When you have a long term personal project you’re trying to work on but your dumbass brain keeps getting distracted by other fixations so you have to wrestle yourself into hyperfixating on the thing you want to do
Still reading “You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Crazy or Stupid?” – a book for and about adults with add. And this is all me, especially that last bit.
It’s sad there seems to be so many of us.
The things you see:
She is a mess of papers. Trailing things, losing things, can’t find the homework she swears she did. Or turns in homework with ink stains, water stains, creases. Chew marks? Her shirt is on backwards or inside out.
Her eyes drift, go glassy, she loses the thread of something she was saying in the middle of the sentence. She’s gone the moment you take your eyes off her.
She writes and draws slowly, painfully. She can’t keep up with notes in class. Her hand cramps, so she massages it absently. Sports may be great or average, but these fine motor skills are still hard after years of practice.
She wants to do better. She wants to. She always seems sincere. Sometimes she seems desperate. Always there’s a look in her eyes that says she knows she’ll fail but she’s going to try anyway.
She has that thing somewhere. In her bag? Her locker? Where was it?
You ask a simple question. She gives you a convoluted answer that is not what you were asking for at all but turns out, after a bit of a tangent, to be more accurate than you would ever expect from someone her age. It seems like an accident, but it happens just often enough to raise doubts.
She always seems to be working on the task you were doing 5 minutes ago, not the task you’re doing now. She has no idea what task you’re doing now.
Whenever she works on group projects, she has the biggest, grandest ideas and contributes the least amount of work to the finished product. Or she does the whole project herself and turns it in 3 days late. Or she has no idea what’s going on with the project and does her pieces incorrectly because she doesn’t know what the big picture is supposed to be.
She can’t remember the multiplication tables. She can’t, no matter what you do to try to help her. The information won’t go in. (She has the presidents memorized in order, with their years and vice presidents.)
She walks into the room, blinks at you, and says “I have no idea why I’m here.”
She forgot the homework. It’s midnight, and her friend called 2 hours ago to kindly remind her that the big project is due tomorrow and she’s been working on it for 2 hours (it was supposed to be 2 weeks) and she’s crying and trying and her parent finally puts her to bed. She will get up in half an hour and start again, stay up until 4am trying to finish, not even sure what the requirements are because she can’t find the sheet but refusing to stop until she falls asleep on her desk.
You ask her what she’s learned, and she can’t tell you. But in her head, her spaceship’s design is far more accurate now that she understands friction and propulsion and other things you weren’t actually trying to teach her. Or, you ask her what she’s learned and she can’t shut up about it, going on long after you’re very much Done with this conversation.
She mastered this task last month, but now she has no idea where to start. Again. You go over it with her. Again. She gets through the first two steps and can’t remember what comes next. Again.
She’s late. Again.
Things you don’t see:
The world is a fascinating, beautiful, bustling, overwhelming place, and she will always be Not. Good. Enough. for it. She knows failure more than success. It’s no wonder she wants to be somewhere else.
She often has insomnia because she can’t turn her brain off to sleep at night.
The tiniest accommodations make it so she can breathe again.
There is a place where she shines. It’s the athletic field, the music
room, debates, her kindness when she takes care of others, painting, her
fashion sense, hiking, telling stories. Somewhere, she shines. She
doesn’t think that means anything, though, because everywhere else she
is staggering through double gravity and wondering how everyone makes it
look easy.
She has no idea that she could shine everywhere – that it’s the rigid structure failing her, not her failing it.
She is on another planet during 3rd period, literally, inventing a fictional language and a syllabary to go with it, and no one has noticed because they’re droning on about test prep.
Sometimes she feels like an alien.
When she’s fully here, in the classroom, she sees who else is struggling, like a kind of visible kinship. She could tell you who and why, but she won’t because you won’t ask.
The day she finds out the bell curve was a eugenicist’s lie, she wants to burn the world down.
It’s not an “active imagination” or “escapism” or a “fantasy life” – it’s self-care to fight depression and anxiety caused by being unable to meet the rigid expectations of an inflexible school system and society at large.
She finally gets diagnosed in her 20s or 30s, after bringing her son in to the doctor to address his obvious ADHD. Going over the checklist in the waiting room, one hand absently snagged in the back of her son’s shirt to keep him from climbing the potted tree in the corner, she has a moment of stunning clarity: this is me.
* Note: There are boys and AMAB non-binary folks with non-hyperactive ADD as well, and we should not overlook them. Really, the only substantive reason to divide us into hyperactive and non-hyperactive is the structure of our school system and childcare, which mark hyperactivity as a behavioral issue to be addressed and everything else as just personality. Neither is accurate.
** This list is a conglomeration of experiences relayed to me anecdotally from several ladies of various ages and one dude. It’s not exhaustive or accurate for everyone.
Wow. Thank you. This, all of this is so true and I’m tearing up because it’s always a relief to know that you aren’t alone.
someone: haha you just want to know when you’re off the hook
me: hah
me: (actually i just need to allocate the right expectations and backlog of energy and make sure the rest of my day falls in good accordance with it so that i don’t feel time-crunched and propel myself into a hysteria because if i don’t know how long this thing lasts or when it ends i can’t possibly know when literally anything else starts and my entire life becomes an unraveled realm of anarchy with no rhyme or reason and how is that not terrifying to you)
me: hey how long will this take
someone: oh like twenty minutes
me: ok
*an hour later*
me: *clinging to every learned social skill i can think of with the desperate hope my distress and exhaustion doesn’t show*
someone: hey we’re almost done don’t be so crabby
me: *smiling* *internally screaming at this SENSELESS CHAOS*
someone: hey do you want to do [involving time-consuming thing]
me: hey that sounds fun! when were you thinking?
someone: oh we’re doing it right now
me: oh. like. now-now? like right now. like you want me to stop what i’m doing and get up and do this thing with you, suddenly, with thirty seconds of warning. now. like this second. immediately. now?
i dont understand how i procrastinate everything i do like i even procrastinate watching tv shows? i feel like normally you would normally procrastinate doing things you dont enjoy like homework and cleaning and stuff but tv shows? who am i
If you’re one of those people who thinks executive dysfunction only happens for things we don’t like (school, cleaning,) then please consider the fact that I’ve been meaning to plug my phone in for 20 minutes and I’m now at 2% and still putting it off to write this post ¯_(ツ)_/¯
My anime/video game list consists of over 100 titles, easily, and yet I almost never get around to watching/playing any of them.
Executive dysfunction is not just for boring or unenjoyable things. It’s for everything. Even eating.
What is executive dysfunction? O.o
Put simply, it’s difficulty/inability with initiating tasks. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functions, like decision-making and impulse control. People with ADHD and other neurological disorders that affect the prefrontal cortex often experience difficulty making decisions and performing tasks, as well as exercising self restraint. Part of why people with ADHD tend to procrastinate so badly is out of genuine inability to begin tasks, even if they’re very important.
It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.
It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.
Oh thank god, someoneput it into words.
For me it’s also waiting for the “right” time to come to complete the task because for some reason my brain thinks doing the task at any other time is horribly, horribly wrong, weird, and out of order. The “right” time might come eventually, might not. It’s a lottery.
that part
adhd mode 1: I want to do this thing!!!! I’m going to do the thing!!! *5 mins later* this is so exhausting lets not do the thing, I’m done
adhd mode 2: *hyperfocus on the most irrelevant, completely unwarranted task in the world* “where did the sun go?”
adhd mode 3: *cue panic-induced motivation, typically offset by: an exam in 1 hr, a 10 pg paper due at 8AM, and other anxiety-stricken deadlines*
adhd mode 4: I want to do something but I don’t know WHAT I want to do, I want to do a million things *spend an entire day restlessly moving from task to task*
adhd mode 5: I’m READY to be PRODUCTIVE! But first, I need to get a cup of water. But wait, there’s no ice in the freezer let me make ice. Hold on, all the cups are dirty, time do the dishes lol. Hm… there’s dishes in my room let me go get them. Oh, there’s my computer let me go check Tumblr. *5 hrs later* What was I just gonna do
The Paradox Machine 