garden in the void

Pretty sure those last two are normal.

Also there’s no time specification — it isn’t the same when a friend doesn’t speak to you at all for 5 months or 3 years.

What makes these symptoms different in ADHD people is the severity. While a neurotypical person may experience these symptoms occasionally, an ADHD person will suffer them continuously to the point where it interferes with their ability to function.

It’s not that they sometimes forget they put things away, they’re always forgetting they put things away. 

They don’t sometimes lose touch with a friend, they continuously forget to check in and communicate with people who are not a part of their daily routines. Hell, half the time I forget I even have a brother because we barely ever see or talk to each other. (Even though I mean to talk to him but then, y’know, the procrastination…)

Thank you, @leviathangourmet for wording it in a way I was too tired to. This is what people don’t realize about the disorder and dysfunction part of ADHD. It’s chronic. It’s constant. It’s consistent. It’s every day. It’s all the time. Literally, it impedes every day life. It’s only normal within its own very particular parameters. It has no time specification, because time blindness, aka time agnosia, aka dysautochromia, is literally a symptom of ADHD. If a trait happens so often that it impacts your life and makes living difficult, it’s a problem.

Saying things like “oh, that’s normal, everyone does that, you’re not special” genuinely undermines, devalues, destabilizes, and minimizes actual experiences that aren’t necessarily fun. Don’t do that. Don’t claim something is ordinary and normal just because your experience is occasional. The point is that we are divergent, we are out of the ordinary, we are not part of everyone.

Maybe this is my autistic bluntness, but why do neurotypicals and allistics (ADHD is exempt) really think that “everyone does this” is reassuring?

The thing about ADHD is that the "lack of reward chemicals in your brain" doesn't just mean that you don't want to do any tasks that don't feel particularly yummy :(, it means that your brain will look at chores and tasks that need to be done like "doing this would be painful and tedious for absolutely nothing to gain from it, Do Not Do That." The same thing that your brain tells you about everything else that would feel really bad and hurt the entire time that you're dying. The part of your brain that stops you from doing the thing is the same part that keeps you from shoving your arm into a wood chipper.

With unmedicated, unmanaged ADHD, "I have to do this assignment or I fail and my life will be ruined and I die" feels like a SAW trap, every single time.

also i can't even do things i like

Do non adhd ppl just….not pace????

Like yall never hear pumped up music and get this feeling to walk???? HELLO????

uhh is this an adhd thing? i basically can’t speak passionately or listen to music without walking or pacing

guys it was an adhd thing

hey can we talk at some point about how having adhd makes you way more likely to be depressed because literally nothing you need to do to be a functioning adult gives you any happiness at all

like this is an actual statistical problem

“lol Arthur Conan Doyle clearly didn’t know anything about drugs. Sherlock Holmes did cocaine but it calmed him down. That’s not how cocaine works!”

There are two options: Arthur Conan Doyle had never met someone addicted to cocaine or he met some with ADHD who was addicted to cocaine

#you cannot convince me sherlock 'i don't see a use for this common knowledge i shall forget it immediately' holmes wasn't adhd as hell #sherlock 'if i have nothing to do for a day i will literally start shooting the walls out of boredom' holmes #sherlock 'i have built a perfect wax replica of myself - why? iunno' holmes

He specifically took drugs when he didn't have a case to occupy himself, that man was ADHD as fuck

ACD was a practicing doctor and ship's surgeon during the period where cocaine was routinely used as medicine and described by medical journals as "the blessed instrument of Christ," so not only is there exactly zero chance that he'd never met anyone addicted to cocaine, he also almost certainly administered cocaine to people.

It's also definitely not a stretch at all to say he'd probably met people who self-medicated with cocaine to deal with what we'd now call ADHD. Like, the second ever Sherlock Holmes story begins with Watson protesting Holmes' overuse of cocaine, and Holmes replying that he needs it to deal with his overactive brain -- it's entirely plausible that ACD had had that exact conversation with someone or multiple someones.

Like, the man had been a ship's surgeon. On a whaling ship. The number one place in Victorian times to find men who either couldn't get or couldn't hold down work elsewhere. He was almost certainly extremely familiar with a pretty broad spectrum of neurodivergence and self-medication thereof, even if medical science didn't yet have the terminology to apply to it.

Not only did ACD probably have this conversation with someone in real life, he clearly knew and understood how dangerous cocaine was.

At a time when cocaine was regularly administered by other doctors, Doyle wrote Watson to have a clear aversion and dislike of the drug and understood that it was bad for you. It’s written as a clear indication that Sherlock, despite all his brilliance and genius, is still a human being who can make very bad decisions for himself.

Not only that, but Watson does ultimately win and gets Sherlock off of his addition to cocaine in the end. It takes him a while, but Sherlock is weened off the drug and this is seen as a good thing for everyone involved. In fact in a later story Watson comes home and sees a needle and fears that Sherlock might’ve had a relapse (he didn’t, the needle was just being used for something else involving a case).

Doyle knew what he was doing. He wasn’t writing it as an endorsement or as an indication that Sherlock knew better than Watson. It’s made very clear in the books that Sherlock is highly limited in a lot of ways that Watson is not. Watson was a skilled physician and both he and ACD knew cocaine was not good for someone like Holmes.

Conan Doyle was hyperfixated on history and very mad his excited infodumping historical fiction didn't get the attention the Holmes stories did. He wrote bestselling serialized novels and short stories (that all tend to follow a specific structure) while full time practicing medicine, and by all accounts had a Holmes-like way of Noticing Fucking Everything.

He had a clear disdain for social convention while understanding deeply how to conform to it in order to survive; a lot of Holmes' deductions actually depend on assumptions about typical human behavior in a given situation rather than physical evidence alone. It's the kind of encyclopedic conscious knowledge of unwritten social rules you might develop in order to mask successfully.

He was almost certainly neurodivergent himself. There's a reason classic Holmes fans tend to be Like That. Game recognize game.

do you guys ever like forget you're interested in something until you start engaging with it again and you go "oh wait i'm like crazy crazy about this yeah"

In hindsight it's very insulting to be told that flunking out of college due to adhd is actually "quite common"

just like, if there's a history at your institution of disabled kids not being able to make it you realise that's your fault right. like why don't you fucking do something about it. i guess they tried to do something about it with me and it failed so they let me go. crazy. nice work. why should we try to do any better.

only 5% of people with adhd who go to college finish a degree. FUCKING. FIVE!!! PERCENT!!!!!!!!!!!

that should disgust and enrage you.

if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening

when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.

but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student

at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.

but this dean of students looked a disabled person right in the face and said well i guess you just can’t do it, short bus

Let me tell you a little something. Number one, this elitist, ablist shit is common, but entirely wrong. ADHD doesn't mean weak and stupid. It just means your mind works differently. And the spectrum of neurodiversity amongst humans is beautiful and should be celebrated, and has resulted in probably most of the innovations in history. We just need to do things a little differently, have a different pace, not be forced into "rat race" conformist modes. And really, those capitalist, neoliberalist notions are killing everyone and burning everyone else. Education should not be HAZING, ffs.

Secondly, I have AHDH, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and chronic health issues. I also have a PhD, a Masters degree, and a Bachelors.

It has not been easy and there were some dodgy periods of time. I nearly didn't make it across the stage at graduation. Story for another time. And back then, there were meds, which sometimes helped, but the idea of mitigations was far from being introduced yet. If educational institutions are serious about scholarship, learning, and innovation, and knowledge and real contributions to the world, and not being capitalist money machines and prestige factories, they need to take a long hard look at this shit and themselves. Because it is both students and staff that suffer.

But if you are ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent, you aren't a lost cause or a weakling who can't hack it. You are brilliant and significant and worthwhile, and, quite frankly, fuck anyone who says otherwise to you. Chances are they are privileged twats who had it far easier than anyone else. They are wrong. Keep your grit and determination, and don't listen to them. If you have a setback, that doesn't mean forever. Your life matters and so does your education.

holy SHIT

Ooo okay, I really wanted to know what the source of this was and it’s Additude magazine, a 2021 last-updated-in-2021 article here titled Why Anxiety Disorder Is So Often Misdiagnosed.

I know I vibed with this quote and saw others do so in the tags so I thought a source would be helpful.

In many ADHD people, anxiety also becomes the de-facto coping mechanism to compensate for forgetfulness, distractability, etc. It is obviously a mistake to diagnose and treat “anxiety” in a vacuum, because there is in fact nothing irrational about “I obsessively triple-check scheduled appointments and that I’ve set my alarm clock because I have missed important appointments in the past and it was disastrous”

A quick, sloppy little comic about Magritte

i have no idea who these characters are but damn does this ever resonate

Hi everyone,

I thought I would share some information about ADHD and emotions. I hope many of you find this helpful.

Hey. Hey you. The person aimlessly scrolling, stuck in an immobilized standoff with your brain

It's not your fault. You won't be stuck forever. I know you're trying. I know you hate it. It's ok.

And tell the Mean Voice in your head that it's not helping. It knows as well as you do that you would get up and Just Start the task if you could. You're not doing this on purpose.

Take a deep breath. Relax your jaw. I see you trying so hard to break out of it, but you can't force it. You'll get Unstuck eventually. All you can do in the interim is be kind to yourself.

more adhd things

adhd will have you fighting for your life to do beloved hobbies that bring you nothing but joy