You guys have a "train of thought"? Like, it's on rails and shit? Going straight ahead into a predestined destination?

I've got a roomba of thought. It can move straight ahead but as soon as it bumps into something, it'll turn around and start moving into a brand new, completely random direction.

@thebibliosphere

Spinning ineffectively in circles, wearing a hole in the rug, and beeping in distress when I inevitably roll over something I’m not supposed to and all my gears grind to a halt.

ah no i have a train of thought like this

each thought has another thought affectionately tailgaiting it but what direction the whole party is heading is anyone’s guess, like probably the watering hole? but we might end up in a safari tour parking lot eating the box lunches out of the cooler, who knows

inevitably, by the time everyone gets to the watering hole, we’re like “wait where’s angus??” and the whole train has to turn around and go back for angus, who got distracted by a bug, and is now up a tree somehow

angus why are you like this

irresponsible adhd top tip #???

sleep with the curtains open because you can turn off six hundred alarms but you can't turn off the sun without effort

irresponsible adhd top tip #??? + 1

once, a guy in my dorms came back from a hazing for a sport that you wouldn't think is the kind to do hazing. he was bloodied, crying, throwing up, and he had to be carried by two older students.

the conceit of the hazing was― they got the freshers drunk, and told them all that the person who ran hardest at the wall would avoid the hazing.

staring at a task, willing yourself to do it, is like running at that wall as hard as you can. it is, by design, not going to work. you will get bodily fluids on your sheep onesie.

you have a mind that lends itself perfectly to switching between tasks. let it wander. let it return in time, fresh and ready. if you keep running at that wall, you will get nothing in return but guilt and a headache.

irresponsible adhd top tip #??? + 2

with adhd, the easiest way to make a goal feel impossible is telling yourself you will do x thing every day from now on no matter what.

good news: this also works for obsessive habits you want to break. nothing makes you want to procrastinate on using social media more than giving yourself a specific goal about how to use it.

you could tell yourself to post 10 times or like thirty posts or use x feature every day or something. maube set a timer, and force yourself to not leave the app until 20 minutes have passed. you will be desperate to do anything else after that.

the negative brain patterns you have programmed into the 'i must do this' categories in your life can be hacked into the things you want to stop doing. you have that power. you've learned the techniques already, now you can apply them to the things you want to use them on

irresponsible adhd top tip #??? + 3

sleep clothes aren't mandatory and getting changed in the morning can delay the day by hours. before you go to bed, just change into the clothes you would usually spend the day in. you can always change again once you're up and about and it feels less herculean a task.

irresponsible adhd tip #??? +4

you want to do a thing? you need to do a thing? reverse psychology yourself:

do it for exactly thirty seconds and then force yourself to walk away.

your brain won't like that very much.

OP why did you imply that with effort I CAN turn off the sun

We know where it is and we know what it's made of. Anyone who knows those things about me could kill me

Bruh this coffee I bought is so good I'm so fuckin alert rn I could probably do a math problem

I don't know

listen you can say “capitalism makes living with adhd/autism really difficult and in a non-capitalist society these things would not be so hard and neurodivergent people would thrive better” without saying “adhd/autism are the biproduct of capitalism and everything you think is a symptom is really just being unable to cope with capitalism” like…… don’t erase neurodivergence and pretend it’s just a social phenomenon. 

saying “actually neurodivergence is just made up by a social structure i oppose” is not as progressive as you think it is

I’ve tried to explain this SO many times.

my adhd and disability combined leave me functioning somewhat outside of capitalism. that is, i can’t work, I’m fully dependent.

without the stress of daily functioning within a capitalistic structure (i spend a most of my time doing whatever the hell i want,) i still suffer the effects of my adhd A Lot.

my adhd causes insomnia, and my lack of sleep severely impacts my mental and physical health. i have rsd, which severely impacts my social life. i have executive dysfunction, which even without work and schedules, makes my life absolute hell, by impairing my ability to feed myself, keep my spaces clean, and generally take care of myself to an extent that without outside care, i would be extremely unhealthy. none of these things are the product of capitalism. the impacts exist outside of capitalism.

in a perfect, leftist world, i would struggle the exact same amount to sleep, eat, have a social life, and be healthy.

to believe my adhd is a product of capitalism is either accusing my symptoms of being made up, or severely underestimating the scope of the effects.

treating adhd like it’s just an impairment to productivity is a capitalistic misrepresentation, and has no business in leftist arguments.

This tracks with my family history with neurodivergence: they married someone who could fill in the gaps, kept extremely simple lives or stayed together as siblings carrying eachother and still had the occasional “bad stretches” despite it. We have to accept that even in a utopia we won’t all be productive little worker bees and reject the mindset that an individual must be “contributing” for their life to have worth. There are plenty of people right now considered high worth, high earners, “productive citizens” who are leaving a negative footprint on the world and wounding the people around them and we never question their right to life and yet we still look at the disabled like parasites, even amongst disabled people, the mindset runs deep. Leftism has to value life, all life with no strings attached, or it’s just the same ol elitist shite repackaged.

This is why I get meal kits. Do I need them? No. Can I easily make them myself? For way cheaper? Yes. WILL I??? No.

Other tips: if you are going to buy things that aren’t pre-taxed, you need to make a habit of always doing the prep AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME. it will NEVER HAPPEN if you don’t.

Get the bulk pack of steaks! But you are never gonna eat them before they go bad. If you freeze them in individual ziplocks as soon as you unpack you probably will?

Get the celery, but you need to cut it ALL UP and store it in the fridge in water or it will rot.

And don’t do all tgese at once, get like, one or two prep things a trip. You aren’t gonna get it started if it’s a huge task.

people who think adhd is fake are so fucking funny like can you imagine if i was like this on purpose

Dealing With Executive Dysfunction - A Masterpost

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.

This.

This is why people who stay in my life are neurodiverse like me!

Huh

this!! I swear I lost like all my friendships bc of this, like I had a group of friends in hs that one day I realized "huh I haven't talked to this people in a while" and popped in to say hi and they were all awkward?? because they hadn't seen me in a while?? and that's when I realized that friendship works different for them?? I was like yeah I haven't talked to you in like four months but it's not like I've forgotten about y'all why would anything change, and they were all like we haven't talked to you in four months why are you here again acting like nothing happened? and it was really confusing for me

YEAH! THAT!

Also I have a thing where I just put the people on pause. If I don’t see them or contact them, my brain kinda put them in stasis. I don’t think about them nor misses them, and I stay on what I last knew about them (how they look, what they study/work). So when we meet again I’m like “wait, you’ve aged?” and I have the same familiarity with them thanI had before.

Anyway all my mutuals I haven't messaged in forever - this is why

i didn’t even know this was a thing i thought all my old friends just didn’t care anymore because they didn’t like me specifically. this feels a lot more validating, though i guess it doesn’t change the end result

Oh. Oh, wow. This explains so much.

adhd is having super amplified introspection yet zero self-awareness or decision making skills. i literally never stop overthinking absolutely everything but if you ask me how i am? i dont know. am i enjoying myself? i dont know. my opinion? i dont know. my favorite? i dont know. am i lying? i dont know. do i want this? i dont know. trust my gut feeling? it changes every second. which of these is better? i cant breathe. just pick one? eating glass would hurt less

adhd just makes your really bad at capitalism, unfortunately

like bro i am just floating in a bubble detached from the flow of time and you want me to work 8 hour shifts?

I am built to sit up from sundown to sunup with minimal food and less light watching for intruders or little animals that I can kill. That requires very little of what would actually be called work and a whole lot of just zoning out because my eyes and ears are naturally attuned to picking up and focusing on changes to the environment. I am not built for the 9 to 5 office world, Janet. Unless your job requires me to persistence hunt Mark for sport.

having one of those executive function days where everything is too many steps

by which i mean, like, here's how my brain parses the steps in making coffee

good day:

regular day:

bad day:

anyway this is a "14 steps to make coffee" kind of day

This is exactly what executive dysfunction feels like

Just saw a spicy hot take in the notes of an ADHD post that was like “adhd isn’t a mood disorder stop making excuses” from a supposed fellow ADHD person and like yes, ADHD is not exclusively a mood disorder. It’s 4 of them hiding under a trench coat with 15 other neurological disorders. And also:

ID, a screen grab from an article that reads: About 70 percent of adults with ADHD report problems with emotional dysregulation, going up to 80 percent in children with ADHD. In clinical terms, these problem areas include:

-Irritability: issues with anger dysregulation – “tantrum” episodes as well as chronic or generally negative feelings in between episodes.

-Lability: frequent, reactive mood changes during the day.

-Recognition: the ability to accurately recognize other people’s feelings. Individuals with ADHD may tend to not notice other people’s emotions until pointed out.

-Affective intensity: felt intensity – how strongly an emotion is experienced. People with ADHD tend to feel emotions very intensely.

-Emotional dysregulation: global difficulty adapting emotional intensity or state to situation.

/end ID. (Source)

Like not to be wildly and irrationally peeved about this, but bully for you if you don’t experience this as part of your ADHD, but over 70% of us do and saying we’re making excuses or not trying hard enough is the exact same shit neurotypicals say to invalidate us, and causes us real harm. Please don’t do the same thing. Trauma inflicted by neurotypicals is a huge part of why living with ADHD is so difficult. We don’t need it from within our own community too.

We all experience this shit show disorder differently. It’s a spectrum of one size fits no one, not a cookie cutter mold to fit into.

And yeah, you know what, this shit isn’t an excuse to behave badly, but you know what, knowing emotional dysregulation is a symptom of ADHD helps you to treat it and work on getting a handle on it. Knowing the reason it feels like the world is ending in your chest because something bad happened, and knowing it’s because your gremlin brain is perpetually starved for dopamine so there’s no cushion for the raw emotional feedback currently happening can help you, with practice, to curb the impulsive desire to do something rash or harmful.

I mean, fuck, there’s a reason for why suicide is so prevalent in ADHD, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that impulsivity and severe emotional dysregulation is a part of that.

Knowing that the feeling will end and isn’t an accurate reflection of the situation, overwhelmingly painful as it is in the moment, can help. It does help. So denying this aspect as part of ADHD? Not helpful, and you need to take some time to sit with your thoughts and see why you want to distance yourself so much from this to the point of invalidating others.

Ppl without ADHD be like “oh if I get rid of all possible distractions then you’ll be forced to focus on the boring task!” Fool… You underestimate my Power 

My partner: dear it’s time to get up

Me: but distractions

Partner: I have removed them

Me: sleeps

Person: we have removed all possible distractions

Me: but have you considered this?

Me: *zones out and daydreams*

Person: I have removed all distractions so you can do [insert task]

Me: *chuckles* Silly neurotypical. So naïve… Don’t you see? I AM the distraction.

The distraction is coming from inside the house

That’s cuz this is the exact opposite of what you wanna do with ADHD. If you take away all input your brain is going to shut down. It has nothing to do. You need to find the right passive secondary input that will allow your brain to function enough to start what you need to start. What counts is different for everyone. Snacking, White noise, music, stim toys, podcasts, wiggling. A thing that will give you stimulation but isn’t enough to totally satisfy it so your brain wants to do more. Then you push yourself to do the task because your brain finally has all the pieces it needs to function.

Don’t force yourself into focusing the same way a neurotypical does. It will only hurt you. Find new ways that work for your neurotype.

shoutout to people with simultaneously great and terrible memories. like oh yeah i remember in perfect detail that random story you told about the banana costume from a year ago but all of novemeber? completely blank.