#i just had a thought process and my ADHD brain wouldn't let it go until i shared

[redysetdare]

I keep seeing other Aros say things like "Having a crush sounds like an anxiety attack" and while I get the misunderstanding I need y'all to realize that it's literally just the vagueness of the wording that's making you think this.

Crushes often get described as causing a "racing heart" you know what also is described that way? someone being excited. Someone being overjoyed. and yes, someone feeling anxious.

And the thing is, it's not wrong to assume anxiety because yes - Crushes can cause a bit of anxiety but the reason for the anxiety is different. Someone may be anxious around a crush because they want their crush to like them and don't want to embarrass themselves. It's just the generic anxiety of wanting to be likable to people but instead just being geared towards a specific person.

There's also the fact that a crush, like anxiety, does trigger adrenaline. but so do many things, such as going on a roller coaster. People enjoy roller coasters just fine because of the adrenaline rush and everyone agrees that going on roller coasters aren't anxiety attacks.

Basically what I'm trying to get at here is "this sounds like an anxiety attack" shows a misunderstanding of symptoms and in some cases is willfully ignorant as it shows that you don't wish to learn beyond your own understanding. And this misunderstanding is due to how vague the wording used to describe crushes usually is. It's using words and symptoms that depending on the context can mean different things.

TL;DR Crushes are no more like "anxiety attacks" then getting an adrenaline rush on a roller coaster. It's okay to not understand something but maybe don't call what you don't understand an "anxiety attack"

[heyitsduff]

it's been a week, now, and i think i've probably got my thoughts together well enough to make this post.

i didn't start watching techno or any dsmp member until around early 2021, when the first episode of the great potato war popped up in my recommended box. i watched it. and then i watched the next 2 parts. and soon enough i was neck deep in skywars commentaries and watching a man beat minecraft with a steering wheel.

needless to say i was completely hooked, and i continued watching techno's videos frequently throughout the year. c!techno was my favorite character on the dsmp by far, his was the only pov i even watched most of the time. something about him and his content was just so captivating, it could make something as fickle as my horrible adhd brain settle down and focus for a while, just to watch his vods.

when he told us he had cancer, i was worried, but i convinced myself everything would be fine. after all, he didn't seem too concerned about it, so i shouldn't be either, right?

and that feeling was only strengthened by the next update. they got the tumor out, and he got to keep his arm! of course it'll take a while to recover, but he's in the clear now, right?

i was in the shower when that last video dropped. i went in feeling good, i'd had a pretty nice day and was getting ready to relax and veg out in front of my computer until i decided to go to bed.

instead i, a whole 17 year old male (almost a grown ass man, as my dentist would say) spent the next two hours hunched over sobbing in the bathroom over a minecraft youtuber.

now, i've been lucky enough to not have experienced a death in the family, at least not someone i actually knew, since my great grandmother died when i was in first grade. but that also meant that i hadn't really experienced grief like this before, and i didn't know what to do with myself.

i ended up texting my mom. she was just downstairs, but i don't really like being seen when i'm vulnerable, and i was honestly afraid she'd judge me for getting this emotional over someone i didn't know personally.

but she didn't, thankfully. she said i might not have known him personally, but i knew part of him, and that part was important to me, and its okay to grieve for that. which is the way i've tried to think about this whole thing from then on.

after i was sure i was done crying, i went back to my room and didn't talk to anyone in person for the rest of the night. i needed the time to process, now that the shock was over and i'd gotten the immediate feelings out.

i ended up having a short text conversation on discord with a friend of mine who was also a fan of techno. he said he'd managed to avoid crying, but only because he knew if he started, he wouldn't be able to stop. i think that's the most genuine emotion i've ever seen from him. that's how much our minecraft pig man affected people.

i delivered the news myself to my other friend. that was rough.

i think i've let a few more tears flow, a sniffle here and there, since then, but i've been able to return to functioning like normal.

i'm gonna really miss techno. he was someone i looked up to, who i could always count on to cheer me up when i was having a rough day. but i know he wouldn't want me to just sit here in a puddle of my own tears, no matter how much i want to sometimes. hell, he'd probably call me a nerd for getting all choked up again writing this post.

good game, pig man.

gg.

[chibisquirt]

You don't have to answer, but if you wouldn't mind. What are some things you've learned about ADHD from Tumblr that are applicable to you, or others you may now? I've been reading more on it and how it manifests in girls/women and was curious when I read your rb on that post about Grammarly

I don’t mind at all!  Fair warning:  this is gonna be LONG.

I’m going to start by repeating something I mentioned in that post:  I was diagnosed in third grade, which was over two decades ago.  I had my diagnosis halfway through elementary school, much less high school and two rounds of college.  So a lot of the old information about ADHD I learned as a young person, and those things are worth exploring, too.  

Example:  It’s not that I’m not listening, Mrs. Nock, it’s just that if I try to keep my hands still, then the only thing I will retain from the lesson will be keep your hands still and not the things you trying to teach, which are supposedly important! 

(Mrs. Nock was the one who said to me, “I believe you believe you’re paying attention.”  Yes, it’s been fifteen years.  Yes, I’m still mad.  If you can’t have basic respect for your students, don’t teach.)

I figured out half on my own, half because of the counselling that if I had a fidget tool that didn’t require words I would pay better attention than if I tried to sit still.  (I still remember being mocked by my dad for fidgeting well after making that discovery, though.  Apparently diagnoses should only inform compassion when they’re his.)  On the same lines, I also figured out that music in the background wouldn’t work for me if it had words, and television is too distracting for me to use at all.  (I have a friend, though, whose ADHD works the opposite way:  he has difficulty focusing if there isn’t a television in the background.  Yes, both are valid.)

So, the Classics:  

I always had trouble with organization and cleaning, had trouble with schedules and calendars and managing my time.  Those are the things they’ll warn you about, the things they’ll tell you in counselling are natural and normal things for people with ADHD to have trouble with.  Trouble paying attention, sure.  Trouble sitting still.  Procrastination.  Got it.

But if you turn those traits around and re-frame them, they become a new set of symptoms.  Adaptations for these new symptoms are more personal and universally applicable in my life, and therefore, to my mind, more useful.

Take Procrastination.  (No really: please take it.)  That just means “putting it off until tomorrow,” and there are lots of reasons to do it:  “don’t have the tool I need” is one of the biggies, “want to conserve steps” trips me up a lot, “I still have time to get to it” is HUGE for me...  But a lot of times, these are just superficial reasons.  The re-framed symptom is, Trouble making yourself do things you don’t want to do.  

ADHD is an executive function disorder.  That’s a phrase I first learned on Tumblr, by the way; it may have been mentioned by one of my earlier counsellors, but it definitely wasn’t taught.  

This is why soooo many of us have struggled with the perception (including self-perception) that we’re lazy!  But no one tells the kid in the wheelchair he’s just lazy for not playing basketball.  (Okay, they totally do.  People are terrible.  Ignore that, stick to the point.)  I reframe this the way I do because acknowledging this as a symptom, taking the blame out of it, makes it easier to find adaptation.

Now, this is a personal post.  YMMV.  But I have an easier time managing my conduct if, instead of calling myself lazy a procrastinator, I say, “I keep not doing that --> oh it’s because I Don’t Wanna --> how can I con myself into doing it?”  (Strategies include bargaining, making it easier, powering through but then allowing yourself to stop afterwards, just acknowledging that I Don’t Wanna and allowing that to be valid...)  Procrastination is an action, but “executive function disorder” is a disease and “I Don’t Wanna” is its trigger, just as much as an allergy and a clump of ragweed are.  “Procrastination” is a powerful sphynx against which I’m helpless, but “I Don’t Wanna Disease” lets me start cultivating my metaphorical catnip and researching the answers to common riddles.

And while we’re talking about procrastination--and trouble with deadlines, and schedules in general--let’s talk about Time Insensitivity.  Missed deadlines and perpetual lateness (perpetual) are external actions, just like procrastination, and they can have all sorts of explanations.  

(Shoutout to Mrs. Pollack, who looked around a classroom containing thirteen-year-old me, and, knowing full well that I was chronically tardy, declared that “anybody who’s always running late, deep down, they just doesn’t care about anybody else’s time.”  Great job with calling the thirteen-year-old a heartless bitch, Mrs. Pollack!  As you can tell, I definitely forgot it very quickly, and didn’t at all have a self-critical breakdown about it, periodically revisiting the question of my own inherent selfishness for years!!!)

But ignoring the external actions, let’s take a compassionate look inside the head again.  Executive function includes regulation of, and awareness of the passing of, time.  Again: you can’t play the basketball with no legs.  We literally do not realize what time is doing.  Sometimes we do--if we devote enough of our attention to it, which may be a large amount for some, a small amount for others, or a variable amount for the same person.  But our brains literally don’t process it the same way.  

But hold on a minute--let’s go back to that analogy.  Because actually, people with no legs can play basketball!  It’s just that you have to use the adaptation of wheelchairs to do it--and that’s an adaptation for the game and for the players.  

I use alarms.  I’ve recently seen a post about audio memos as alarms.  There are people who just slap clocks everywhere.  When I was forced to work in a kitchen with no clocks, I used the multi-setting timer and set it for like four hours so I would know if I was keeping on schedule.  I also chose a job environment where much of my shift is the same as itself, and rigid punctuality isn’t enforced--that’s adapting my environment, instead of myself.  There’s all kinds of adaptations.  But you have to know you have the condition before you can compensate for it.

Here’s a fun little story:  when I was... oh, eleven?  Twelve?  My Quaker Meeting’s youth group (#7 whitest phrase I’ve ever written) went to the museum together.  One of the stops was in the children’s section, there was a... a pegboard, I think?  With some kind of problem on it.  A puzzle.  Me and a couple others sat down at it, and it took me a while, but eventually I solved it, and I looked up.  

I blinked.  “Where is everybody?” I said.

“They left,” said my mom.  “Half an hour ago.”  

I was stunned.  “Half an hour ago?!  But I couldn’t’ve spent more than ten minutes on this!”

“I promise you, it was half an hour.”

“Why didn’t you call me??  Why didn’t you say my name?”

“We did.  Several times.”

To this day, I will swear myself blind that I never heard a thing.

Hyperfocusing.  They’ll tell you about the problems focusing; oh yes.  They’ll tell you allll about that one.  But they won’t tell you about the flip side of it.  They won’t tell you about the times when the rest of the world falls away, and the only two things in the world are you and whatever problem you’re trying to solve.  

D’y’know what, I bet that’s the reason I test well.  I just realized this now, phrasing it like that, but--I’ve always tested well, even when my actual practical applications of things are mediocre I do well with the classroom testing on it.  I scored a 39 on the MCAT, back when it was out of 45 and not whatever it is now.  (To those with the plain good sense not to want to be doctors:  that’s pretty good.)  And I just bet it’s because, once I get focused on solving the problems, the other problems--nerves, intrusive thoughts, anxiety--just don’t have room to get in.  Hyperfocusing can be a superpower, if you can harness it.  

But it can also blind you to everything else.  And it works in smaller ways, too:  once I think I understand something, it is very difficult for me to perceive information that contradicts that understanding.  I still get the map of the Elflands backwards every time I read The Goblin Emperor, just because I pictured it one way, and every indication in the text that it was the other way just fell on deaf ears.  

And this one leads right into the next, which is Rejection Sensitivity Disorder.  RSD is hyperfocus, but it’s hyperfocus on how everyone must hate you.  It’s delightful!  I’ve been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, as well, and I do have both of those things, but for my money, I think that this one symptom of ADHD--which no doctor has ever even mentioned to me--has hurt me more than both of those conditions combined.  

The last one I’m going to bring up is Auditory Processing Disorder.  Now, I’ve gone and gotten re-diagnosed twice in my life, and the last time was just a few years ago, so they actually used this one in the test.  The psychologist told me about it, she just didn’t use the phrase Auditory Processing Disorder, and she didn’t tell me that it was its own symptom--she just used it for the test.  

What she did was, she gave me two hearing tests, one to test whether or not I could hear, and then the other a list of words that all sounded alike, and I had to mark which one I was hearing.  The second part of that was very long, and very boring, and despite scoring perfectly on the first test, I got several wrong on the second.  I was actually surprised by that; I at no point suspected I had heard any of them wrong.  When she gave me the test, told me this was proof by contradiction, that we were ruling out hearing loss as an alternative explanation for my difficulties.  It was only after the test was done that she explained that the pattern I showed was actually part of the diagnosis of ADHD; that we get bored, and stop really paying attention, and that we don’t even know we’re doing it.

...Okay, but you couldn’t have mentioned the part where I also do that every day in real life, lady?!?!  It’s not just when we’re bored, it’s not just for long processes.  I do this all the time.  I actually tell people now that “I actually have a neurological condition that makes it hard for me to hear; I can tell that you’re speaking, but I can’t tell what you’re saying.”  

This is 100% true.  It is a neurological condition.  

We label this a condition, but as a society, we don’t treat it that way.  Society treats it as yet another excuse.  It’s not.  You’re not lazy, stupid or crazy.  Neither am I.  

I have a condition.  Acknowledging that is the first step of treatment.  Not five thousand sticky notes, not binders or filing systems or even taking all the doors off the cupboards (although I definitely plan to do that one as soon as I possibly can).  Not counselling sessions with so many different people I can’t even name them all, for the love of god please understand that you can’t just fix it with pills.  

(Although mad props to the people who thought Concerta would magically solve me at the age of nine!  Spoiler alert:  it did not do that!  But it did mean that my parents felt comfortable blaming me for all my failures again, so it did at least some of what it was designed for, I guess. :) )   

I have spent the last few years re-understanding my ADHD it as is:  a neurological condition, a disability, and a simple fact of life.  A starting place, instead of yet more proof of my own inherent insufficiency.  And you know what?  When you take the blame and self-hatred out of the diagnosis--when you stop cursing it as the cause of all your problems and start trying to work with it, instead--it gets a lot easier to manage. 

[probablydrunk23]

Back to it

Haven't written in a while, been a bit gun shy. But here I am typing words straight into the text editor bareback. I haven't written for many reasons. Actual scrap that. I was going to make up some bullshit about covid, but the real reason? is I finished my book over a year ago, a book I thought contained some of the best writing of my life. And I couldn't even get my friends to read it. My agent pitched it to, maybe, two people and  now its in limbo. I still don't know what to do with it.

So now apart from bits its been a year since I've done some serious blood letting soul wringing fuck em all writing. 

And I'm  working way back into it. Got to be honest it took a fucking full 45 minutes of swearing and cat squeezing to get into my account so my mood isn't improved. Nearly an hour ago insomnia let me know I wouldn't be really making an honest attempt at sleep until the birds start singing again, so I dutifully picked up my phone and got out of bed so I could doom scroll, suck down my feeds, and check the usual fetish poles. for markers, signs and portents. But as I sat down I just couldn't  bring myself too. Over the last few days I've become increasingly aware of my tendency to hyper focus to avoid anything uncomfortable, distract myself with shitty jangly keys rather than sit in the pain, or discomfort. And over the last two years there's been a lot of that. That time gone scrolling miles through the sewer of human thought looking for the sweetcorn nuggets in the shit.

Writing is the only thing I've ever been good at. Actually scratch that, that's a lame cliché and worst of all its a lie. I'm good at a lot of things. in fact that's the problem. Once I've cracked how to do something, there's no satisfaction in actually getting there. I'm bored easily and boredom is physically painful. So writing, I suppose with my dyslexia writing is the only thing that constantly challenges me, my taste constantly outpacing my skill. I love it.

Perhaps I've been procrastinating, I've recently done a lot of reading about ADHD and if I could get it together for long enough I would probably chase a diagnosis. catch 22. but doing has been making think about procrastination. Thinking about thinking. I've noticed that I tend to put of tasks if I don't know exactly the process of getting it done. it seems I need to imagine the task in its entirety for me too even countenance starting it. That's not to say the tasks ever follow that plan. but tasks I have to do and there's just a jumble with a question mark in my brain. Its seems I wont even allow my self to sit down and think about thinking about them. The really frustrating thing is knowing that if I did just sit down and start, they'd be done, or at least id be able to see the how to do it.

I've missed blogging, about as low stakes as you can get. you can say anything because no ones going to read this especially not here on tumblr. But there's enough of a chance that someone might that i care about being semi coherent.

god I hope this is it now, the doom scrolling finally has lost its lustre. I'm not making any promises about writing more. Even if I do it'll more of this drivel. BUT its got to better than having my soul sucked out of my eyes in exchange for tiny hits of dopamine squeezed out using cynically coded fruit machine game mechanics by amoral bastards that didn't care they were making the human experience more shitty for everyone. After fourteen months of replacing my phone with spunking words into the ether  if I can come up with one turn of phrase, one sentence I can be proud of I will have had more concrete worth than that time in my phone.

until then, if you actually got this far, thank you. Don't feel bad if your not where I am with my phone, or are using it to avoid some shitty thing in your life. Do what you need to do to get through. And if you are struggling, using tumblr to distract from whatever ugly demon is sitting on your chest. You've made a friend. I’m here. hi, your doing great. hold on. You’ll get through this. We all will.