#my adhd lyfe
- I don’t even remember putting that thing down but now it’s not in my hand and I don’t know where it went
- ‘what do you mean you can just think about nothing? what’s that like? I don’t understand’
- *tuning out of a conversation halfway through somebody else’s sentence because I just thought of something interesting*
- carrying my psychiatrist’s business card with me at all times because I see her once a month and every time I go I forget what floor her office is on. I’ve been there 8 times
- ‘Between A & B, A would be the right thing to do’ *a cascading thought process that takes a few seconds tops, justifying option B* ‘actually B would be the right thing to do’
- somebody else, later: why did you think B was the right thing to do??
- me: …. it’s not important, I’ll know better next time
- (spoiler: I won’t know better next time)
- I know you already told me this thing like 12 times but can you tell me again just one more time because I forgot
- it’s not that I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to do this thing. it’s just that in that particular moment i thought it was okay to do it anyway for reasons that would take 48 minutes to explain even though it only took me 3 seconds to justify it in my thoughts, so it’s easier for me to just say ‘I forgot’
- ‘I already told you that’ ‘really? I must have forgotten, i’m sorry’ ‘it was FIVE MINUTES AGO. in this SAME CONVERSATION’
- this internal conversation:
- me: I feel motivated to do this responsible thing
- me: if I don’t do this responsible thing right now I will get distracted and forget to do it for another 5 hours
- me: so I should do this thing right this second, there is nothing stopping me
- me: after I finish this one cell phone game
- me, 5 hours later: I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN
- almost flunking a class because I straight up didn’t know any homework had been assigned despite loving the class and always attending
- trusting the memory of literally anyone else over my own memory
- intending to do something for days. sometimes months. never doing it
- *cuddling somebody* mm this is nice … *2 seconds later* bored now
- somebody is mad at me. I might as well fucking d i e
- the options in company are: overshare about the one thing I care about or not talk at all
- insensitive or inattentive? YOU decide (and when you tell me that i hurt your feelings and I didn’t notice I’ll rejection sensitive dysphoria into fantasies of disappearing forever)
- being excellent at my job for months on end, doing everything right and everything well, and then suddenly & without explanation being t h e w o r s t at it for several weeks, making dumb mistakes everywhere for no discernible reason
- when asked to explain something: well it all started when I was a baby
- ‘they don’t need that much explanation’ well YOU tell ME where to start b/c I have no fucking clue tbh
- i can’t throw away anything b/c when I look at it I remember all the sentimental reasons I keep it around and they seem just as important as actually needing it and when I close the storage box back up I forget I had it in the first place until the next time I try to get rid of my clutter and repeat this process
- i wasnt’ idle for a second all day and yet I didn’t accomplish a n y t h i n g
- am i a speed-reader or was I so impatient for what came next that I read only half a page and then skipped to the next one?
- getting excited about a project, starting it, then racing to finish it as fast as I can because when I get bored I’ll abandon it and never go back. must beat the boredom
- edit my fics? working twice on the same idea? /uproarious laughter
- well I fucked that up. too bad I can never rework it because I no longer have passionate energy for it
- me, opening a bottle of adhd meds: I don’t have adhd. I’m just a lazy bum who doesn’t try hard enough
I’ve seen so many people reblog this with ‘I don’t have ADHD but I relate to all of this’ and I just wanted to add:
this list is mostly about inattention, overthinking things, and failure to follow through.
at its heart, adhd is theinability to pick what your attention is locked onto, sometimes combined with a need to move constantly (hyperactivity). This manifests as:
- lively internal life + rapid thought & intuitive leaps of cognition - good when being creative, bad when trying to make a logical decision
- overthinking things
- impulsive behavior
- short attention span + being easily distracted
- unnaturally long attention span + inability to notice outside stimuli
- short term memory dysfunction
- executive dysfunction
- no sense of priority (everything is equally important)
- no sense of time in relation to self (cannot effectively tell how long an activity will take or develop a sense of urgency based on a deadline until the deadline is perilously close or already passed)
- failure to follow through (leaving work incomplete)
- forgetting to remember/remembering tasks at inappropriate times
- intrusive thoughts
And pretty much everyone experiences one or all of these things at times, and these symptoms can spring from other causes than ADHD (for instance, executive dysfunction accompanies depression and anxiety as well).
But adhd people have this happen so constantly and so intrusively that we cannot complete basic tasks, even if we want to:
- The only thing consistent about us is inconsistent results: sometimes we’re on time, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re reliable, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re studious, sometimes we’re not … (and trust me we’re not enjoying it any more than you are)
- We fail classes, we drop out of college, we lose jobs, and no matter how much we try, we cannot fix it.
- We can’t just remove distractions - our brains are a distraction.
- We can’t just ‘try harder’ - our wayward mind might be focusing on our studying today, but tomorrow it might not. The same effort level will have wildly different results on different days because our attention cooperated … or didn’t.
- it is literally impossible for us to choose our focus. pretty much ever.
Another common tag? ‘I wanted to read all of this but I couldn’t’. that’s adhd.
So this list is pretty relateable, even if you don’t have adhd. But if this happens to you to the point that you’re getting in trouble at school or your job and you’re pissing off your friends? might be worth looking into what’s going on with you.
honestly the worst thing of all is getting 97% of the way through a project and then my brain decides ‘this is an acceptable percentage of done for me to move on’ and then that last 3% nags me for the rest of eternity but I can’t seem to ever find time to go back to fix it or it’s already too late to bother
shoutout to the adhd people who did well in school for years but suddenly crashed and burned when the responsibilities outweighed their coping skills
shoutout to the adhd people who couldn’t finish college
shoutout to the adhd people who do great work but lose their jobs because of poor time managment
shoutout to the adhd people who don’t lose their jobs but can never advance because of their inconsistent performance
shoutout to the adhd people who want more work responsibilities but are afraid of what will happen when they inevitably make a careless mistake or their inattention leads something important to be forgotten
shoutout to the adhd people who have damaged their credit rating by forgetting to pay bills or return library books
shoutout to the adhd people who work their ass off every day but never know if the results will be stellar, average, or terrible
shoutout to the adhd people who have done just well enough to go most of their lives knowing something was wrong, but figuring they just needed to work harder to fix it.
the saddest tags:
#mmm #ive been wondering for a while but #was dismissed so i guess not
so was I. Growing up it never occurred to anyone, including me, that I could have ADHD because it was thought of as an overdiagnosed ‘disorder’ for hyperactive boys who couldn’t stay still in class, who probably needed extra recess more than Ritalin. I was a good student - until I wasn’t (in high school, where the workload was too much). And I’m great at my job - until I’m not (inconsistency is the most consistent thing about ADHD people).
The first thing that tipped me off that maybe I have it was a post about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which described my anxiety spirals better than anxiety did. complete depression triggered by a negative perception and clearing up the second the negative perception is gone? that was me! And it’s primarily - if not only - found in ADHD people. But when I told my therapist (who I was seeing for anxiety) about it, she was discouraging and doubtful.
I’m looking for a way to get a full evaluation. I’ve gone through an interview and testing, and the prognosis was ‘likely has ADHD-PI’, and the meds are immensely helpful. But I had to skip directly to going to a psychiatry office that specializes in ADHD treatment to even get this far.
ADHD is frequently misdiagnosed as anxiety, depression, and other disorders - which can themselves accompany ADHD. when the hyperactivity is absent, it masks effectively. And you can fit ALL the symptoms of it and still not be diagnosed with ADHD because your symptoms aren’t considered to be causing you enough distress, or frequent enough to rise to the level of a disorder. But if you think you have it, do research, and if you still think you have it, it’s worth pushing for a full evaluation.
You will be dismissed by even mental health professionals. People outside your head will doubt you a lot, because you probably have coping mechanisms that prevent you from being the mess that outsiders imaging ADHD people to be. But if you think that being treated for struggling to focus your attention where you want to focus it will help you, keep pushing. get that full evaluation. Find out for sure. and then you can be certain you’re getting treated for the right thing!
shoutout to the adhd people who did well in school for years but suddenly crashed and burned when the responsibilities outweighed their coping skills
shoutout to the adhd people who couldn’t finish college
shoutout to the adhd people who do great work but lose their jobs because of poor time managment
shoutout to the adhd people who don’t lose their jobs but can never advance because of their inconsistent performance
shoutout to the adhd people who want more work responsibilities but are afraid of what will happen when they inevitably make a careless mistake or their inattention leads something important to be forgotten
shoutout to the adhd people who have damaged their credit rating by forgetting to pay bills or return library books
shoutout to the adhd people who work their ass off every day but never know if the results will be stellar, average, or terrible
shoutout to the adhd people who have done just well enough to go most of their lives knowing something was wrong, but figuring they just needed to work harder to fix it.
this one is a little more serious I guess
- i am at my job and I want to work. there’s plenty to do, and I want to do it. some things bore me but others are fun once I get started. so why am i refreshing twitter for the 50th time instead
- i’m not even enjoying twitter but I can’t s t o p
- *getting distracted from a conversation in the middle of my own sentence because my brain took a few quantum leaps and now I’m thinking about space*
- ‘… I don’t remember where I was going with this’ I admit after 3 tangential stories and a complete topic change
- everything is equally important but it’s physically impossible for me to do everything so my brain decides on its own what stuff to dump from the memory as unimportant. things my brain has decided is not important:
- paying my student loans off. for seven years
- going to a court date. now i’m not legal to drive for the foreseeable future
- invalidation hell: ‘all millennials have adult adhd’ ‘it’s a quarter-life crisis thing to get diagnosed with adhd’ *all google results about adhd meds are primarily about drug abuse* ‘sell me your extras? lol’ ‘you’re way too organized to be adhd’ ‘isn’t that only a boy thing?’ ‘isn’t that only a kid thing?’ ‘whatever it’s just overdiagnosed’
- an unusual story: I was an excellent student. I loved school. I loved learning. I did all my homework; I thought it was fun. I had a hard time doing long-term projects but I hardly had any of those in elementary and middle school. if I had attention problems i was more than smart enough to cover up for those.
- in 8th grade I got A’s in every class in every quarter. A B+ in Civics threatened that my second quarter. It was because I had forgotten to turn in my community service form and subsequently lost it. my teacher relented when I cried, trusting I had done it because I was such a good student.
- i got into a competitive magnet high school. we were the best of the best. the school, afraid of how we would handle competition, didn’t offer any special recognition for excellence. at the same time, my parents divorced. Worst of all, I found fandom.
- adhd experts call it a ‘breaking point’ or ‘tipping point’ - the point at which an adhd-er can’t cope anymore and it all falls apart all at once. for me, the first breaking point was high school, with the competing interests of fandom and classwork.
- college: a largely unstructured learning environment that requires self-discipline and time management skills
- my adhd brain: *nervous laughter* haha what the fuck
- me: *withdraws after 4 years with 45 completed credit-hours*
- *gets a text* I better leave that unread so I remember to reply when I have time for a text conversation, or the conversation will distract me from what I’m doing now *never actually responds to the text, stops noticing the ‘unread’ icon after 48 hours
- don’t do that *immediately does it anyway*
- why did I do that
- the idea that I should
- (I forgot what I was writing in the above bullet point)
- that low-key feeling of dread I get when somebody wants me to watch a video or listen to a song b/c the thought of giving something I may not enjoy my undivided attention for longer than 15 seconds is awful
- something gotta bounce. a leg, a toe, a finger, something g o t t a b o u n c e
- anxiety before meetings b/c what if I forgot something I was supposed to do. anxiety before phone conversations b/c what if I say something and don’t pick up on the social cues that tell me not to. anxiety w/friends b/c if I do something shitty they’ll be too nice to tell me and then eventually they’ll just leave b/c I always do something dumb and awkward b/c evidently I just don’t even notice when I’m being an ass. anxiety because it’s happened so many times before and it’s not even like I can blame them because I’m the one who’s an oblivious jerk
- someone is mad at me and I wanna die. no really, here’s some ways I could do it, I think it would be better if I just– *gets a text from said friend forgiving me* the world is sunshine and rainbows!!
- ‘okay I wanna reach this goal’ does nothing but work on the goal for the next two weeks* *the second the goal is reached the project/game/etc is abandoned and never thought about again
- the idea of having no distractions is amazing but what do you do when the distraction is your own brain
- I don’t even remember putting that thing down but now it’s not in my hand and I don’t know where it went
- ‘what do you mean you can just think about nothing? what’s that like? I don’t understand’
- *tuning out of a conversation halfway through somebody else’s sentence because I just thought of something interesting*
- carrying my psychiatrist’s business card with me at all times because I see her once a month and every time I go I forget what floor her office is on. I’ve been there 8 times
- ‘Between A & B, A would be the right thing to do’ *a cascading thought process that takes a few seconds tops, justifying option B* ‘actually B would be the right thing to do’
- somebody else, later: why did you think B was the right thing to do??
- me: …. it’s not important, I’ll know better next time
- (spoiler: I won’t know better next time)
- I know you already told me this thing like 12 times but can you tell me again just one more time because I forgot
- it’s not that I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to do this thing. it’s just that in that particular moment i thought it was okay to do it anyway for reasons that would take 48 minutes to explain even though it only took me 3 seconds to justify it in my thoughts, so it’s easier for me to just say ‘I forgot’
- ‘I already told you that’ ‘really? I must have forgotten, i’m sorry’ ‘it was FIVE MINUTES AGO. in this SAME CONVERSATION’
- this internal conversation:
- me: I feel motivated to do this responsible thing
- me: if I don’t do this responsible thing right now I will get distracted and forget to do it for another 5 hours
- me: so I should do this thing right this second, there is nothing stopping me
- me: after I finish this one cell phone game
- me, 5 hours later: I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN
- almost flunking a class because I straight up didn’t know any homework had been assigned despite loving the class and always attending
- trusting the memory of literally anyone else over my own memory
- intending to do something for days. sometimes months. never doing it
- *cuddling somebody* mm this is nice … *2 seconds later* bored now
- somebody is mad at me. I might as well fucking d i e
- the options in company are: overshare about the one thing I care about or not talk at all
- insensitive or inattentive? YOU decide (and when you tell me that i hurt your feelings and I didn’t notice I’ll rejection sensitive dysphoria into fantasies of disappearing forever)
- being excellent at my job for months on end, doing everything right and everything well, and then suddenly & without explanation being t h e w o r s t at it for several weeks, making dumb mistakes everywhere for no discernible reason
- when asked to explain something: well it all started when I was a baby
- ‘they don’t need that much explanation’ well YOU tell ME where to start b/c I have no fucking clue tbh
- i can’t throw away anything b/c when I look at it I remember all the sentimental reasons I keep it around and they seem just as important as actually needing it and when I close the storage box back up I forget I had it in the first place until the next time I try to get rid of my clutter and repeat this process
- i wasnt’ idle for a second all day and yet I didn’t accomplish a n y t h i n g
- am i a speed-reader or was I so impatient for what came next that I read only half a page and then skipped to the next one?
- getting excited about a project, starting it, then racing to finish it as fast as I can because when I get bored I’ll abandon it and never go back. must beat the boredom
- edit my fics? working twice on the same idea? /uproarious laughter
- well I fucked that up. too bad I can never rework it because I no longer have passionate energy for it
- me, opening a bottle of adhd meds: I don’t have adhd. I’m just a lazy bum who doesn’t try hard enough
- less than an hour after posting this I forgot my keys in the mailbox because I was distracted by looking at the mail I had just gotten and trying to figure out how to haul those and my groceries upstairs and if that doesn’t sum it up i don’t know what does
- THIS HAPPENED WHILE ON A DOSE OF ADHD MEDS
- I don’t even remember putting that thing down but now it’s not in my hand and I don’t know where it went
- ‘what do you mean you can just think about nothing? what’s that like? I don’t understand’
- *tuning out of a conversation halfway through somebody else’s sentence because I just thought of something interesting*
- carrying my psychiatrist’s business card with me at all times because I see her once a month and every time I go I forget what floor her office is on. I’ve been there 8 times
- ‘Between A & B, A would be the right thing to do’ *a cascading thought process that takes a few seconds tops, justifying option B* ‘actually B would be the right thing to do’
- somebody else, later: why did you think B was the right thing to do??
- me: …. it’s not important, I’ll know better next time
- (spoiler: I won’t know better next time)
- I know you already told me this thing like 12 times but can you tell me again just one more time because I forgot
- it’s not that I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to do this thing. it’s just that in that particular moment i thought it was okay to do it anyway for reasons that would take 48 minutes to explain even though it only took me 3 seconds to justify it in my thoughts, so it’s easier for me to just say ‘I forgot’
- ‘I already told you that’ ‘really? I must have forgotten, i’m sorry’ ‘it was FIVE MINUTES AGO. in this SAME CONVERSATION’
- this internal conversation:
- me: I feel motivated to do this responsible thing
- me: if I don’t do this responsible thing right now I will get distracted and forget to do it for another 5 hours
- me: so I should do this thing right this second, there is nothing stopping me
- me: after I finish this one cell phone game
- me, 5 hours later: I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN
- almost flunking a class because I straight up didn’t know any homework had been assigned despite loving the class and always attending
- trusting the memory of literally anyone else over my own memory
- intending to do something for days. sometimes months. never doing it
- *cuddling somebody* mm this is nice … *2 seconds later* bored now
- somebody is mad at me. I might as well fucking d i e
- the options in company are: overshare about the one thing I care about or not talk at all
- insensitive or inattentive? YOU decide (and when you tell me that i hurt your feelings and I didn’t notice I’ll rejection sensitive dysphoria into fantasies of disappearing forever)
- being excellent at my job for months on end, doing everything right and everything well, and then suddenly & without explanation being t h e w o r s t at it for several weeks, making dumb mistakes everywhere for no discernible reason
- when asked to explain something: well it all started when I was a baby
- ‘they don’t need that much explanation’ well YOU tell ME where to start b/c I have no fucking clue tbh
- i can’t throw away anything b/c when I look at it I remember all the sentimental reasons I keep it around and they seem just as important as actually needing it and when I close the storage box back up I forget I had it in the first place until the next time I try to get rid of my clutter and repeat this process
- i wasnt’ idle for a second all day and yet I didn’t accomplish a n y t h i n g
- am i a speed-reader or was I so impatient for what came next that I read only half a page and then skipped to the next one?
- getting excited about a project, starting it, then racing to finish it as fast as I can because when I get bored I’ll abandon it and never go back. must beat the boredom
- edit my fics? working twice on the same idea? /uproarious laughter
- well I fucked that up. too bad I can never rework it because I no longer have passionate energy for it
- me, opening a bottle of adhd meds: I don’t have adhd. I’m just a lazy bum who doesn’t try hard enough
(the majority of this post is pulled from an older reblog I did on my main, @vantasticmess.)
it’s ADHD Awareness Month so here’s a post about it. :D
I’ve gotten sooo many ‘#not adhd but man i feel this’ tags on adhd posts i’ve made, and tbh tags of this type drive me nuts (b/c they make me doubt the validity of my diagnosis.)
but if you, a not-adhd person, see a post about adhd experiences and relate to it, please consider the following:
- maybe you do have adhd?
- maybe it’s because most things that adhd people experience are things that most everyone experiences sometimes, only they experience it all the time.
at its heart, adhd is theinability to pick what your attention is locked onto, sometimes combined with a need to move constantly (hyperactivity). This manifests as:
- lively internal life + rapid thought & intuitive leaps of cognition - good when being creative, bad when trying to make a logical decision
- overthinking things
- impulsive behavior
- short attention span + being easily distracted
- unnaturally long attention span + inability to notice outside stimuli
- short term memory dysfunction
- executive dysfunction
- no sense of priority (everything is equally important)
- no sense of time in relation to self (cannot effectively tell how long an activity will take or develop a sense of urgency based on a deadline until the deadline is perilously close or already passed)
- failure to follow through (leaving work incomplete)
- forgetting to remember/remembering tasks at inappropriate times
- intrusive thoughts
And pretty much everyone experiences one or all of these things at times, and these symptoms can spring from other causes than ADHD (for instance, executive dysfunction accompanies depression and anxiety as well).
But adhd people have this happen so constantlyandso intrusively that we cannot complete basic tasks, even if we want to:
- The only thing consistent about us is inconsistent results: sometimes we’re on time, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re reliable, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re studious, sometimes we’re not … (and trust me we’re not enjoying it any more than you are)
- We fail classes, we drop out of college, we lose jobs, and no matter how much we try, we cannot fix it.
- We can’t just remove distractions - our brains are a distraction.
- We can’t just ‘try harder’ - our wayward mind might be focusing on our studying today, but tomorrow it might not. The same effort level will have wildly different results on different days because our attention cooperated … or didn’t.
- it is literally impossible for us to choose our focus. pretty much ever.
it pisses off our friends, it pisses off our bosses, it pisses off our family, and it even pisses off ourselves. it affects every part of our life.
So adhd shitposts can be pretty relateable, even if you don’t have adhd. But if this list sounds familiar - if the contents of it happen to you to the point that you’re getting in trouble at school or your job and you’re pissing off your friends? might be worth looking into what’s going on with you.
- it’s 2:20 pm. you blink. it’s 2:20:01 pm. you blink. it’s 2:20:02 pm. you blink. it’s 2:20:03 pm. you blink. it’s 4:36 pm
- the next chapter of your textbook is 5 pages long. when you turn the page, it’s exactly the same as the page before it. you read it anyway, and turn the page. it’s exactly the same as the page before it. you can’t remember what you read on the page before this one. you still have 5 pages left in the chapter.
- you are told to highlight the important parts. you highlight the important parts. when you look back, everything is highlighted.
- you leave for class ten minutes late and get there ten minutes late. you leave for class 30 minutes early and you get to class ten minutes late. you leave for class on time and get to class ten minutes late.
- the professor says your research paper can be about any subject. ‘any subject,’ he repeats. he meets your gaze, his pupils swallowing the iris and whites of his eyes. ‘any subject,’ he drawls. the floor cracks open at his feet and you can hear the buzzing of millions of flies from the crevice. ‘you have all semester to finish,’ he adds. ‘no check-ins.’ the crack in the floor extends under your chair. the flies swarm up under you. ‘good luck,’ the professor says. the buzzing fills your head and blurs your vision.
- the professor is talking about something you learned last year. you pull out your phone to play a cell phone game until she gets to something new. when you look up, she’s handing out the final exam. you check the date on your phone. the semester has ended. you remember nothing.
