that point, the relationship she has with you depends a lot on her accumulated memory and gut-level conditioning from years of being around you.
I’m choking up as I write this because I have a daughter and I know I’m not a perfect dad. I want very much to have a good relationship with her as she grows up, and I know I don’t always make that easy. It’s a huge challenge. I say this because what I wrote sounds really preachy; I’m preaching to myself as much as to anyone else.
The hardest years are still ahead of you. I have ADHD and was undiagnosed until junior year of high school. I was doing amazing in school until things started getting hard enough that I couldn’t just rely on my current knowledge and had to actually study. Make sure she develops strong study/organizational habits now before she gets into high school, because that’s when things can really start to fall apart. It sounds like you are already doing a great job, and more than my parents did at that age, so you might have far less of an issue.
No, you don’t have ADHD just because you get bored sometimes.
dont like that approach since mental illnesses are typically underdiagnosed rather than overdiagnosed. If someone says they have adhd they do until proven otherwise.
It’s undiagnosed because you don’t have it. Mental health is an extremely complex thing that only somebody with the right qualifications should comment on.
wow thats hostile, fuck you too buddy
I thought I was hostile until proven otherwise?
go fuck yourself you piece of shit,
a) I am officially diagnosed dont know why you assumed I wasnt
b) not everyone has equal access to healthcare and might have no choice other than to self-diagnose and medicate any range of illnesses
c) there are systemic issues like e.g. racism, sexism (sexism is double the issue in mental health than it is in physical) paired with the superiority complex of some doctors constantly leads to psychiatrists dismissing and downplaying their struggles and not diagnosing or writing prescriptions a patient needs.
but glad you keyboard warriors who never had to deal with this shit got it all figured out
“a) I am officially diagnosed dont know why you assumed I wasnt”
Do you need to be officially diagnosed? You’ve made it very clear you have the power of Google and YouTube on your side.
“b) not everyone has equal access to healthcare and might have no choice other than to self-diagnose and medicate any range of illnesses”
If you could diagnose yourself you wouldn’t need any of those things.
“c) there are systemic issues like e.g. racism, sexism (sexism is double the issue in mental health than it is in physical) paired with the superiority complex of some doctors constantly leads to psychiatrists dismissing and downplaying their struggles and not diagnosing or writing prescriptions a patient needs.”
Oh, so now I see. You don’t even need doctors because they’re racist or something because they didn’t give you the diagnosis Google said you had.
Do you need to be officially diagnosed?
Helps with access to medication
If you could diagnose yourself you wouldn’t need any of those things.
In a perfect world everyone would have access to what they need, until then a lot of people will have to make do with what they got and if its not a licensed doctor then google will have to do.
Oh, so now I see. You don’t even need doctors because they’re racist or something because they didn’t give you the diagnosis Google said you had.
They did. I am officially diagnosed by a licensed psychiatrist with ADD and I get prescription medication for it. Still don’t know why you assume I am not. Yet still there a lot of doctors which are racist, sexist, transphobic and mis- or underdiagnose because of their biases. A white wealthy male doctor might have difficulty relating to a black poor woman and not understand the issue they’re facing. On top of systemic racism, for instance it’s well documented that, especially in psychiatry, a lot of the research is centered around USian college students, because those are the easiest test subjects to find, which makes the research rather biased.
And there are a lot of people that don’t even get to see a doctor due to poor health coverage who have to make do with what they find online.
What an absolute cold-blooded dismissal of other people life-altering struggles.
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.
