#how will my executives function without my external brain

[goodplace-janet]

the good news is yesterday i floated the river with a bunch of local running friends and had an absolute blast

the terrible news is my phone got wet, it’s currently at a repair place getting looked at but it’s likely unsalvageable, and i’m moving in four days and have a mountain of shit to do and no serotonin machine

[rederiswrites]

I wrote this out for FB and then thought I might as well share it here as well. So if you have ADHD, are a late-diagnosed adult with ADHD, and most particular if you are a person with a uterus and/or have children, this one might be for you.

...

Last couple of days have been a little...weird. Let's start at the beginning. Buckle up and learn something.

As many of you already know, I have ADHD. It's a condition with a PR problem--a lot of people, often even medical professionals, have a very distorted idea of what it does, and a very limited one. For starters, it's not about parenting, or lead paint, or lack of discipline. It's genetic, *highly* heritable, starts in childhood and persists throughout life, and is a sufficiently severe disability that it comes with a decrease in life expectancy of up to 13 years. It is a visible difference that can be perceived in brain scans. These are all, at this point, well established and thoroughly attested in the scientific literature. ADHD affects up to 5% of the population and appears across cultures. It is very common.

It's not just about lack of attention--in fact, plenty of medical professionals think the name should be changed, as in fact the problem isn't the volume of attention but the way we struggle to direct it. We are motivated by interest, and struggle to properly weight future goals and consequences, specifically because they are in the future. If the robin outside the window is more immediately rewarding to our brain, we will watch that, and not the teacher. Our ability to properly weigh the consequences of that choice is negatively impacted by our own biochemistry.

We struggle with many of what are termed the "executive functions", the self management systems of the brain. Degree and presentation varies from person to person, but initiating tasks, completing tasks, staying ON task, restraining impulses, emotional regulation, and working memory are among the things impacted. My working memory is notoriously horrible. When they send you those activation codes on your phone? I often have to go back and read them out several times to enter a six digit number. I have to stop and remind myself what I'm doing between every step of my morning bathroom routine, or making tacos. Sometimes I take off my glasses to put on my contacts, reset, and reach for my pill bottles while I still can't see. My long-term memory is also affected, with my husband de facto serving as the memory-holder of the family.

Another common symptom I personally experience is "time blindness", which can mean both that you have no "internal clock" that has a clear idea of the passage of time, and that our ability to properly weight the importance of things in the future is impacted. So, for example, I can know intellectually what's coming, but it takes some really complex and exhausting antics to actually focus and work on those things if they're more than a week or sometimes even a couple days away.

Without externally imposed controls, many ADHD people flounder and fail to meet social markers of success. Estimates of how many ADHD people manage to complete college range from 5% to 15%. Again: 5% to 15%! I have failed twice myself. WITH externally imposed controls, ADHD people often have to work far harder to make their brains do what is required, and either fail and develop an image of themselves as failures (usually with plenty of external help), or keep fighting and suffer crippling burnout.

To that point, ADHD is HIGHLY comorbid with a whole range of knock-on conditions, some of which stem from the same brain patterns that give rise to the ADHD itself, and others from the trauma of living with a disability, but they include very high rates of depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, social isolation, and addiction. I have dealt with depression, anxiety, and fibromyalgia my entire adult life. I have never ended up in the trap of self-medication but let's be real, that's partly about having supports and a healthy social environment. It's not some accomplishment I praise myself for, nor is addiction a sin I shame anyone for.

And anxiety has a very different texture to it when what you're really anxious about is the next time you fail in some catastrophic way. Lock your keys in the car. Completely space on a doctor's appointment. Go to pay for groceries and find that your wallet is next to your computer at home. Because the anxiety is not irrational fear of some generalized bad thing. These things do and will happen, regularly. Sometimes it feels like the only fix is getting good at recovering. Because no matter how many times you manage not to blow it, there's always another chance.

So, the struggle to be a reliable person, to be a consistent parent, to be a dependable life partner, is continuous. And it is so so so hard and it sometimes feels like you're not actually making any progress at all. I have tried therapy. I have tried three (or four??) different non-stimulant medications that sometimes help people. One of them DID help. ALL of them had catastrophic side effects. There were times as I was trialing these medications when I needed to be minded because I wasn't capable of taking care of anything, not even myself. Without Jacob, I don't know where I'd be. Not here. Probably in poverty, which is where he found me.

I have tried probably most organizational tools you know of. I have tried imposing schedules, all of which turned to dust and ash when the next fibromyalgia flareup or the next major life disruption happened. I don't think a new schedule has ever lasted a month before.

I HAVE felt like I'm made progress lately. I learned things that really helped my fibromyalgia, which gave me the space to work on other things--just like getting the borders of a puzzle finished. Enough things were spiraling upwards, and I think I might be cementing some gains. I have felt optimistic.

But in the meantime, I asked my doctor if, now that no less than three cardiologists have insisted my heart is Perfectly Healthy, I could finally try stimulant medications. After decades of use, Adderall, Ritalin, and a couple related stimulant drugs are still the gold standard for ADHD treatment and improve outcomes substantially for many people. And stimulants are in serious international shortage. Have been for many months. The only one she thought she could get me was Adderall. And she didn't dare try anything but the standard 30mg because nonstandard dosages would be even less attainable.

So now I'm taking Adderall. One week on 30mg, which I stopped when it was clear my function was being seriously impaired rather than improved. Reassessed with the doctor, now trying 60mg, because that's two of the pills I've already managed to obtain. It is....too much. And in some ways it fixes problems I wasn't working on, while so far making my executive function, my initiation or even *contemplation* of tasks, virtually nonexistant. Which was, of course, the thing I was trying to fix.

So yeah. When you have the context, I figure you can understand the substance of my frustration yourself. If you have children, I don't think you need my help to imagine what it would be like to know that you are unpredictable, or to see that your children are used to to you undergoing events that make you act strangely and erratically. I think just knowing that often, new medications introduce themselves by giving me a migraine, and I know this is possible when I take that first pill, is fairly self-explanatory. And so I expect you can imagine what it would be like, with all of this as a backdrop, to experience worsening of your symptoms, probably because of age-related hormonal changes. To in desperation try something you'd previously been denied. And to learn that it probably won't help.

In a week, I will either give up on Adderall for now or find a way to make it work. I'll put together the pieces yet again--at this point, possibly my strongest personal skill--and continue that upward climb as far as I can get. I'm incredibly fortunate in that regardless, I will be fed and dry and warm and loved. But right now, I feel justified in some serious dismay.

[silence-ofthe-llamas]

I feel I’m VERY late to the party with the mecha AU considering how bone deep Pacific Rim runs within me but I’m chomping at the bit. Gnawing at it. I LOVE YOU ALL. I’ve reactivated my tumblr for this. Good god. @keferon my leige. I'm meant to be SLEEPING.

Anyway, I’m a general nuisance, I wont be following much of the pre-established lore too closely because of who I am as a person, bone app the teeth.

TexAid for the soul is more potent than Chicken soup.

First Aid wakes up in an ice cold sweat.

It’s not the first time. He’d lost count, actually – it seemed that every morning was the same now. He’d wake up, he’d shudder, he’d carefully extract himself from his damp-with-sweat duvet, he’d shower, and then he’d pretend that everything was perfectly fine and normal.

His function first and foremost was one of a medic. He trained to work with live patients. His expertise was with the living, not the cold stares of the dead.

But lately, all he’d been dealing with were corpses, and it all came down to one reason.

Vortex.

Superstition wasn’t something that he bought into, but the theory on base was that the mech was haunted. At the start, he didn’t believe it – mechanics were plagued with stray code, oddly executed scripts. There was nothing supernatural about it. All of the pilots said that they felt another presence within their mechs with them – there wasn’t anything special about Vortex’s AI. If one wanted to look at it that way, all of their mechs were haunted.

But Vortex was different. Of course he fucking was, why wouldn’t he be. No, no, nothing was allowed to be normal. Ever. Firstly, there was the staring. The mechs weren’t meant to stare, but whenever he went close to Vortex, he could feel his piercing gaze against him. It wasn’t normal. They should have been offline without any human input, but Vortex stayed stubbornly awake and studied his every move. Sometimes he’d swear he could hear his internals humming, the rumble of moving parts, his plating trembling and straining against the dock as he tried to move. If someone got too close to him, he’d hear the hum of weapons systems warming up. It was part of their onboarding process that they were warned against approaching him, now. He’d cut them down without a second thought.

There was also the small fact that he had a tendency to kill his pilots. And it wasn’t even an exaggeration – their means of slaughter always came from within. The cameras that filled the insides didn’t show any breaches, no weapons were brought on board, the vital signs monitors from the pilots and their own helm-mounted cameras showed no foul play of an external parties part. No. It was… Vortex. The mech showed his displeasure in a shower of blood and moving parts – and that was if he was being nice. If they weren’t power washing the remains of a digestive tract from his floor, they were manoeuvring a live body that acted like a dead weight, the pilot a stuttering mess, mentally shattered and broken. They’d never managed to get any of them back into active duty – a lot of them First Aid had no idea what had happened to them. They were simply shipped off somewhere, never to be heard of or seen from again. The worst part of it was that they were all missing fingers, as if they’d been cleaved right off by sharp metal as they reached out for something.

An alarm ripped through the base, and he gagged on his morning coffee. He knew what that meant – deployment. And with deployment came another victim, courtesy of Vortex, and all that horrid stench and morbid fascination that sent his spine tingling and brain firing to the point of insanity that paired so closely with it.

Ambulon frowned at him. “Jittery this morning, Aid.”

“I just know I’ll be on Vortex duty again.” He groaned.

Ambulon patted him comfortingly on the shoulder. “Don’t let it get to you, Aid. Pharma only does it because he trusts you.”

Yeah, right. It’s so I haven’t got an excuse to be by the morgue.

You steal one Quintesson body…

He briefly remembered the smell of the grave dirt as he’d re-interred them into the ground instead of the stone cold morgue, and quickly smelled his coffee instead.

The deployment seemed to last an age. First Aid managed to get through all of his deskwork before they returned, and Vortex staggered into his bay. First Aid was waiting patiently by the gate as the docking station clasped around him, holding him in place as cables came down from the ceiling to plug into him.

“How many bets this guys dead?” Someone behind him asked, elbowing the one stood next to him. First Aid ignored them, focusing intently on the mech.

He could see blood behind the glass. It was leaking out down the side – they were more than dead. They’d been eviscerated.

The visor lifted with a loud hiss, and First Aid took a deep breath. He held it so he didn’t have to inhale the initial stench – that part was always the worst, having been left to fester within him – and carefully studied the scene before him.

Organs hung down from the ceiling. Scraps of fabric hung limply from the still locked harness.

“What did he do to them?” First Aid quietly asked himself as he stepped forwards with a bucket.

There was a rule - you never got inside Vortex on your own. First Aid followed it religiously, and he could hear someone behind him, and so he felt perfectly comfortable in getting inside.

Only the visor snapped shut with a sickening crack as their leg was cleaved clean through, the scream barely muffled by the glass.

“No!” First Aid flew to the glass of the visor, pounding against it. “Are you okay?!”

What a stupid question that had been. Of course he wasn’t okay. The smell in the air burned at his throat and turned his stomach, and he looked down at the dismembered leg.

He couldn’t breathe. Or he was breathing too much? He didn’t know, but his chest ached and his head spun and he felt like ice had been injected straight into his veins, every hair stood on end as panic gripped him. It took every ounce of self control he had to not scream from terror when he heard pistons loudly slam into place, firmly locking the visor.

Oh, god, have mercy.

Emergency exits. These things had them, right? He’d had to pull a barely conscious pilot from one once – he’d gotten trapped in it in a malfunctioned ejection sequence. The button would be big and bright red, surely – and with a protective cover so they didn’t smack it by mistake in the middle of a fight and end up launched into the face of a Quintesson. His eyes scanned wildly, breath catching in his chest as he tried to suck in air that didn’t make him want to vomit, hands hovering over the dash. Mental images of the pilots missing their fingers played in his head like an omen.

There. Bright red. The words were worn off, the plastic scratched. The metal around it was worn and faded from use, and the plastic cover was long gone.

Blood crusted it. He smacked it anyway.

Nothing.

He looked back to where it should have been, hyperventilating. What did that mean? The techs had never found anything to be wrong with it before. Everything was functioning as normal – it was why Vortex was still even allowed to be operated. So why didn’t the emergency escape open?

Red light flooded the cockpit. His teeth chattered together as he slowly turned to look at the display that had lit up, white text running across it.

[LEAVING SO SOON?]

“I’m just a medic.” First Aid pathetically said. He almost bit his tongue.

[TAKE A SEAT]

Tears prickled his eyes as he unbuckled the harness and sat down. He tried to ignore the wet squelch as he sat in what remained of the previous human who sat there.

“What do you need from me?” He tried to sound strong as he asked.

The screen remained blank. The lights slowly dimmed, leaving him in the dark with only the sound of Vortex’s hot systems for company. He tried to calm his breathing, timing it to the rhythmic thunk of a nearby fuel pump, and wrung his fingers together.

It would be okay. It would be okay. Everything was going to be okay-

The chair suddenly flew backwards, and First Aid shrieked. His throat felt raw with how hard he’d screamed, clinging on tightly to whatever he could get his hands on. He studiously kept his limbs away from the console – he had a theory on how they’d lost their digits, and he was not keen on finding out if it was true. The chair snapped back upright again, and he whimpered, tears pooling in his eyes and his bottom lip trembling. The mech shuddered, a grinding sound rumbling through the cockpit and rattling his bones.

[PLUG IN] the screen instructed. A cable fell from the ceiling.

Helmet. He needed a helmet. They had the required port for that cable. He scanned the floor, ignoring the rising nausea as he searched for the helmet from the previous pilot.

There. Behind the chair. He picked it up, and had to look away when he realised the head was still inside. He shook it out, humming loudly to block out the sound of it hitting the floor, and kept his eyes closed as he put it on and ignored how much it stank of organic metal. He reached up for the cable, and gently guided it to the port-

Agony. Burning agony. His back arched as he screamed, hands clutching the helmet as if willing it to stay on despite how hard his legs kicked and thrashed. Electricity coursed straight through him, setting him aflame as his brain tried to catch up with his body.

It hurt. It hurt so much.

First Aid gnashed his teeth together as he fought with his conflicting emotions. He wanted to know why. Why Vortex had trapped him in there, why he had gone to this length to do this to him, why him. But he also wanted to run, to run so far away that he was nothing more than a distant memory. He didn’t want to know why Vortex had taken such an interest in him.

But oh, oh he did. He did want to know what he’d done to catch the AI’s attention.

The pain slowly subsided, the fried nerves numbing to the raw energy that charged through them, and he cracked his eyes open.

[GOOD BOY <3]

“Oh, god, I think I broke something.” First Aid whimpered. He suddenly understood just why so many pilots came to them with nerve damage, with extensive burns, and why most of their heads were metal. The connection was. Intense.

“Don’t be such a pussy.” A voice spoke directly into his head. First Aid gasped, sitting up straighter. It was strangely human, yet equally as mechanical.

“What-!”

“I just want to talk, but it’s so irritating to have to wait for you to read the screen. Removing the barriers is so much easier, isn’t it? Now, to business...”

First Aid gasped and whined as he felt pressure in his head, white not points of pain slowly pressing through his brain. His eyesight flickered and faded in and out, his sight shifting from the inside of the cockpit to the chaos right outside – chaos that he couldn’t even hear – and he was glad to see that the man who had been right behind him was receiving medical attention. What a relief. Humour that wasn’t his and that he didn’t recognise pulled at his lips, and he felt a strong urge to smile so wide that his lips split and cracked.

The pressure on his head increased, and he felt his eyes cross, reality slowly slipping through his fingers like thick slime. Red dripped from his nose. Where was he, again? Why was this happening to him? What was even happening to him- Awareness snapped back to him in time with a loud bang on the glass. He heard his name, muffled. Someone was calling to him. He should go to them, right? “Don’t move, I haven’t finished looking at you yet.” First Aid felt phantom sensations of ice cold hands pressing against his skin, a shudder running up his spine. He felt a prickle run down his arm, chasing the feeling of the tips of someone’s fingers running down the bare skin. Obediently, he held still despite how curious he was to go and look. “I can tell you like the good stuff.” An invisible hand patted his cheek and the mech shuddered, loud and clunking. “God, I’m so lucky I found you.” “Found me?” His chest felt weird. His everything felt weird. It was difficult to keep his eyes open. “I’ve been watching you. On the cameras, when you’re in the hangar with me, your files. Fascinating. How wonderful you are to me.” “That’s a bit creepy. You could have asked first.” “I don’t like being told no.” “I would have liked it more if I’d known it was happening.” Why was he so readily admitting this? Where were his carefully constructed walls and defences, keeping the abnormality at bay? He felt like he was an open book and Vortex was just turning to the pages he wanted to read. “Maybe I’d have done something if I knew I had an audience.” The mech shuddered again, harder this time.

“Come on, baby, talk to me wont you? I’ve been so lonely.”

“Maybe if you stopped killing your pilots you wouldn’t struggle so much with that.” He gritted out. Fuck, everything hurt.

“You’ve got a bit of a mouth on you, don’t you.” A sound that felt like anger rumbled through him. “I like it.”

“Can I go now?” He felt woozy. Something was wrong. Something was really, really wrong, his ears felt wet and his face felt wet and he could taste copper-

As if on cue, there was a loud bang on the visor – someone was pounding it with their fist. A shared stab of annoyance flashed through them.

“Question first. How did it feel to have a Quintesson in your bare hands?”

“How did you know about that?”

“Come on, don’t be shy, you know I’ve seen everything.” He crooned. “Tell me. I’m so desperate to know. I know you liked it – I can feel it.” It felt as if he had someone’s arms wrapped around him, their mouth right by his ear. If he closed his eyes and focused, he could feel their warm breath ghosting over it.

“It felt fucking amazing.” He thought back to it. The warmth of the body – an infant, tiny in comparison to the adults that dwarfed their houses. How thick their blood was, how it dripped down through his hands. The burn of the smell, mineral rich and glowing bright blue.

“You fucking tease.”

“You cut through them every day.” First Aid argued. “What’s so special about that?”

“You can really feel it. I’ve got metal between me and my prey.”

The banging was louder, and First Aid’s vision shifted to be through Vortex’s. There was a big group of them now, he had an audience.

“I should go.”

“You’ll be back, honey.”

First Aid ripped the helmet off, and nausea hit him like a truck as he felt a sharp wrench in his head. He loudly gagged, folding in half, and pressed a fist to his mouth to keep himself from spilling his guts into the cockpit. Vortex was certain to kill him if he made a mess. Sucking in a deep breath, he staggered over to the glass and gently placed his hand against it. It felt like half of his consciousness was somewhere else, somewhere he couldn’t reach.

“Please?” He was starting to feel disorientated, the sudden disengaging scrambling his brain. What memories were his, or the previous pilots? Pain suddenly flashed through him and he screamed, his limbs going numb. He felt warm liquid slowly run down his suit, red blooming amongst the white, bone wrenching from bone-

[LATER, DARLING <3]

Vortex’s visor finally opened, laugher echoing in First Aids head, and he fell out face-first onto the catwalk. He was gasping for breath as he scrambled away, shaking and trembling and swallowing back vomit. His hands flew over his body, checking for injures, for limbs he was certain were missing – intact. He was completely intact. His team had their arms around him and were pulling him away faster, leaving a trail of blood smeared after him – was that his? Or was that the pilots? - and were shouting. All of it was just noise. Pure noise.

Giddiness bubbled up in his chest, and he laughed. It started quietly, a little chuckle. Disbelief at the situation, he thought. Pure, utter relief that he was alive. The cannibal mech had eaten him, but here he was – spat out whole and unharmed. His next laugh was a little louder this time, and Ambulon paused, taking notice. First Aid didn’t see him any more, his whole vision taken up by Vortex and the loud snap of his visor clamping back down into place, a hiss as the mechanism locked it back down. He could have sworn he was smiling, but it was ridiculous – the mech didn’t even have a mouth.

He didn’t realise he was still laughing – and hard – until his stomach began to hurt and he felt light headed. Gasping for breath, he let himself fall back onto the floor, staring blindly up at the ceiling. He could see the red lights of Vortex’s visor reflected on the metal there.

“Felix?” The voice of his mentor pierced through his peals of laugher. First Aid looked up and saw Ratchet running towards him, face twisted in agony. He felt himself start to laugh again, and he had to fight to not start punching himself in the stomach to get himself to fucking stop it. It wasn’t funny. None of this was funny. Why was he laughing.

“Is he hurt? Why is he bleeding?” Ratchet demanded as he knelt down next to him. Ambulons response was inaudible, First Aids ears ringing. He felt something dribble from his mouth, and from the acidic taste in the back of his throat he assumed that he’d finally thrown up. He didn’t remember turning – his airway was clear. Two hands gently cupped his face, forcing him to look at someone.

Ratchet.

“Can you hear me?” He gently asked, tension clear in his voice. First Aid could, but he didn’t know how to respond. He slowly blinked, hands reaching up to clasp at his wrists with trembling hands. The adrenaline was burning off, replacing itself with a leaden heaviness that threatened to drown him. Slowly, he nodded.

Get me away from that mech, he tried to say. They get it and I hate that we understand each other.

Ratchet seemed to hear him. “Help me move him.” He was looking at someone else, but First Aid didn’t want to look away from his face. He committed every detail to memory, every line, every grey hair, every follicle and aged scar and flush of colour. It felt like he was seeing him for the very first time.

The world spun and his stomach clenched as he was lifted unceremoniously onto a stretcher, and he took one last glimpse of Vortex before the oxygen mask was fitted over his face and he couldn’t see anything any more.

09090909

It was highly inadvisable.

But he was doing it anyway.

That taste he’d got of Vortex was like a breath of fresh air to him – he hadn’t realised how stifling the company on base was until he’d met him. Ratchet would be so disappointed in him. Pharma would hang him by his guts. Ultra Magnus would try and make it so he never saw the light of day again.

One moment of feeling his teeth at his throat and he was addicted. He wanted him. He wanted physical scars he could touch and remind himself that it hadn’t been a dream, it was real. Carefully sneaking through the base, First Aid crouched and peered around corners, internally humming the Mission Impossible theme. It felt ridiculous, but if he didn’t distract himself he’d make himself vomit from laughing too much again. He had found a random face mask and slapped it on, hoping that obscuring his identity a little would help him get into character.

They hadn’t found a new pilot for Vortex yet – they still went through the usual procedure of finding one with the right personality and skill set, of testing how well the AI meshed with the mind of the pilot outside of the mech before allowing them to go inside. They had a few candidates, but now it was a question of ‘are they more compatible with other bots?’ and ‘how expendable are they really?’ before they stuck them inside of him.

Like lambs for slaughter. They knew they were going to die – but what else could they do? Vortex was their strongest mech. If he went down, their whole operation would crumble with him. Mechs were expensive and difficult to make, the AI’s complicated and prone to disaster.

Pharma didn’t take his eyes off of him for two whole weeks. He’d fallen out of the mech looking like the pilots whose brains had melted under the pressure, his arm marked with a burn that followed the path of a nerve, mapping it onto his skin. Pharma had stared at it, long and hard, brain ticking over. He wasn’t to go near Vortex again. Not for a while, until they figured out why he’d decided to kidnap him, and why he’d decided to spit him back out. They knew why he’d mangled the other medic. He thought it was fun. He’d said so himself, writing messages in the morning memo. They still hadn’t figured out how he was doing it, but if you were early enough in the day you’d see it before they’d caught it. But First Aid didn’t do too well in following instructions, in listening to orders. The Infant he’d plucked from the formaldehyde to get a better look at was evidence enough of that. The fact he was scrambling to get back inside of Vortex right now was yet another reason why First Aid was to be kept under lock and key - god, if they knew anything about him they’d never let him see the light of day again.

The catwalk that lead out to the mechs was a stones throw away. A guard stood watch, hands firmly on their gun.

God damn it.

First Aid rocked on his feet, wondering how he’d get him to move, when he suddenly felt a prickle on the back of his neck as if he were being watched. He shuddered and whipped his head around.

Nobody. Alone. No eerie glow of a camera – not that there were any over on this side of the hall – and no shadowy figures. He held his breath and strained his ears – all he heard was the cough from the guard and their sigh of boredom. He slowly looked back to the guard, and a faint red glow caught his eye.

Vortex’s visor was on. He was watching.

The sound of something falling to the floor caught the guards attention. He quickly turned and ran out onto the catwalk, looking down at the floor. He quickly looked back up at Vortex and scowled.

“I’m not stupid, Vortex. I’m not going down and getting that.”

Vortex did not respond. The guard tutted and turned on his heel.

Something else fell to the floor, a little louder this time.

The guard threw his head back with a sigh.

“You are the worst.”

He marched off, out of sight, and First Aid saw his window of opportunity. He quickly slipped out, thankful for his socks muffling the sound of his steps, and hid behind the terminal the guard was stationed at before he turned back around and walked over to the terminal.

“Yeah, yeah.” He was speaking to someone on the phone, drumming his fingers on the terminal. “It’s Vortex again. I know, I won’t get close – yeah. He’s dropped two this time.” He paused for a moment, listening to what the person on the other end had to say, before making a sound of disgust. “Go and check? I am not getting close to him!”

First Aid could hear a raised voice on the other side, and strained to see if he recognised it. Before he could pin a face to the voice, the guard sighed loudly. “Fine. I’ll go look. You’ve got my will there, right? Take yourself off of it.”

The guard didn’t look back at the terminal as he walked to the stairs and descended down them. First Aid glanced between the stairs and the catwalk, and quickly crawled over. Peering over the side to see where the guard was, he gained an uncharacteristic burst of bravery before he sprinted towards where Vortex was, visor open and waiting for him.

“Can I?” He asked in a hushed whisper. Vortex didn’t respond. He gingerly approached, noticing that every single camera inside his cockpit was trained onto him. He swallowed nervously, and clambered in.

He should have been used to climbing inside of Vortex. He’d done it enough times. Maybe it was because he wasn’t wearing any of his protective gear? Not his uniform, or his helmet, or even his gloves. Just himself and his pyjama shorts, his t-shirt, and his socks with little bears on them.

Mmm. First impressions. Wonderful.

He should have gotten changed first.

[TAKE A SEAT] lit up the screen.

He slipped into the seat obediently, taking care to not touch the controls. He coyly waved at the camera.

“Did I wake you?”

[YOU DIDN’T. I LIKE YOUR SOCKS]

The bears stared back at him. First Aid tried not to think about the rumbling he now recognised as laughter that rolled through the cockpit.

“Thanks.” He replied, red tingeing his cheeks.

[THAT’S A GOOD LOOK ON YOU]

He pressed his legs more tightly together. “The socks?”

[NO, YOU’RE GOING VERY RED]

[MAYBE I SHOULD CALL YOU LITTLE RED INSTEAD]

The helmet dropped from the ceiling, firmly attached to the cable that would connect organic to mechanical.

[I WANT YOU]

[<3]

First aid scrambled with the harness, clipping himself in place, before putting on the helmet. It burned just as badly as the first time, and he saw as the nerves in his arms glowed with the energy of it – without the proper implants, there was nowhere for the current to go but him.

He whined, squirming in the seat. He ground his teeth together and squeezed his eyes shut, counting down from ten and losing his place three times before the connection settled. Vortex was a heavy and oppressive presence in his mind, and he chewed his cheek as he cracked an eye open.

[LET ME TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AT YOU]

The warning wasn’t even a verbal one. He read helplessly as he felt cold hands clasp him once more. Digital fingers made of 1’s and 0’s probed his brain, and First Aid arched in the seat, teeth clenching down over a loud moan of pain. Neurons fired agonisingly and his hands scrambled at the harness, the tips of his fingers raw and torn and bleeding against the rough fabric. Memories were brought to the surface unbidden, dragged out by artificial means, and others flooded in to take their place. He inhaled sharply, eyes going wide as the realisation hit him. Vortex was trying to show him something. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t even an AI.

He’d been entombed in it. In the mech. Vortex had been a real, breathing human being, mocked in a sham trial in the name of obtaining more pilots. Rich men had paid him to do terrible things, and he had taken the entirety of the blame. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of funds, countless hours, blood, sweat, and tears – all for one mech. A prototype, at that.

First Aid blinked as a bright red screen flashed up, text displayed across it. He squinted and rubbed his eyes, grimacing at the drag of sore and exposed flesh against the rough material of his face mask, and blinked.

[LOCKED IN]

“W… what do you mean locked in?” First Aid hesitantly asked. Like… literally, he was locked in? He knew that. He was connected to Vortex’s nervous system – he could feel that there were bolts in place keeping the cockpit well and truly locked down like a fortress, impenetrable except to the override codes the high command kept locked in a vault in their office or the request of the pilot. He felt amusement push at the edge of his awareness, a shudder of a laugh running through the mech, and he clarified.

“I know your dirt, and now you know mine. Do you think high command are going to let you go peacefully?”

Ah. A threat. Of course. Worried he’d run? He wasn’t going to. He was fascinated by this mech – the joy of being caught in his mechanisms was sure to sing in his ears, the pure delight of watching him carefully pick apart his prey like a hawk dismantled a rabbit was like a chorus of cherubs to him. And Vortex knew it, he knew it and he loved it- he was certain of it, the way his mind melded with his, pushing against him and caressing him, a warm blanket around his psyche.

“I’m not going to leave you.” First Aid took a deep breath, the unsettling stench of bleach and cooked meat and rotting oranges filling his lungs. “No, I’m fascinated by you.”

He tensed, eyes briefly widening as he felt a grin that wasn’t his tugging at the corners of his lips, threatening to split his face in two.

“Happy about that?”

“Extremely.” He purred. “I’ve seen what your hands have done, what they’re capable of. I think we’d make a great team.”

“What if I refuse?”

Images flashed in front of his eyes. Bone fragments scattered around the cockpit, blood and guts and gore hanging obscenely from the ceiling. Blood ran thickly on the walls, the smell foul and rotten. First Aid wretched.

“You’ll kill me?” He hated the excitement that bled into his voice, how eager he was to feel the mechanism close down around him, to feel his metal deep inside of him, for his last thought to be about his touch. “It’s a shame you can only do that once, you know. It’s so exciting, all the different ways you could do it to me. You could make me completely unrecognisable, identified by DNA alone. Or maybe flood the cockpit with gas, slowly suffocating me before I realised what was happening.” He bit his bottom lip. “I wish I knew what it all felt like.”

A new image, one of gears and cogs deep inside of him. All sharp angles and straight edges. The presence was probing inside of him, trying to figure out his reactions. He pressed his hand to his mouth and gasped as his teeth pierced his bottom lip without him realising it. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and another. Vortex probed again impatiently. Respond, damn it.

He looked up at the camera, glad that his mask hid his face, the excitement glowing on his cheeks. “I’ll show you.” His voice was breathless. “And if your use for me runs out, give me a little warning before I’m a permanent feature, please?”

“I wont let you run away from me.”

First Aid swallowed hard at the burn of yearning in his chest. “You’d catch me if I tried.”

“Damn fucking right I would.”

He watched the energy sing in his nerves, the pain spreading down his limbs. His digits were starting to go numb. How much longer could he hold out? He never wanted to leave. He felt flayed open and alive. Squirming, screaming, and alive. Red dripped down and stained his pyjama shirt. Damn it. He liked this pair.

“How do you control yourself? You want what I want, you wish you could do it. So why don’t you?”

“I’m a pacifist.”

“Are you? Or is that just what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”

First Aid whimpered as the pages in his mind flicked, a burning sensation flaring in his arms. He watched the skin there turn red, the connection starting to be too much. His nose felt wet as he thought of it, as the memories Vortex was looking at came to the forefront of his mind. He liked surgery. He liked anatomy. He liked the cadavers and how they felt under his hands, picking them apart and pulling on tendons and ligaments to move them like puppets. Even earlier, his first pet. A hamster. He had told his parents that he’d buried it in the garden all by himself, and they had praised him for being such a grown up young boy, when really he had picked it apart like he had practised on his teddy bears and then blamed on the dog before shoving it into a hole in the ground to hide the evidence before anyone had seen what he was doing.

Vortex chuckled.

“Oh, let me show you how exciting a Quintesson can be. Little Hamphrey hasn’t got anything on them.”

[knifedog-machina]

Daemons To Systems, And The Ways They Intertwine

Hey, I’m Max, he/they - I’m the host of our system, the guy who lives in the front and has only ever lived here, the one who identifies our body as my body specifically. A few nights ago, we realized something about our system origins while talking to some other systems, and I’ve honestly never heard of it happening before, so I thought I’d talk about it.

I used to think that I was a singlet before Jude and Gavin walked in. Now I’m pretty sure I wasn’t. See, before I was the host of a system, I was a daemian. I had three daemons, over the course of my time practicing daemonism, interacting with the community. And they were all a little weird.

The first one was Charlie, affectionately longformed as Charlemagne. Xe appeared in January 2018 as a red fox, said that was xir settled form, and never changed from that. That’s an option for daemons - I know other daemons who chose their forms, independent of how well that form represented their daemian, and stayed that way - but it was in contrast to how most people seemed to do it. I never really felt the need to find a form that fit my personality, not when xe was so confident that this was what xe was.

I didn’t try to make xir do anything, I didn’t decide to give xir faux autonomy - xe just did things xirself, with or without my prompting. Xe was playful, optimistic, a cheerful presence always willing to race around and perk me back up. I really needed xir, back then - I was going through a lot of stress in high school, and I needed someone around to remind me of the whimsical little joys in life. Xe fronted sometimes, and I loved when xe did, conjured phantom tail and paws and big fox ears and an unstoppable zest for life.

My next daemon, Martin, appeared in May 2019 after a fever dream. Really. I was sick and tired and miserable, and I didn’t want to do anything, including things that would make me feel better, and a new internal voice appeared in my head. She told me to drink some water and get to sleep. The next morning, she was still there, lounging around as a large black dog, and she stayed.

This became her role, her purpose in our mind, being a shepherd for my needs. She ran our faulty executive functioning, told me to take care of myself when I forgot important things, encouraged me when I failed to meet expectations. She raised her hackles when anyone tried to overstep our boundaries, and advocated for doing what we needed to protect ourselves, regardless of whether it was nice or polite.

Charlie and Martin overlapped in existence for a while. Charlie loved having a big sibling to play with, and Martin was fond of xir. So I had two daemons for a while, and the arrangement was nice. As I transitioned out of high school into college, my circumstances and environment drastically changed. Charlie was sweet, but xe stopped having a function in my life, so over the months, xe popped up less and less, until xe faded away entirely. Xe wasn’t upset to go, and xir memory is a comfort to me - xe served xir purpose, brought me joy, and had a life well lived.

In October 2021, I created a new daemon, compartmentalizing my emotional dysregulation and disordered anxiety into something that was Not Myself, so I could talk to it and understand its needs without being overwhelmed with distress. This became the feral shadow of a dog that we named Cortisol, nicknamed Court - and if Martin was our Freudian superego, who provided guidance for my decisions and stability when I got stressed, Court was our id, feeling all the explosive emotions that I couldn’t externally express and curling up for scritches like a beloved pet when it got what it needed.

We stayed like that for almost a year, getting familiar with the rhythm of life together. Then, in August 2022, my current headmates walked into my brain. My daemons vanished for the duration of their stay.

They only stayed around a few days, that first time - I was moving to a new place and having new people in my brain simultaneously was overloading our mental RAM, so I was forgetting a lot, and I decided that I’d rather live with them some other time. They understood, we said our goodbyes, and they walked out the next morning. (Recounting this to my friend Tanix was hilarious, by the way. “what the fuck (positive)” he said, his own headmates unable to do this. The joys of being a gateway system.) Once the headmates were gone, my daemons returned into my life.

They came back in March 2023, after I settled down into college for a while, and the memory didn’t jam up like it did previously, so we didn’t part ways this time. Martin and Court vanished overnight, again, and looking back on it, I’m noticing some patterns.

Gavin is basically performing the same role that Martin did - he’s the guy reminding us about our responsibilities, talking through the emotions when we feel like garbage, telling me to eat when I forget, or encouraging me to eat when I have enough sensory issues that I can't stomach anything. He consistently fronts when talking to people we don’t especially like, because he feels protective of us and tends to be the most patient with annoyances.

He’s also literally just some guy, just a decent human person who wound up in here because his partner arrived in my brain five minutes before him and understandably got really upset about it, so he followed them in. Somehow. We don't know how it works, but I also don't know exactly where the first two of my daemons came from, so I’m fine leaving it as a mystery.

(He has a lot of complicated feelings about the position he's in, playing a daemon’s role as a completely different person from me, and will probably write his own post about it some time.)

Jude is, unfortunately, kinda in the same role as Court. And since Court held the emotional dysregulation in my brain, Jude also holds the grand majority of the distress and anxiety that we feel on a regular basis. We all really wish it was split more evenly, because Jude tends to not only lose the ability to talk when they panic, they also get stuck in the front, completely unable to talk to me or Gavin.

(It’s not even that they feel the stress that directly affects them, it’s that on top of the stress that we get in our daily life. They regularly had panic attacks over my grades and exams last semester, and they weren’t even the one studying for it at all! It’s fucked up and I don’t love it for us.)

And there are other interesting little coincidences. You know how Court was a sketched-in sort of black dog? Jude only really realized they related to dogs upon arriving in the system with me, and the archetypal form they identify with is, again, a stylized black dog.

It’s really interesting, the ways my brain decided to be plural, because I didn’t think I was a system back then. I had a daemon, then two daemons, and they were daemons because I considered them parts of myself - no matter how autonomous they were, we were bound together in the same identity, as parts of the same person. They were reflections of me, and I loved them like I loved myself, and they loved me with the same ferocity.

With this realization, that my daemons effectively merged into my system, I did have to ask - are my headmates also parts of me, since they’re falling into the same functional compartments in my brain? We don’t think so, or at least, we don’t think it’s that simple. 

They’re completely different people from me, people who arrived here with their own lives and memories and identities. They aren’t autonomous reflections of my psyche like my daemons were. They’re my weird roommates who moved in with me, and my boyfriends, and I guess you could say we’re life partners - because hey, what’s a partner if not someone you share a life with? What’s more intimate than sharing the same body, hearing each other's thoughts and feelings? They aren't parts of me, but we live the same life together, and I think that counts as something just as significant.

[transgendertism]

So there's one or more things you need to get done

ask yourself:

do you want to get the thing done? like even if you don't enjoy the idea of doing it, is "doing the thing" still what you want to happen?

if you think about how important the thing is to do, and the consequences of not doing it, does that make you feel empowered to get it done, or does it make you anxious?

is this a thing you've done before? do you know how to do it? do you already know the first step and the steps that come next?

do you actually have enough energy to do the thing? are you mentally or emotionally exhausting yourself with expectations around how the thing is to be done instead of doing it? have you done too many things today? have you given yourself permission to relax in the last [week/month/etc]?

These are the questions I usually forget to ask myself when I'm struggling to do something and beating myself up about it.

If you want to get the task done, your problem is not with motivation. If you feel a sense of urgency towards the task and still can't bring yourself to do it, that doesn't mean you don't take the task seriously enough. If every time you try to move towards doing the task your brain mysteriously bounces off of it, that doesn't mean you're not trying to do the task. And if you continuously expect performance from yourself without giving yourself permission to slack off once in a while, you're going to be too exhausted to complete most tasks even if you haven't gotten much or anything done. All these things mean is that you're struggling to produce the executive functions necessary to complete the task. And usually that means you need help, or at least a different way of doing things.

Some things you can try if you're struggling with starting a task:

ask someone else to tell you when to begin your target task, and make sure that you actually begin.

ask someone to explain to you, from beginning to end, what the process of the task will look like, as if you'd never heard of the concept before. Tweak this if the response you get is too detailed or too condescending (or not detailed enough). This would have saved me so much heartache the first time I had to like.. file my taxes. It's okay to explain that you need to be able to visualize the process all the way through and you want someone to help you fill the gap in your brain.

don't start the "whole" task, pick a small-enough segment of the task and start with that. Wash one single dish, open the confusing administrative website and log in or make an account. Get something done that will make it easier to do the rest later, even if you don't get very far.

physically move your body towards the task. It might actually help to do something unrelated that you like doing, in the physical location you need to be working. Then while you're there, you can either fully switch to the target task or you can do bits of it in between something you like better.

Some things you can try if you're having trouble finishing a task:

assign yourself an external reward for finishing, or remind yourself of something you're looking forward to once it's done.

half-ass it. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly! Ask yourself if it's actually necessary to put your full effort into making it good, or if it would be better to get it done even if it's less than perfect. This saves me a lot of time, personally.

don't try to "finish" tasks that can never end. The dishes do not need to all be clean at once for you to be done doing dishes, you need to set specific goals for "completeness" that don't require absolute perfection. Running a full dishwasher or emptying a clean one and putting the available dirty dishes into it can be the whole task.

you can also ask someone else to help you define "finished" for a task that you don't have an easily defined ending in mind for.

purposely give yourself a break from the task. That includes thinking about it or worrying about how you'll get it done. Set a date or time when you can begin working on it again, and until then dismiss thoughts about it with "I will deal with that [at set time]." If motivation and energy to complete the task return before the set time, you can always start early, but you need to be able to step away from things sometimes in order to give them the effort they deserve.

These are the strategies I use to accommodate the executive dysfunction I get from my combined ADHD and autism. The way the two interact can vary wildly from person to person and makes it hard for people to understand how I work because I seem to contradict my own needs a lot. I don't always know which one is causing which problem but there's always an accommodation or way around the thing that gets me stuck.

[thesummerstorms]

I was going somewhere with that last post and then decided I wanted the headcanon about House de Riva to stand separately from the headcanon about my Rook, so here's the rest.

In general, I don't think Arsinoë thinks of herself as ever having been particularly food insecure. Her mother always has enough coin to feed the two of them (although as an adult looking back on it, Arsinoë very much wonders how that was), and the Circle did tend to feed the mages consistently unless they were being punished.

Arsinoë was young enough that despite her willfulness and tendency to attract consequences/punishments like flies to honey, most of the Templars were still not going to lock an eight to eleven year old in solitary or confine her to quarters long term with no food. Getting sent to bed without supper, sure, but it isn't the same thing.

In the Crows, she was trained to survive hunger and occasionally punished with it, like anyone else, but she doesn't think about that training or punishment very much because it was like that for everyone at some point. It also was outside of her daily normal and it was always justified as having some point.

So you would expect a Crow's hang ups to be about lack of food, but hers aren't so much. She definitely has emergency stashes, but she doesn't obsess over it once they're established; mostly she sees it as just a contingency. Weirdly enough it's just not a hang up her brain decides to fixate on, mostly.

Instead, I think if anything it's harder to keep her eating consistently. Arsinoë absolutely has ADHD being medicated mostly by caffeine, and without someone to hold her to a schedule or set of expectations, she will quite literally forget to eat until she comes out of her focus.

The whole coming out of your hyper focus and realizing you're hangry or starving because you haven't fed yourself? Well... Arsinoë was deliberately trained to ignore those physical signals, so...

There's also just the executive function piece of preparing food. House de Riva, the Circle, and Viago's private household all tended to have set meals prepared by someone else (again, utilizing a schedule that inadvertently forces her to eat). She was pretty familiar with the street food vendors in Salle once she was old enough to earn her own coin.

But if she's been trekking through the Wetlands making important decisions about the Blight all day, it doesn't matter if pasta sounds delicious, sometimes all she's going to be able to force herself to do is find a piece of cheese or a hunk of bread or an easy to eat fruit.

Putting prepared snacks she doesn't have to fuck with in her general vicinity helps since she can graze without too much focus... But someone has to remember to prepare them or buy them prepared first.

(Cue a very, very frustrated Lucanis; it should not be so hard to keep this woman fed.)

And I feel like it's important for a Rook de Riva to think about the poison aspect as well. Her food has absolutely been poisoned before. Snacks stolen from Viago's cabinets were always a gamble, as were meals at his table. There were times where she knew something was poisoned and had to eat it anyway due to circumstance or his experimentation/training.

But also despite being House de Riva (or maybe because of it) some other Fledgling probably has tried to poison her before. And her actual teachers probably occasionally poisoned the Fledglings' food as a punishment or training. Not often, not consistently, not everyone all at once. But enough to teach caution.

It's harder to stick to normal eating patterns when your brain is leery and you just don't have the executive function to spare on easing that weariness.

That she lets Bellara and Lucanis cook for her on the regular both speaks to how much better she does with some external system in place and how much she trusts them.

At some point her brain decided "Varric is not going to poison me. Lace might poison me, but it would be on accident. I mainly need to worry about food safety and watch the staff handling the food when we eat out." Which was a relatively big moment, even though she hardly noticed it herself.

And then somehow in the Lighthouse it stops being a conscious concern. She genuinely believes no one on the team would try to kill her or incapacitate her that way.

They'd just stick a sword in her or not help a key moment in a battle or Lucanis would do whatever his mage killer schtick involves, but they would be refreshingly direct about it. Eventually, quickly enough the old Heir for House de Riva would scoff, she accepts that they wouldn't likely try to kill her at all.

Except Lace. But it would be an accident, and she's mostly been shoved out of the cooking rotation anyway.

[optionalcausality]

Long post, somewhat personal. I'm trying to kind of process something that is an ongoing stressor in my life.

So. Executive function issues can be frustrating. Not just for the affected person, but also for those around them. Especially dependents / partners.

My parents haven't had a working dishwasher for over two years now. Their previous dishwasher broke after many years of service, and my mom wanted a replacement, and my dad agreed. So they purchased a brand new dishwasher, which broke after ten days.

My dad decided that he would take on the responsibility for handling this. Which, historically, means that he will do nothing until forced to by outside circumstances, and he will get increasingly irritable when others who are affected by his total lack-of-action try to get him to do something about it, or try to impose deadlines or requirements of any kind.

Was the dishwasher under warranty? Almost certainly, yes, but no action was taken.

After two years (in which my mom tried repeatedly to get my dad to just. Order. A. Replacement) and finally my making a big stink about it at a family gathering such that everyone could agree that two years without a dishwasher is excessive, my dad actually... Took a look at the dishwasher so he could get a model number, so that he could hire someone to come repair it.

(he had not so much as looked up local repair shops or handyperson services in two years)

He ended up "fixing it himself" and it worked for four days and died again.

And he continued to do nothing, insist that he would be the one to deal with the problem, refuse outside help including from relatives, and eventually tell my mom to stop bringing it up.

(my mom is very intelligent and organized and could order a replacement on her own, but she is more disabled than my dad is, and relies on him for a lot, and over the years has made the tactical choice that when he is this level of stubborn, it's not worth it to go "over his head" or whatever unless the situation is direr than this)

I have managed to take one tiny step towards a solution. I have worked out an arrangement with my dad where, if and only if he doesn't have a working dishwasher by the end of August 2024, I will order a replacement for him.

He agreed. He is of course confident that by then, he will have dealt with the situation on his own.

How is he so confident? Because it is more than 90 days away, so his brain (and mine in the absence of a calendar) approximates it as "at the heat death of the universe" and of course he will have dealt with it by then.

I fully expect to order a replacement on August 28, 2024, and for him to be annoyed or possibly very angry with me about it.

Now, venting aside: what I'm getting at is that this isn't new and unique. I grew up in a household where my dad would periodically take responsibility for specific tasks, which if things went well was fine. But if he ran into any unforeseen barriers, the problem wouldn't be fixed until someone got hurt or a pet's life was in danger or it turned into a big blowup fight that finally imposed an external deadline on him...

Or someone else did it.

Which would also result in a fight. And (I speculate) he'd feel that his control over the situation had slipped, so next time he'd be even more stubborn and more territorial over tasks that we all needed him to do and which he wasn't doing, but wouldn't let anyone else do, either.

There's some point where this becomes neglect, and some later point where this pattern of behavior (specifically: not meeting a need, and declaring that no one else is allowed to meet that need; continuing to do this when the issue is one of safety and/or sanitation) becomes abuse.

It's a thorny, complicated situation all around.

And there's a point where it feels crappy and manipulative to use his time-blindness against him -- to use the end of August 2024 as a deadline, knowing that his brain will parse it as basically infinity.

But by then it will be three years without a working dishwasher (which they've had money to replace, and which my mom has always wanted to replace). And I feel there's an argument to be made that my dad has spent two years proving that he isn't able to do this particular task, even if he doesn't see it that way.

Time-blindness. It's freaking rough.

[leam1983]

On Autonomy in the IT Industry

What's kinda frustrating for a disabled hardware geek like me is that a lot of my peers don't really see how common maintenance tasks are day-long planning and execution rigamaroles for me. Those tiny M.2 screws? They're a bitch to wrangle if your hind brain is so convinced you'll drop it in the frame that your limbs are overtaken by tremors so strong that the entire case shakes.

At the Old Place, my former boss used to give me an amused look. "Relax, Grem! It's just a single screw; you can't mess this up!" she'd say.

The fact is, I could - and I knew it. I've scratched material off of PCBs, shorted boards, lost screws, broke posts and scrapped hardware all because my motor controls never got the message that I know how to handle a PC case in multiple formats. The old boss never understood why I needed to force myself into borderline monastic levels of focus to switch M.2 drives out of a system, or why I demanded near-absolute quiet when my colleagues could shoot the shit while handling a laptop's stumpy little external screws.

Walt and Sarah, however, understand this all too well. I updated my Steam Deck's SSD last night, and both of them treated this like I were a heart surgeon performing a triple bypass. Others might've laughed, but I was actually given the space I needed, for a change. The same went for the Palpatine server - the more crucial operations always came with a ramping-down of Walt's phone calls.

What they also understand is that pushing past my disability and succeeding feels insanely good. I walked out of mine and Walt's room with a big-ass grin and a functional 1 TB Steam Deck in hand with no stripped screws or broken screw posts, and I was proud of myself. Sarah gave me a wolf whistle and Walt added a golf clap in equal parts supportive and teasing measures.

I doubt many able-bodied techs get that feeling; this "I did something! Me, on my own, without ever asking for help! Yes!" type of euphoria that I've only ever seen out of cripples like me when we both manage to pull ourselves by our bootstraps and materially succeed in what we'd envisioned. Able-bodied people tend to downplay most of what they do, but even switching RAM sticks without missing the slots at least four or five times still feels like a big thing for me - and I've been building PCs for about twenty years, now. Plus, the older I get, the more demanding some operations become. It makes successes all the more precious - and increasingly less banal.

[overflowchute]

i guess that's really my fundamental problem though. i can survive on my own but i solve life problems extremely slowly and without external pressure it can take months for me to even attempt a thing. adhd meds are weird b/c they do help. but the way they help is a bit sneaky, they let you focus on whatever thing you're currently doing. like you're setting yourself on rails. so you need their "power" but you also need the "will" to decide what thing you're using them to do

i've always felt that one of the psychological problems is much like having two magnets that you're pushing together as they repel. you can hold them together but the moment you're not exerting force they separate. the meds do help with that b/c they stop the separation. that's what the meds overcome, the repelling force that requires immense effort to do when you're not in the proper phase. and often once you start a task you can actually lock into it and fixate on it and get it done even without meds. but executive dysfunction can only be overcome by exhaustive planning and the problem is that exhaustive planning is work in-and-of-itself. the biggest problem for me with planning is that i earnestly don't know how long things take

if i schedule my entire day into blocks then i can kind of push myself to try to deal with it but if i'm actually "in the zone" it's hard for me to break away and i earnestly don't want to, because i don't know if i'll ever be able to come back to that! so i get motivated to stick with something until i've solved it, b/c i'm Actually Doing Something. which leads to me spending hours on, say, a programming thing i've done before but have to relearn and i want to finish before moving on. the really frustrating thing about situations like this is that such neurodivergence and mental disabilities and so forth feel like the answer is simply applying will, and yet you end up repeating a cycle of somehow not making the right decision… which is how addiction works of course. things look different in the moment on the ground. and if you don't know /where/ you must properly exert your will, it can be really difficult to change one's behavior

ive been thinking about this a lot b/c i got screwed up by daylight savings again but also it was dst last year that permanently knocked me out of my previous cycle, where i was able to consistently go to bed by at least midnight and get 5-6 hours of sleep. now i regularly get caught up on a specific distraction i'm trying to oust and don't even feel like i'm probably functionally in prep to sleep mode until about 12:30-1:30, and it's that weird mid evening brain fog before

i know i say this like once every few months we've all seen this thread but i am sort of pondering recognition of it and also of how i have not managed to fix it in any real regard. yesterday i accomplished only a few things - well, ok i did laundry/hygiene etc... but it's way too easy for me to end up trapped in brain trap cycles, low energy passive things like youtube videos i can't quite distract myself from and multitask, or, well, card games and other special interest stuff

i think fundamentally i am frustrated b/c i can be fairly functional when i have something to be motivated by but i don't have much of a strong push to fix these problems. it's just smth i survive over and over, becoming more miserable and cutting it closer and closer until something jolts me back into functionality for a few days. i've felt the same frustration with creative work, in that i don't even know who i'm making stuff for. and i think that emptiness is causing me problems. i earnestly do suspect that a major element is social for me, i put an immense amount of effort into the ygo community space i was in for a little while for instance lol. unfortunately i'm a picky person and easily triggered or upset by a lot of people, can't get all the social depth one kinda needs to actually, like, survive out of a lot of spaces like that... so it ended up being upsetting. but i do think maybe ive been wishing i had some social motivation

but ultimately this is a lot of self-analysis about what i probably should be doing that's may be totally separated from actually doing something. so i guess we'll see what happens

[harbingrs]

Starting to tag 'undescribed' for reblogs without image descriptions. Yes, it would be ideal if I could add them, but I can't - and not for reasons I can circumvent like learning how to write them better or asking for help, but because it instantly spirals me into being unable to regulate my behaviour. (And I do write descriptions for my original posts, since those are finite and rare).

More detail below - but I'm genuinely not trying to make someone else's accessibility issue all about me, so probably don't read this if you're a stranger (or I guess if you're dealing with a similar issue) but if I could keep this out of search completely, I would. I am not trying to get this post in front of people who need or advocate for image descriptions because it is a Me Problem, I just can't 100% control who sees this.

Note that I'm talking explicitly about moral OCD thoughts/compulsions, in case that might be triggering.

I'm aware of how ridiculous it is, but my moral OCD + ADHD + autism combo means that any time I start adding descriptions to reblogs - even just "when I'm able to" or "when I have time" - I can't regulate my own behaviour enough to stop (which is necessary for me to actually get work done).

Every reblog and every undescribed image becomes a crossroads where I can do the Good Thing or not, and how could I choose not to do the Good Thing? And it's the kind of simple, repetitive task that I get mentally locked into feeling like I can't control my actions (in an executive function sense) until something forces me to break the pattern.

Any time I've tried to challenge myself on this, thinking that I just need to try harder and do better and contribute a little when I can, that it shouldn't be such a big deal, I end up missing a full day of work because I get so locked in (and I'm self-employed so there are no external guardrails here). I can easily lose a full day before something forces me to stop (like not being able to go any longer without eating or sleeping).

Things like limiting myself to X number of descriptions per day or setting a timer don't work, because it immediately becomes a moral OCD intrusive thought/compulsion spiral every time I see a post where I COULD add an image description (even if I wasn't even planning to reblog it) and don't. Or I could go back through everything I've ever reblogged, and the 7000 posts in my drafts, and so on.

It's frustrating because it's an objectively silly problem to have, and posts about how there are no excuses, if you don't have the spoons for descriptions then just don't post, etc just make the obsessive-compulsive cycle worse. If it came down to 'add descriptions to every reblog or leave Tumblr' I would genuinely have to choose the latter, because I just can't engage with it safely with the way my brain is right now. I hope that's not always the case and I can get to a point where I can, even just to the point where it's /challenging/ and requires work but it's possible.

And I totally get why it's like 'your issues here are not the problem of people who need this accessibility feature' - which is why I'm not trying to bring it to anyone's attention and would never say this ON posts about image descriptions. I can only turn off reblogs and unfortunately can't keep this post out of search completely.

It's just one facet of a broader problem when it comes to any kind of activism or mutual aid or generally Doing Good. I can't safely regulate the time, energy or money I put into things once the obsessive-compulsive cycle starts - and with auADHD in the mix, it hijacks my executive functioning to the point where I feel completely out of control. And with OCD, the more you do the compulsion (ie. doing activism) the more it escalates.

And it fucking sucks. It truly sucks to be a person who genuinely gives a shit but can't separate Doing Good from a devastating mental illness. It fucking sucks.

And yes, I know what people will think by now - that there's no excuse for not doing things I should, and that it's my responsibility to fix it and get a handle on it in order to do that. I don't have access to treatment for this, and while I do try to work on it myself and push myself in order to break the obsessive-compulsive patterns, I genuinely have no chance of building those skills/abilities if I go straight for my biggest triggers. I've tried over and over and it never works, regardless of how hard I'm trying.

I don't know, I know /anything/ I say about this just lands in "it's your ethical responsibility to resolve anything that gets in the way of doing the right thing, period." And I know that how intensely I feel about /that/ is informed by my moral OCD as well. My brain just wants to substitute the original issue with "it's your moral responsibility to do /whatever it takes/ to fix this at any cost" or "whatever you have to sacrifice to do the right thing is what you need to do".

And that's part of the problem - that my moral OCD has no concept of what is reasonable or healthy to sacrifice in order to help other people. Whatever I do, it will never be good enough, because instead of making a sandwich, I could've eaten plain bread and donated that money I spent on sandwich fillings to someome who needs it more. OCD is always chasing Perfection and every single minor decision in my life becomes a missed opportunity to Do Good that causes me constant anxiety and guilt.

And it's so shameful to even talk about, knowing people will roll their eyes at how dramatic it is, like I'm making such a martyr of myself and /especially/ that I'm making other people's need or suffering all about me. But these are genuinely intrusive thoughts that don't reflect any kind of rational belief or value system I have. If it sounds like I'm making myself a martyr or a victim, it's not a choice I'm making to be self-centred - it's just a goddamn affliction in the same way that other forms like contamination OCD (which I also deal with) are. It feels like something being done to me that I don't want and didn't ask for and don't want any part in.

And then I know that fearing I'll be judged as a bad person for THAT is also part of the OCD, and so on, and so on. I don't even know if I'll be able to keep this post up - and then I know that saying things like that to pre-emptively protect myself from judgement also sounds manipulative like I'm setting myself up to play the victim - and then I also know that overthinking /that/ is part of my OCD - etc. This post could go on forever with me attempting to qualify whatever I just said and then immediately needing to qualify THAT.

It's safest to say nothing, do nothing, delete any posts I make because there's no chance of it going wrong, cut myself off from other people because I can't mess things up, and to always always turn internally and just try be better by any means necessary, to be as harsh and strict on myself as possible to Do The Right Thing. To end up deleting any post I make, not only to remove the risk but also to punish myself, that I don't get to /have that/ until I can be good enough - unless I can make a post that feels completely flawless, that's completely beyond reproach, I don't get to say anything at all.

And once again I'm making myself out to be a whiny victim, etc. Kinda interesting how OCD can look exactly like a personality disorder from the outside - disproportionate emotions, rapid mood swings, dramatic or histrionic or self-victimising behaviour, cycles of self-punishment or hot-and-cold relationships (due to push-pull kind of compulsions). Moral OCD symptoms are easily read as a kind of hero complex or martyr complex or self-aggrandisement.

It's no wonder that the DBT techniques I tried weren't helping me like they "should". Trying to identify and better manage my own emotions doesn't help when the driver is intrusive thoughts and compulsions, not simply intense emotions. Radically accepting your thoughts and feelings is an impossible ask without recognising the nature of intrusive thoughts, that they /aren't/ reflective of your organic feelings or values.

I don't really know how to end this. I don't usually make personal posts, and if I do, they aren't up for long. I genuinely just meant to note I was trying out tagging 'undescribed' and this kinda fell out. And I'm trying really hard to resist the need to go back and retag EVERYTHING on this blog because I know I won't be able to stop. I am tired.

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

no this is literally how the infinite scroll works. it trains you that you can consistently find pleasure in the endless slog through whatever pops up on your feed. and then you do, you see another little joke that makes you laugh and your brain goes :) !!" and looks for another one. this happens very quickly on the internet, where social media posts move very quickly. the negative post lasts as long as it takes you to read it or watch it or reject it 5 seconds in and you can keep searching. everything moves exactly at your pace. so you get used to the search for frequent small bursts of pleasure/stimulation at exactly your pace. and then you go to a Real Life Event and the real world cannot move as fast as the internet does and certainly not at your desired pace (impatience is associated with adhd). and because you're not getting frequent small bursts of pleasure like you've gotten used to and you're not allowed to reject it to search for a more immediately satisfying thing, the slower-paced activities in real life or even slower-paced activities digitally/online can feel less satisfying. which inevitably results in 'worsened attention span' as you're trained to drop things and move on even more than you're already inclined to do so. this is more harmful to adhd people because a part of adhd is a chronic dopamine deficiency--we chemically do not produce as much of the executive function chemical as more neurotypical brains do, so we are more vulnerable to things that are manipulating our behavior through it.

my attention span literally did get better when I quit tiktok and twitter because I was no longer constantly searching for new and better stimulation. i was able to withstand longer waits and better regulate myself without the external manipulation of my specific vulnerability

edit: it's not about the size of the bursts or about the level of pleasure. it's not strictly about the dopamine that's triggered, it's not dopamine addiction. it's about being in the habit of this search with its specific parameters and reward system.

Ok feel free to ignore if you don't wanna get into it, but what are the things people get wrong about dopamine that bother you? I'm curious

Dopamine is not a reward or happiness neurotransmitter, it's implicated in many processes (including things totally unrelated to the subject, like motor control) but if anything it's more associated with forecasting and search and surprise than with reward. So getting tons of stimulating little boosts of input from tiktok or whatever cant blow out your dopamine pathways or whatever people claim it does. Dopamine detoxes are also not really a thing, quitting social media and appreciating slowness and presence are rewarding because theyre less stressful and overloading, not because social media is like "too much pleasure" or whatever people think.

[apaganacademic]

I've been thinking about doing a proper WordPress blog post about this but since my executive functioning hasn't come back from the war for that level of Formality (TM), let's do this, instead.

Basic skills I wish I'd been encouraged to start with as a baby polytheist spiritworker.

My teen nephew has been making noises about learning spiritwork, so here's what I basically told him.

Have a mindfulness practice so that you know where 'you' end and 'other' begins.

The difference may not be so straightforward, depending on a whole variety of spiritual factors, but GENERALLY SPEAKING, you want to have a baseline standard of being able to know what's your internal narrator/intrusive thoughts/mental illness/etc and what's actually other entities. Not all (or even most) random thoughts for most people are actual spirit chatter. Work on your discernment.

If possible, I'd recommend having a supportive but critical third-party support: a therapist you actually trust, for example. Especially in the beginning, it's easy to get sucked into thinking everything is spirit contact, or spiritual damage, or spiritual something. Maybe it is! A lot of it isn't. (Occasionally it's an awkward combo of both.) Having an incredulous (but supportive) sounding board can help you calibrate how your personal brain stuff plays with your spiritual stuff, and also help avoid getting sucked into cultish movements that do harmful stuff like equate PTSD = empathy.

**Note: this third party should preferably have a) some legit knowledge in appropriate peer counseling/therapeutic support and b) isn't someone who's gonna be bringing their personal agenda to you, such as trying to invalidate your spiritual beliefs or, on the other end of the spectrum, undermine your mental health by framing it as magic instead (e.g. equating delusions with spirit contact).

Additionally, if you're familiar with your spiritual body, e.g. how your physical body carries spiritual energy, it can also help you know when you've picked up unwanted Stuff like some curses, spiritual parasites, or other immaterial 'gunk.'

"Mindfulness" can look a bunch of different ways. More conventional mods of meditation are perfectly fine, but other kinds of somatic/embodiment practices can work just as well: experiment to see what's compatible and sustainable for your lifestyle, resources, and cognitive processing style.

Pick an external divination style and get comfortable with it.

Doesn't really matter what kind: what you're looking for is some kind of a system that can become a shared language between you and your own spirits/gods/blessed powers. That can take some negotiation, and you can always change systems, but pick one to start with and get to know it.

You won't always have to rely on another person to act as the messenger between you and your own spirits. (That said, there are times when you shouldn't do your own div, but that's a different post.)

Having an external div option will help you double-check on your own intuition. Not sure if what you saw was a sign from your spirits? Use div to make a more formal check. If we're personally invested in a particular answer to a question we have, that can skew how we interpret our intuition.

Helps deepen personal relationship between you and your spirits, which also makes shit like mediumship or using omens easier.

You can double-check other people's divination for you. For more important/higher stakes stuff (such as a Tarot reader telling you that a specific deity is now claiming you and you have to swear an oath, dear lord, please take don't take that as face value without at least a second opinion!), this can be particularly important in terms of maintaining a sense of autonomy over your own relationships with your blessed powers.

Basic healthy communication skills that frankly most of us aren't ever taught.

All the meditation and div practice in the world isn't gonna do shit if you don't know how to talk to other beings, human or otherwise. You know what made the actual biggest difference for me in transitioning from 'flailing baby pagan practice' to 'devotional polytheist priest'?

Knowing my boundaries AND how to negotiate them safely and healthily. Learning how to do possessory mediumship first started with me getting every single one of my trauma triggers slammed ALL AT ONCE. Nothing healthy would've come out of that experience if I hadn't had been intentionally practicing my boundary-setting skills in my mundane human relationships, AND if my blessed powers hadn't been willing to meet me halfway. It took a LOT of conversation and mistakes were made on both sides, but now possession is something that's become privately sacred and beautiful and wonderful for me, partially because of how hard-earned it was and how it required the development of mutual trust. (Now I get scolded for being TOO trusting with my main lady, oops. 😅)

Conflict management. A lot of people are conflict-avoidant. That's not helpful. It's also not helpful if you dread "getting in trouble" or "being a disappointment" every time you have contact with your blessed powers. Learn how to handle disagreement, misunderstandings, disappointment, and frustration with more intention and skill so that you can move past those inevitable incidents with growth instead of deeper shame, resentment, avoidance, or resignation.

Assertive communication (or your social/cultural equivalent of that, since what's considered 'appropriate communication' might change based on culture, circumstances, etc). Assertive isn't the same as aggressive, either. But basically, this is the kind of communication that's like, "What are your needs, and what are my needs, and how can we collaborate on exploring options to get both our needs met with mutual respect and dignity?" For example: when my blessed powers ask for a daily disciplined routine, my neurospicy ass has learned to ask what the goal is and here are the methods I am neurologically capable of to achieve said goals, how does that sound? So far, we've always been able to come to a mutually satisfying plan that doesn't deepen my old, unhelpful, internalized ableist narrative of being 'too broken to do something that any neurotypical person could do.'

There are lots of other helpful skills, both spiritual and mundane, and not everyone may agree with the ones I picked out here, but these are the most basic ones I find myself returning to most often and being the most thankful for, personally.

[rocinantescoffeestop]

Ted Lasso has ADHD

He’s just super well-adjusted to it and has had lots of support through his life in this particular area. In all honest, he’s like ADHD goals; someone who’s comfortable and accepting of himself and his neurology.

This is so not a scientific analysis. Just a nerd looking for solace in yet another fictional character. ;)

Five reasons why I firmly see Ted Lasso as an ADHD character:

1.) Pasta Water.

Right off the bat, here’s what started this whole internal discussion: pasta water on the stove. As well-adjusted as he seems in day-to-day appearances, little details slip his mind. Forgetfulness is one of the more obvious traits of ADHD. In 1.09 when Ted and Roy Kent are having a heart to heart about Roy’s future on the team, the scene starts off with Ted trying to offer Kent something to eat/drink like any good host, and he makes a joke about offering the pot of pasta water that’s been sitting on his stove for two days. Kind of odd to have that sitting out, right? Not for a neurodivergent, though. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve baked cookies and then left all the materials scattered about on the stove and counters overnight, and then just didn’t have the energy or mindfulness to clean it up until someone got on my case for leaving a mess.  Our minds are just on a higher plane; we prioritise differently. Ted’s not at all concerned with the material. It’s the heart and soul that gives things meaning and thus gives him muse to pursue something, and frankly, cooking and cleaning up doesn’t give him that joy.

2.) Reminders.

He has little signs that say ‘believe’ tacked up all around his house, and in the same episode that’s mentioned (1.10 if I remember correctly – when he, Nathan, and Beard are discussing tactics for the game against Manchester), there’s also a fleeting mention of having a reminder to floss (that he also states to ignore due to exhaustion). I constantly have to write things down; anything that pops into my head, I put it on a flashcard and pin it to the wall, because even if it’s something I believe in, it might leave in the next few seconds so if I want it done/ingrained in my head, I have to have it somewhere outside my head. It’s because of our absolutely shot executive function – doesn’t really work too well – that leads us around our day in a spiral, constantly finding something different/a new angle or another story off our previous story that leads us astray. We get acquainted with backpedalling, mainly from other people (or ourselves) who keep telling us: hey, you were about to tell me something? I don’t have all day. Or something similar.

3.) Mentality.

It’s obvious that Ted’s thought process is miles away from the people he’s surrounded by, and the more people try to drag him back to his way, the more firm he gets. (The only person who I’ve noticed doesn’t try to sway his mentality is Keeley, they actually vibe really well together, right off the bat, which is funny because I see a little adhd-coding in her as well.) In my experience, the more someone tells me to see a different side/do something else, the more I want to keep doing what I want to do/keep believing in my way. (It’s only recently that I discovered this was a trait shared among many with ADHD; I thought it was just me being a dick to be honest XD.) I work so well with opposition. Losing that feels a bit like losing a purpose. It’s just so lucky that Ted’s way of staying true is optimism, because there’s a lot of rampant pessimism everywhere you go, so he never truly lives without his purpose. Breaking away from this core is painful, too, and we see him refuse to do just that literally every episode.

4.) More Reasons for Optimism.

Here’s another reason for optimism: RSD. We all know that positive thinking is the first line of defense against negative thinking, and you’re thinking duh right now, I can feel it. ;D That just helps me warm up to what I’m really trying to say which is about RSD, or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, a way to describe a symptom of ADHd. Now, at first, I didn’t see much evidence for this. RSD is what makes it very hard for us to bear criticism, and from what I see of Ted, he manages to handle criticism pretty well, he’s pretty civil about it, always taking it with a smile. And typically, people with this dysphoria don’t handle rejection or perceived rejection too well. Then, I realised that Ted’s intense optimism acts as a coping mechanism against this. If something is hard to hear, if criticism pulls him down to the depths, he forces himself to bounce back up because, in all honesty, everything starts with a smile, and after you start that (starting is the hardest thing), picking yourself up becomes slightly easier. He’s clearly had a lot of support in this area, not to mention a lot of his rambles almost sound like he’s searching for support – for validation – too. He latches onto people easily because of this, because external validation is such a powerful force. (The same goes for the lack of that, powerful in the opposite effect.) He knows this well, which is why he tries to be such a strong force of support for others. I can see this as being a contributing factor to why his divorce lead to an alarming/seemingly uncharacteristic bitter outburst and a severe panic attack – although that could also be because he spent so much of his life/devotion loving his wife and raising a family, that anyone forced into the situation wouldn’t have fared much better. In my experience, living with RSD has shaped me into a selfless person, ceaseless supporter, and postive-thinker, because I don’t want the people around me to feel as lonely and rejected as perceived criticism and the like leaves me. It doesn’t even matter whether I like them or not, I always end up feeling nauseated if something I say leads to even slight aggravation. (That’s something I’m working to address, as not everything I say or do will lead to people hating me, but it’s such a big motivator in my life.)

5.) The peanut butter jar.

This is a clever hack to combat the munchies. My ADHD leaves me hungry all of the time, but it’s a hunger that’s all in the head. Eating gives me stimulation to stay focused on whatever I’m doing, which isn’t always the healthiest (I like eating crunchy and/or salty things especially, as savoury keeps him going for longer). Leaving an open peanut butter jar on the table is honestly a clever hack. Peanut Butter isn’t the worst food to snack on, especially if it’s all natural/doesn’t contain processed sugars (those do not work well for our brains). It’s sweet but a little salty, and it’s a protein, meaning a little goes a long way in making us feel full. I know I don’t like to eat too much peanut butter, because then it starts to make me feel a little stuffed (not sick per se, just uncomfortable). Swinging by every so often to eat a bit of peanut butter is the perfect lil boost of dopamine, doesn’t over stuff, and the movement to get there is also refreshing. (I think I’m actually going to try this out for myself!)

There may be more, but alas, I’ve uncovered all the major signs that have been rattling around in my head since my first rewatch of this incredible show. XD!

tl;dr –

[positivelyadhd]

hi! is it an ADHD thing to be absolutely unable to function on weekends and holidays and such (online school was hell), you know, days when there's technically nowhere to be but you still need to do things or you'll be in trouble but somehow the day is over without knowing what you were doing

hi anon, sorry it took me a while to answer this!

yes it is! that sounds a lot like executive dysfunction which is a huge part of ADHD!

one of the things about executive dysfunction is we struggle to start/switch between tasks without external prompts and structure. this is why things like online school can be difficult, since it's self motivated, rather than being motivated by prompts of moving classes/schedules ect like we do at school!

our perception of time also plays a role in executive dysfunction in the form of "time blindness" and means we can easily lose track of time (or feel like time is moving very slowly). this can, again have an impact on how we manage with the lack of structure that comes with online school.

I'd be lying if i said i had this part of ADHD under control, since it's one of the things I struggle with most (i feel your pain with online school!) but here's a range of tips and resources that could be helpful for you! (under the cut to prevent this getting too long)

Structure! creating your own structure or time table (weather that is a lose list of things to do that day or a more structured list with specific timings) can help a lot with getting things done. there's so many different forms this can take and it depends on what works best for you

timers! setting a timer for a period of time to work and stopping once the timer goes off takes away some of the parts of executive dysfunction i talked about! the Pomodoro technique is one that's used widely in study communities and the one i use! I also use apps like forest which prevents me from getting distracted and using other apps while the timer is set.

Rewards! ADHD brains work big on rewards and so giving yourself a reward for doing a task can sometimes be whats needed to kick start the work! I personally use the app habitica since it "gamifys" to-do lists and rewards you specifically for crossing off your tasks! it also helps as a way of keeping track of what I need to do that day!

I've also got more resources for executive dysfunction in my ADHD masterdoc and under the executive dysfunction or study tags of my blog!

Finally, be kind to yourself. Executive dysfunction can be difficult and especially makes things like online school harder for those of us with ADHD. I want to remind you that you're doing the best you can and I think that ultimately, looking after your own mental health is more important than your productivity.

[theforesteldritch]

This so much. Even properly medicated with stimulants that do genuinely help a lot and I can see the difference when I’m not on them, it’s still always such a struggle. My executive functioning skills are poor enough that I constantly feel like I’m fighting my brain to do anything and it’s just. So exhausting to constantly have to wrestle with yourself and lose so often and suddenly you’re behind on half your assignments for school or things for work and nobody seems to get how difficult it is. It was much less of an issue when I was younger, I’ve always struggled with inattention but when you’re a kid, there’s so much external structure and support that executive functioning issues isn’t as big of a problem because you don’t have to make yourself do things your parents or teachers do that. And then all that falls away and you’re drowning as everyone else is swimming. And while I love certain aspects of routine like listening to my goth playlist on the way home from school or work since I’m autistic, it’s genuinely so hard for me to even accept help and structure because I can’t stand most rigidly scheduled things and feel so restricted by someone else having to tell me what to do. And so I end up with eating peanut butter out of the jar for breakfast, piles of clothes that need to be washed in my room, and forgetting to brush my teeth or shower for days. I’ve gotten lucky since I don’t make skin oils or sweat like normal so I can get more wiggle room with showering but it can still be an issue. It’s so debilitating and even though meds help even medicated, what some of my peers would consider struggling would be smooth sailing to me because it is such a battle to make myself do things, and not just a battle, one I usually lose. Deadlines aren’t much of a motivator for me because I see them and I’m beating myself up and telling myself to just go and do it and make myself do it but I can’t zero in on the deadline to motivate myself more. I watch it pass while feeling like a failure. People talk about the battle but not the usually losing or going on meds and suddenly you can do things normally and I feel even more like an outsider because it’s not a bad thing that other peoples experiences are different than mine but it would be nice for some people to have experiences that are similar deeper than surface level with some things with adhd with me. Meds help a lot but there’s no ‘so THIS is how people without ADHD feel’ moment for me. And like you said. While my impairments with ADHD do require more support than a lot of other people, there are a bunch of people with higher support needs or need more support in completely different areas. And if I feel alone like this sometimes with having higher support needs than some others with adhd, it’s probably even worse for people who have more support needs than me.

Sometimes I'm reminded that people hate people with severe ADHD so fucking much. They base the entire ADHD experience on people with mild milquetoast ADHD, to the point that people think experiencing ADHD at all is severe, and then act like people with severe ADHD are just weaponizing incompetence. I am never going to be able to live alone. I need external support and reminders in order to function, because my brain cannot produce internal reminders, even after 13 years of therapy. I had to drop out of college because I wasn't getting support. And I am not the only person with this experience. I don't have the world's most severe ADHD.

People are fighting against the idea that all autism is level one LSN autism. I really, really hope that someday ADHD gets the same treatment.

[crackcrocs]

DEATH WILL ONLY BE THE BEGINNING #1

1. The backbone to my emotions

As someone who  cannot conceptualise  time in any way whatsoever, I want to say sorry to my loved ones. I'm aware I still need to send my friends messages every once in a while and remind them I still want to be their friends and I need to actively work on this. I need to overcome this fear stopping me from being present and accepting peoples love and support. I want to break free from me and I want to feel content being on this earth, I want nothing more than to enjoy experiences with my loved ones. I love you I love you.

I am a young charismatic, creative individual learning to do things differently so I don't always have the same outcomes. I suffer from a Cluster B Personality Disorder; under the same umbrella of mental health I also experience extremely intrusive thoughts on a daily basis, that can become obsessive and compulsively hyper fixated thoughts in an instant. I have anxiety, depression and a lot of the time I’m deeply dissociated to a point where I struggle to believe I’m even real, even when I do know I am real- I have no attachment to my limbs or body as a whole and only feel alive in a spiritual sense or when I self harm. I don't want to get too into my illnesses; as I’m not someone who really likes labels, just know that everyday is a battle and each personality that exists within me is different. I wouldn't say drastically, however its evident for me and living with so many different masks can be intense. Especially when you've tried to convince people that you're just one solid mould in the hopes they don't perceive you as an intense person. I am going to try to take you through a few of my altars and moods starting with the emptiest subconscious alters that I call the backbones of my emotions to the more powerful  energetic ones that haven't managed to yet consume me over the years. I hope this can give people an insight.

Overall I present a pretty confident front, I like to appear like I’ve got my life together even though I’m so far from it, sometimes I’m not sure ill even find the strength to go on long enough in attempt to get my life together, which is a real problem but it's the sad truth. Don't waste time reading this if you're easily triggered as this piece of writing will consist of real and genuine feelings. I’m in no attempt trying to create content for people who enjoy turning blind eyes and wishing they didn’t see this so I’ll give you a fair warning. I'm not responsible for your triggers, whereas I’m responsible for the things I’ve done. I might have cared too much at one point, but I will not hold myself captive to those situations nor will I regret them. I want the lies, deceit and hurt that I’ve committed against loved ones to end, my secrecy has done enough damage and its exhausting pushing people away even though that’s not usually the intent, truth is I am so embarrassed of myself. I'm private, secretive and mysterious but I’ll also talk about my childhood trauma after like 5 minutes. I guess this says I’m happy to talk about my trauma because it's what I know and am comfortable with, I just struggle to tell anyone the real suicidal me behind my problems. I hate that I’m so young and feel like a dead person already.

I tend to act out or distance myself due to fear which isn’t clear at first if you know me, but does become obvious. I might appear as someone with no care in the world, like I’m unbothered, but I assure you that's the African pride combined with the Leo pride. I also don't want people to treat me like a footstool, which has happened when I’ve come off ass too passive. I care so much and over think absolutely everything, it's literally my only way of thinking. I have little to no self esteem and I have no clue who confidence is unless under the influence of something, be it weed, alcohol or psychedelics (which I don't take much of because I enjoy them and don't want to abuse them) I mean I can function sober, I don't even like to be out of control high or drunk, but as Chief Keef once said, I hate being sober. #i'mTrash4thereference. Although I’m not fully healed and functioning yet, I’m a developed character with both positive and negative traits. At the moment I’m going back and fourth between 'just stop trying' and 'you cant give up'. Sometimes depression is kind of like looking at yourself through a window, there’s this part of your brain that understands it'll pass, but you’re so far into despair that its impossible to see the way out, its a lot like being trapped. I am having a bad patch right now, the difference between this one and the last one is I’m more self aware with less of a desire to go on. At least I’m no longer suffering from paranoia and thinking everyone's out to get me all the time or that I’ll get trafficked walking home from somewhere, but depression and mania are so bloody invasive and there’s always that little voice in my head telling me ill never be good enough. Executive dysfunction kills my motivation because I have so many things to do and I cant pick anything to start first, it gets worse when my depression gets worse too. I'm not lonely though; I have a few people who care for me- and while I'm trying to not involve them in the metal episode, they are around to talk to and that means so much. My friends are super encouraging even though I've only briefly mentioned that I'm having a sad time right now, and that's awesome.

I hate that no matter how much better I get there's still this deep desire to get worse. I don't feel like a real person. I just feel like a collection of what people want me to be and various mental disorders. It would be so cool if I could admit to the world I have a personality disorder without feeling disgusting and without fear.

I've had plenty time to reflect upon every bit of thought that created the barbed wire surrounding my logical brain, I want to feel okay to be alive, but I so strongly just want to die. I am tired of fluctuating from feeling extremely vigorously suicidal to passively suicidal; where I just don't have the energy to carry it out myself. It's gotten way past the point that it doesn't matter what kind of day I have, I think about killing myself all day. Sleep is an escape from life and I'm always tired and wanting to 'sleep'. Deep down I feel like I’m waiting for the right time to end my life and it's not the right time yet because I still have a footprint to leave behind, I still have journal pages I want to burn. I cant just jump off the highest accessible building or mall car park I could find just yet- I don’t just want to ruin others by hurting them with my death. It's sad to think I grew into this mindset, waking up wishing I was dead.

Being abandoned by many people in the past made me doubt people and think everyone was out to get me or wanted something from me, it made me feel hurt and lone. So I felt it would be better to let people down before they could hurt me so I wouldn't repeat the same cycle when forming new connections. It wasn't intentional but I could just silence myself due to fear.

I just found myself feeling immensely hopeless, like I was too internally enraged at the external world to be able to trust anything of it. I definitely do want to get better because I’m tired of feeling this way, it's so exhausting and I hate pushing people away from me like I’m poison. I need to allow people to accept all of me.

Before picking up these coping mechanisms when I was younger and more insecure; I wanted to be a part of the world, I had this strong urge to fit in. I had to learn how to manage my anxiety and socialising became more exhausting stemming from my fear of being 'odd' or 'different', I didn’t want to be called out for being different- it was not a compliment at that age, it always felt like a being the joker in the card deck. I was intensely afraid of being judged or labelled as such. Being told I was a 'weirdo' didn't help at all, that type of criticism is what got to me the most. People made me feel like I needed to change, like I was too African, even in a joking manner it didn't help- because although I was okay with who I was, I did feel like I had to change and westernise myself to fit in. I ended up hanging around with people that didn't care, doing stupid things I didn’t even want to do, dating people I didn't connect with. Eventually I got tired of people using me for entertainment, tired of catering to those who refused to understand. I still have to admit there were many periods that I lowered my frequency to be on the wavelength of others that did not match mines at all, I hate that I'm someone who always feels the need to explain myself so people don't think I'm a bad person and even though I don't owe it to everyone and now I am able to make better choices and I'm no longer easily influenced, it still hurts that i was ever around people that made me feel like I was over exaggerating my mental health or uncomfortable to a point where I learned to downplay it or the mention of it. Now as a coping mechanism I’ve become so facetious and sarcastic about my trauma it's a struggle to take myself seriously at times. Users and abusers belittled me to such a point where I felt they'd underestimated my intelligence and most of all humiliated me. It made me tired of justifying myself so now most days I’m just a mute, but I really do finally have good people in my life who deserve some sort of explanation and it's a shame they don't get to be experience a truly present consistent me. It’s just after having the wrong eyes on me, I don’t want anything to see me. I hate attention because I’m so embarrassed of myself I don’t want to be noticed. People looking at me make me want to kill myself.

I've been told to move past my rage, to let go and become a grounded and level headed person. I've been told there is hope for all of us. Must be nice to believe that, all I could wonder was what it was like to get angry without getting homicidal and suicidal. Even on most days where nothing extreme would happen besides negative emotions, my brain still travelled to a dark realm. I've come to a point where I want to live in my daydream universe wile I physically rot away. That's my business. Sometimes I feel as though all my friendships are on a timer, or more so it's that my timer is about to go off, so I subconsciously shy away and make sure i have no deep friendships. Just in case my head decides to do something stupid.

I don't want to have no friends, I want to have friends and I do value friendships so much more than entitled relationships, I just have a difficulty maintaining friendships because it's exhausting for me, it takes a lot of energy to be social and on a level that isn't just superficial where I can just let go and allow myself to fully be. Sometimes I have a hard time relating to other people, and thus I may feel I don’t belong or don’t quite fit in- causing me to feel irritated, paranoid or even in pain during social situations. It's not always this bad, and I don't mean for it to sound dramatic. It's different when In person and I’m really relaxed and comfortable with the company. However virtually socialising and expressing will always be extremely anxiety enducing and its something I need to overcome especially going into this new phase of Artificial Intelligence.  So if I start to drift away it most likely isn't a reflection of you. The cycle goes I need alone time to recharge then I realise how long has passed and I just feel so bad I haven’t gotten back, I tell myself I’m an awful friend for dissociating for so long, and then I don’t know how to explain that so my anxiety rises, mood drops and I spiral back into a pit of depression, often wanting to relapse but refraining from doing so. Sometimes I manage to get out of the pit, but by then so much has piled up I don't know where or how to begin again.

I don't feel like I could have a normal friendship as well as romantic relationship. It's hard for me to long term imagine myself being fully relaxed enough to let my guard down and not reluctant to express. I don’t think there’s any condition where ill just be came and enjoy a connection without worrying that the other person isn’t putting in as much effort, or they have an image of me, or that I’ve amplified the emotions and even though I feel them that way do they really understand me or love me as much. Silence is so upsetting and I hate the fact I do it when I'm afraid of myself or don't feel good enough. I never intent for it to become 'the silent treatment' because in reality its not treating anyone, it's more a reflection of what I’m internalizing and not wanting or being unable to project and express those feelings without feeling like party pooper, an attention seeker or 'too deep'. I don't mean to give people false hope, I love the people in my life so much and every one I’ve met on this journey. I'm learning to look at life through a different lens and the people who contributed to my suffering will not be the definition of me. People have led me to believe so much and strung me along, not letting me go- and I realised those entitled controlling abusive relationships were not serving me. I couldn't keep doing it. Now even though I want closeness I end up pushing people away or leaving them in the dark because of fear, especially of something new because I've never experienced anything good and true for a long enough duration of time to rid me of that fear. I also have fear of rejection or hurting, I fear becoming too emotionally invested and becoming co dependant so I end up wanting to avoid the pain than actually wanting to experience the joy and growth the relationship could offer, so I end it before it begins to avoid any possible pain. I feel like I don't deserve these connections,and sometimes the depression runs so deep I have to push people away in case I want to do something stupid- I don’t want them to feel at fault, or obligated to be able to handle me. Sometimes I really can just only be with myself and my thoughts so I hide but it may appear that I’m pushing others away because of my isolation and neglect.

With everyone I know, I get this feeling that they're too good for me, their energy is so radiant and loving but I feel so broken and don’t want to depend on that. I've had perfectly ideal people come into my life and I feel they’re too good for me because I have a lot of work to do on myself first, primarily I need to build up confidence and self esteem because it's the root of most my issues. I want to relate to people, share our deepest fears and wishes without fear of judgement. It's not that I don't want to get better, I simply cannot remember what it was like to have an actual honest to god normal personality. The feeling of being a mentally unstable chameleon is all I have  now. I AM my illness, that's the only identifier I have left. I can't remember normality.

I understand that I’m lucky and I’m not ungrateful for the things and people I do have, it doesn’t mean that my life doesn’t suck because of those lucky things. I often think about if someone created technology to transfer life to another, I’d happily give them mine because they'd live it much better than me, I’m not worth anything to myself. I never wanted to be someone to cause pain on the people I love but now I do, even if that’s just through silence. I just disappear when I haven’t been doing well and  although I know things get better, recovery isn’t linear and that not all my days are bad, I just have extreme chronic feelings of emptiness.

I struggle to trust people because I don't want to be hurt but I need people so much, I hate feeling unloved. It's so overwhelming because I feel everything so extremely as if I’m going to explode.

My sense of self and reality feels destroyed, my future and dreams are uncertain and it's hard for me to move on, sometimes it scares me what I’m doing to people without the intention of it, being too much or not enough- or at least feeling that way. It's hard for me to give myself a reason and it's not on the people around me to fill my empty void, I hate forcing people to be my friend or understand my illness. I cant expect anyone to want to- it feels like I’m holding their hand while they pull it away; and even though it's not the case I feel awful, I constantly feel like I’m in a more pessimistic head space. I'm worried people will realise I'm as pathetic as I say I am.