The lighter side of ADHD
It took me ages to realise this. People with ADHD are always portrayed as lazy but they don’t struggle with hard work, they struggle with boring work. Before I knew I had ADHD I always found I was getting in trouble for not finishing boring work so I always used to prioritise tasks by how much fun they were and start with the most boring. I just ended up getting nothing done.
Then they also get mad when you find an easier way to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time or even automating it.
"Why didn't you show your work, so I can see how you think?"
Because I did it in my head and got the right answer. This isn't about you.
The "show your work" is about checking if you understand the logic in getting the answer. We had lots of questions out of 5. Right answer was only worth 1 mark, the other 4 were the steps and reasoning. This type of setup punishes those that skip right to the answer, or have memorized answers. But rewards those that show they know the concepts
Ok but forcing me to show my work was one of those things I hated until I was extremely grateful for it. I didn’t need to show my work to prove my answer was correct in elementary school, but it was a slow drift from “I can do it in my head with ease” to “I need to document my steps so I can check where the error occurred”. Also “it’s not enough to be correct, you need to be correct with evidence” is the reality for people who do math for a living
Literally every single damn math class I ever took
I had to retake an algebra 2 exam multiple times because they thought I was cheating- including sitting IN the principal's office, yet the scores were all within points of each other.
They were so fucking salty about it too when there was no "gotcha." I wish I could time travel back to advocate for myself, because I would have TORN THEM A NEW ONE. My parents were apathetic cowards.
Like all cutting injustices, it's stuck with me.
I deconstructed the underlying methodology of the creator of the system in order to understand their internalized blind spots or artificial limitations imposed on them by unrelated third parties at the time of the systems creation.
This reminds me of a punishment homework thing I was given in my youth, I had to write out something a bunch of times, which was a shit punishment to begin with and only happened once in like, grade 3 or something. Maybe even grade 1 when we were learning to write, idk. Maybe it wasn't a punishment (it felt like one).
Instead of writing the letter "i" at the start of every line like I was supposed to, I just put a long line down the page to be that letter on every line.
The only part of this that I remember to this day is that I got it back with that line circled in red and the word "lazy!" Written next to it, with points off of the assignment for it.
That's literally the only thing I recall about it, that finding an "easy" way to write the same letter across multiple lines was lazy, therefore I'm lazy and worthless. I don't even remember if I passed or failed it, because that was less important to my young mind than being called lazy for simply trying to optimize my working time.
I dunno, but at this point I kind feel like that teacher was a bit of an asshole.
You gotta try to make a perfectly spaced dashed line down the page, as fast as you can. It's a bit of a challenge and get all the I's out of the way. Then the teacher can't say boo.
This is when you learn to just not tell anyone that you're saving time and pretend it takes as long as everyone else lol
This applies so hard to programmers, as well. I love making things automated, but I never have the time to make them properly.
Come join us on the QA side! I'm an automation developer, so it's my job to make things automated :)
Keep it up with these posts, if I share enough of them with my clearly very painfully obviously super adhd girlfriend I might eventually convince her to go see a therapist and seek a diagnosis someday
Call her doctor, make an appointment, save it in her calendar, remind her in the lead up, drive her there, get the referral. Walk her to the post box to send it off, sit next to her to phone the intake office to confirm they got the referral, set appointments on her phone for every 6 months to sit with her and call to check the cancellation list until you get an appointment. Drive her to that appointment.
If she has ADHD, the steps involved in getting a diagnosis are bigger than Mt Everest, she will need a neurotypical Sherpa.
I hope she does. I don't think I'm ADHD but my partner was just diagnosed a few months ago. Now that we think about it it's not a surprise at all lol
It feels really nice to have more understanding and more context for both of us.
Add the extra layer of my mother not appreciating my interests and thinking what I now do for a living was a waste of time... And a dash of expecting me to somehow just be able to perfectly do chores they never taught me how to do when I was young. Yes, this is the first time I've ever mopped a floor at 17 years old. How the fuck is that my fault?
As a child of Baby Boomers, they really never wanted an answer - they just wanted to complain about something. And they probably never wanted to be parents in the first place.
God, it sucks to be a child of parents that never wanted children
Like I get that it was the social expectation but c'mon, what the hell, you brought me into existence, and for what?
Shit, sounds a lot like my mom. She always complained I never helped with chores, but she never asked or told me to do any. Worse, whenever I did anything, like washing the dishes, instead of saying "thanks", she would tell me to stop because she'd do it.
I remember this progress as a kid. Nothing was taught until after I did something wrong. It ended up discouraging me from trying, because every time I did something that I thought was "right," my mom complained about it.
At first the rule was "put dirty dishes in the sink."
Then when I put dishes in the sink, the complaint became, "Why did you put dishes in the sink without washing them?"
So then I learned to wash dishes, and set them in the drying rack. To which my mom would complain, "Why are there dishes in the drying rack? You should put them away."
Okay, so I washed and put dishes in the cabinets. "Why are the dishes all wet?"
...
How about teaching kids each step beforehand, instead of complaining that they don't magically know/do everything?
It's actually the normies who can't even do laundry without a little neurotransmitter bottle from mommy frontal cortex. We fight demons every day.
For fucking real. Same deal with autism for me.
I'm getting a sort of buffer underrun when doing routine so I'll always try and make trivial tasks or busywork faster, more efficient, or superfluous through process design. When I cannot do that, I'll listen to music or podcasts, that helps somewhat.
The main drawback of this condition is that many employers think I simply "like to work" and bury me in even more busywork.
The reward for being good at toil is more toil.
Signed,
The guy who was good at streamlining and ended up with 3-4 different jobs but only one salary
This is the ultimate lesson, especially if you're in a for-profit venture. That is what I have learned from decades of working: Never do more work than the minimum that is expected from you.
It isn't as bad if you work at an NGO or in public service of some type, because at least the fruits of your labor don't go directly into the pockets of uber-wealthy CEOs. But if you're in the private sector, fuck all that shit.
I did the opposite for the last part. I just went the "lazy" path of just doing hard things. As they were easy for me and rewarded more. If the hard things were rewarded less, why bother in the first place?
So I got based by teachers as "not precise enough" because they could clearly see I totally understood what the exercise wanted me to do, I just didn't do "the easy part" of writing it properly.
I don't have a diagnosis yet but this is extremely relatable to me and I hope it gets better when I get one
The only thing a diagnosis changes is external proof that you have ADHD. If that will help you then yes it will get better.
Personally I stopped taking ADHD meds. They changed me into a different person and I'd rather learn to live with myself.
I think it would help me feel more sure because I have some absolute proof that I'm making all of this up, although I have heard some people saying that they still have imposter sydrome. Also I hope that meds help me stay focused without tooo many side effects
What hurts is guessing wrong what people around you care about and then realizing that what they care about is the thing you cared about before you realized that they actually just didn't understand what you were actually worried about. It starts to feel like the matrix but you aren't NEO you're just the cat.
Most of the drug users and smokers are above average intelligence. Most of the intelligent people are depressed.
Great job world.
Yep. I've had substance abuse problems and severe depression my whole life. I've had people telling me I have "genius" intelligence but I can't do some of the most basic tasks like paying bills and managing finances and making any plans for my future whatsoever.
But I know quantum physics! Lots of use for that shit, right?? I can't count the number of job interviews where the hiring manager asked me about interactions between quarks and the strong nuclear force.
As an aside my therapist just diagnosed me as autistic, as a middle-aged man that's a whole basket of cats I don't know what to do with yet.
There are lots of boring un stimulating tasks that are super important that’s the issue. I have adhd and I cope with my issues to be able to be a functional adult. Things like the dishes and the laundry and cleaning need to be done. Some task that seem repetitive for forcing a basic understanding of the subject. I’ve met so many people in my field who are adhd and say they are super productive on complex tasks but lack basic understanding on fundamental subjects in the field because they skip all the “boring stuff”. Life is not always exciting or stimulating sometimes you have to force yourself to do something. Neurotypicals do the same thing.
The difference with ADHD, especially untreated ADHD, and the idea of "sometimes you have to force yourself to do something" is that, as a person with ADHD, trying to force myself to do stuff, without the assistance of medication, can often be a bit like trying to nail jello to the wall.
It might work for a short time, but eventually, it'll be laying on the floor, not doing what you want it to do.... Much like me.
The paralysis is very real and very strong. The contrary feelings fighting eachother in your head, one voice saying how important it is and that you need to do it, another that's breaking down the task into every motion required, so one job becomes a quintillion individual steps, which makes you feel overwhelmed and anxious at even the thought of trying to do the job, and another voice berating you for being a lazy fuck who can't even do the most simple shit, like get off the couch and do the thing.
In the end you just feel horrible, both about the thing you should have done and about your worth as a person, leading to depression, which exacerbates the issue further.
It's a cycle of violence that most ADHD people have suffered with for their entire life.
