#nd things

[rainbowpopeworld]

This is a big thing that I continue to work on unlearning/relearning

[sieluritari]

A lot of us with ADHD are familiar with the concept of time blindness, but for anyone who isn't: it's a neurological inability to have a consistent sense of the passage of time. If you put me in an empty room, gave me a button and told me to press it when I think it's been 15 minutes, I might press it after..... idk, anywhere between 3 minutes and 2 hours? And if we repeated it the next day the result would probably be wildly different!

But something I've only seen mentioned in one (1) Reddit post, which took some extensive digging to find, is the same effect extending to ALL things measured in numbers. Distance, weight, length, height, amount, space, volume, percentage... For me, small numbers are a bit easier, I could approximate a centimetre probably, but a metre would be much harder and 10 or 100 would likely miss the mark by a lot. Also, anything that can't be easily measured with a ruler or a measuring tape (like weight or volume) is even harder since I don't encounter reference points (like a 1kg hand weight) for those as frequently as I see visual representations of specific lengths.

It's not dyscalculia or anything like that, I'm decent at math (and the OP of the Reddit post was a math major) and I have no other difficulties with numbers, it's just a disconnect in translating real life experiences like sensory input into numbers (and possibly also inconsistent processing of sensory input? Like how the same sound volume is okay one day but hurts my ears the next?), which I think is basically the same thing as what happens with time blindness. For now I've been calling it "measurement blindness" since I've never seen a name for it anywhere, but maybe "quantity blindness" could also work?

I've talked to other people with time blindness to see if they experience this too, but so far none of them have known what I'm talking about. I'd really like to know how many of us are out there and if anyone knows literally anything actually scientific about this very inconvenient phenomenon!

Tl;dr: bc I am wordy:

It's like time blindness but for all things measured in numbers

Not dyscalculia or caused by it

Pretty much never seen it talked about anywhere

Please tell me if it sounds familiar and/or you know something about it, thank

[snakeautistic]

I love eating food “wrong” because it makes the experience about 10 times more enjoyable. It used to drive my parents crazy but that didn’t stop me!! I would pick the chocolate chips out of my cookies and eat them separately, split apart the frosting from cake, sort my M&Ms and eat them in a very specific way- (first, you sort them into different colors, then you eat them until you have the same amount of each color, and then you eat them alternately in least to most favorite color order).

I also had a phase where I used to buy a giant bag of smarties and label every wrapper with a number and eat from the highest number counting down, saving any of the white smarties in a bag until I’d eaten the rest of them. No clue why I did this but it made that mediocre candy extremely fun.

Doing stuff like that doesn’t hurt anyone and it’s fun so I don’t get why it gets pushback sometimes!

[turns-out-its-adhd]

[bukkitbrown]

I realized today that sometimes ill say shit that a person with no neurodivergent symptoms would find extremely dramatic but in reality its just the ND everyday norm

Like earlier today i said i wish i could bash my brain in with a bat to make it work right, which yeah sounds dramatic but eh thats just the vibes all the time with a brain like this

[holierthanth0u]

i wonder how many autistic people struggled to switch over to "mature" parental names? i noticed that all of my peers switched from "mommy/mama" to just "mom" around 4th-5th grade, but a lot of the autistic people i know either switched over during high school, or not at all.

maybe its due to the resistance to change.

[ashmaenas]

Ash's guide to getting shit done (aka how I survive. Kinda).

Disclaimer: This is just stuff that (mostly) works for me. I can't make any promises that your type of brain worms are the same as my brain worms. They may be a totally different species.

Music. I find that I am very music motivated, and I can kind of hack my brain into doing certain things by listening to a Specific type of music every time I do them. For example, every time I want to clean I listen to 50s music and my brain goes 'Ah yes, you should be mopping the floor around about now.' It's very effective when I actually remember to do it.

Clothes. In much the same vein as music, wearing outside clothes tells my brain it's time to be Alert. Again, it only works when I remember to do it.

Starting step. This one is a bit dubious because the beginning is the hard bit, but with some activities (like showering) I'll do an easy action (getting naked in the bathroom) and my brain will kick into the correct mode for that activity. This works maybe... 40% of the time, but that's still better than nothing.

Doing something else. Occasionally, I simply Can't Do The Activity but I'll have enough spoons to at least do something. In that case, I'll just trick my brain into being productive by incentivising it with organising stuff. So I may not be able to study but I will be able to compile resources for every topic I need to research based on the syllabus. It's not what I needed to do, but it will make my life easier later on.

Half ass it. The perfectionist in me hates doing this, but doing something badly is still better than not doing it at all. I've reframed this as 'doing the bare minimum is still doing it' and this method helps me with things like basic hygiene, cleaning, studying, eating ect... When I have next to zero spoons. An example would be that a sink bath isn't as effective as a shower, but at least I'll feel a bit cleaner.

Have someone watch me Do The Thing. This doesn't work if they tell me to do the thing because then my brain goes "Well, now I'm not doing it," and everything is difficult, but if I voluntarily have someone in the room then it makes it easier for me to do tasks. Sometimes. Unless I was already in the zone. Then my brain says no again. It's kind of a hit or miss but it may work for you.

Turn on the Big Light. I actually don't recommend this one, because I don't recommend that other people voluntarily cause themselves distress in order to get things done, but it is a last resort for me. Turning on the big light makes me feel a bit like a rabbit being hunted for sport. Namely, stressed and alert. This helps me get tasks done because the quicker I do them, the quicker I can turn the light off. On one hand, it is effective. On the other hand, it's horrible. 10/10, would not recommend.

Disguise it as something fun and automatic. Confession: at this point the only exercise I get is late night bedroom dancing and skipping (to music) with a skipping rope I made out of an old bathroom robe sash and a shoelace. I'll listen to danceable music and the urge will be there, so I fulfil it and get some Movement™ in at the same time. It works because it's something I'd do anyway, but it's also beneficial.

If you're the type of person who can just do things easily without having to have a hundred different strategies to wrangle your brain into submission then you're probably a bit confused right now. To that I say, don't worry about it!!

Go get a snack with the convenient cues your body sends you when you need to eat, and get started on that minor task that you won't spend all week in a state of procrastination paralysis and terror about.

If you're like me and everything is difficult (except sometimes the things that everyone else finds difficult—either that or except some super niche skill that is not regarded as useful by society) then I'm proud of you for making it this long and I hope you found at least one of these useful. Feel free to reblog with your own strategies for Doing Tasks and surviving life (seriously. Anything helps).

[spacebugarts]

Related to my last textpost: do y'all have specific stims you do while you're drawing/writing/anything creative?

For me whenever I'm excited about how my drawing is turning out digitally I'll start aggressively zooming in and out of the canvas, and when im drawing traditionally I'll slap the page or seesaw the pencil between my fingers :)

[bishiglomper]

I started compiling ND posts to share with my friend

Mom thinks I should microdose her via messaging her memes every once in a while

But that won't explain why I'm suddenly sending her hopefully relatable things

Like I want her to be more aware than "yeah I do that lol" but I also don't wanna just be like "you're autistic BTW. Your kids too. You should do something about that."

And by do something I just mean look into it. Learn about it. 👀 'cause, y'know, realization and validation 💖

How should I approach iiiiiit

If one didn't know they were autistic but knew they were weird asf and didn't like coming off as too weird how would you wanna be told

Or maybe I should just ask "so what do you know about neurodivergency/autism?" ? And go from there..

[betterthanbatman1]

Literally went around thinking about this amazing fic all day, where Steph helps Jason after he has a little mishap with the bats. Turns out it was just a daydream I had… I don’t really know how I feel about that

[shu-of-the-wind]

are you the "sleeps on my back because i need my weight distributed evenly" ND or the "sleeps on my side cause otherwise i can feel my heartbeat in my teeth" ND

[rainbowpopeworld]

David loves some “fiddleable” buttons. They gave him lots on the new TARDIS (tour video). He’s so neurodivergent seeming, I love it! 😂🥰

[taboo-delusion]

If my dysfunction is executive, then why isn't it making me money?

[sparrowsortadrawzzz]

as a fellow adhd haver, I couldn't find any gifs for ✨️happy hands✨️ so I made one! feel free to use it :D

[rachymarie]

Schizospec X autistic feels: please god why can't I be more succinct?

God: Because my friend you have the autistic schizospec urge to Talk

[queer-geordie-nerd]

God, my spatial awareness is actually shocking 🤣

At work, we have a dish washer and sink in a small alcove, so of course, I walk directly into the wall of said alcove - bearing in mind, it's been in the exact same place for the 19 years I've worked there.

To be fair, I also do this at home all of the time and I've lived in the same house for 24 years 🤷‍♀️