I Know My Value

RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE. 

When I was at one of my lowest (mental) points in life, I couldn’t get out of bed some days. I had no energy or motivation and was barely getting by.

I had therapy once per week, and on this particular week I didn’t have much to ‘bring’ to the session. He asked how my week was and I really had nothing to say.

“What are you struggling with?” he asked.

I gestured around me and said “I dunno man. Life.”

Not satisfied with my answer, he said “No, what exactly are you worried about right now? What feels overwhelming? When you go home after this session, what issue will be staring at you?”

I knew the answer, but it was so ridiculous that I didn’t want to say it.

I wanted to have something more substantial.

Something more profound.

But I didn’t.

So I told him, “Honestly? The dishes. It’s stupid, I know, but the more I look at them the more I CAN’T do them because I’ll have to scrub them before I put them in the dishwasher, because the dishwasher sucks, and I just can’t stand and scrub the dishes.”

I felt like an idiot even saying it.

What kind of grown ass woman is undone by a stack of dishes? There are people out there with *actual* problems, and I’m whining to my therapist about dishes?

But my therapist nodded in understanding and then said:

“RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE.”

I began to tell him that you’re not supposed to, but he stopped me.

“Why the hell aren’t you supposed to? If you don’t want to scrub the dishes and your dishwasher sucks, run it twice. Run it three times, who cares?! Rules do not exist, so stop giving yourself rules.”

It blew my mind in a way that I don’t think I can properly express.

That day, I went home and tossed my smelly dishes haphazardly into the dishwasher and ran it three times.

I felt like I had conquered a dragon.

The next day, I took a shower lying down.

A few days later. I folded my laundry and put them wherever the fuck they fit.

There were no longer arbitrary rules I had to follow, and it gave me the freedom to make accomplishments again.

Now that I’m in a healthier place, I rinse off my dishes and put them in the dishwasher properly. I shower standing up. I sort my laundry.

But at a time when living was a struggle instead of a blessing, I learned an incredibly important lesson:

THERE ARE NO RULES.

RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE!!!

I am 19 years old and apply to work at the local movie theater, which is owned/founded by a wannabe business tycoon baby boomer who was like a cross between Donald Trump, Danny DeVito, and Jay Gastby (the Gatsby parallel will make sense in a minute, I promise. But it’s very important to me that you know that this man looked like a Danny DeVito clone with Trump’s toupee.) 

They are paying me minimum wage, which back then was about $6.50 an hour, to sweep popcorn off of the carpet with a tiny broom and occasionally hand out mints at the door at the end of movies. Our uniforms were unisex and consisted of a dark green tuxedo jacket and shirt with black bow-ties. There was also a stupid little hat but nobody actually wore them. This isn’t very important, except the uniform actually went with the interior ~design~ of the theater, which I think was supposed to look “fancy” but actually looked like the person who designs Cheesecake Factories dropped acid and got set loose in a Home Depot with an unlimited budget and no directions. 

I do my job, sweeping popcorn off of the rugs, wandering the hallways, and occasionally handing out mints. We get free popcorn on break (with no butter) which at 19 I thought was the most amazing thing I ever experienced. Because I was poor, my diet probably consisted of about 80% movie theater popcorn by volume. We could also stand in the back of the theater and watch like 5 minutes of a movie if there was no popcorn left to sweep up with our little brooms. 

For some reason Donald DeVito-Gatsby took a liking to me. Not in a creepy way–he just thought I was the shit for some reason. He called me “Tammy” once, which is not even close to my real name–doesn’t even have any of the actual letters of my name in it, which I think he eventually figured out was wrong, but still didn’t care enough to find out my actual name, so he just started calling me “sport” every time he saw me (which was almost daily). 

He’d saunter up on his tiny legs while I was sweeping popcorn and say something like, “Doing great today, sport! Keep it up!” and clap me on my little epaulet-clad shoulder and leave. I could never figure out why I appeared to be his favorite popcorn-sweeper. It was baffling. 

I have no idea what he actually did to run the theater except wander the halls, occasionally yell at the managers for letting the concession stand use too much butter, and talk about how much his tailored suits cost. Probably nothing.

He would also occasionally hire dance troops to perform Vegas-style routines at the front of the theater before big premiers. This was 1) very weird, and 2) somehow perfectly in-character with everything about this man’s personality and aesthetic. 

He once had his high school reunion there, and made a mixtape of songs from the 1960s to play on a loop during the big event. They were all terrible songs, and the CD just played on a loop for years and years and years afterward because he liked it and no one could be bothered to turn it off, I guess. I think it was probably still playing on loop when the theater shut down. It is because of this that I now have a classically-trained rage response to the song “Aquarius” by the 5th Dimension. 

Anyway, sometime while I was working there, he decided that what the theater really needed to keep up with the times was to knock out the end of one of the hallways and build an enormous IMAX theater with like 500 seats and it’s own dedicated concession stand that served more expensive food. We didn’t have anything like that in our town, so it was kind of a big deal. 

The wall gets knocked out, and the concrete gets poured, and there is a crew working to put in all of the wiring needed for the giant speakers, etc. Donald DeVito-Gatsby is very distressed about this because he was super racist and literally scared of Mexicans, who made up most of the construction crew on-site.

Donald DeVito-Gatsby decides that I am the perfect person to “keep an eye on them” and “make sure they’re not planning anything” because somehow he thinks I speak Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. I attempted to correct him. He doesn’t believe me. 

So he sets me up in the unfinished theater with my own little pink hardhat, and now my job is to sit there on an unattached memory foam IMAX seat all day and “watch them”. For what? I don’t know. I don’t think he knew, either. 

The helmet is pink because, I don’t know, maybe he thought a girl would be offended by a normal hardhat? I’m not sure. Anyway, the best part of this was that he got some shiny stickers and put “IN CHARGE” on the hardhat when he sent me off into the construction zone. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything. I don’t know why he did this.

The foreman spoke English, but most of his crew didn’t, and we eventually figured out that Mr. DeVito-Gatsby had probably heard me speak Sicilian on the phone with my family and thought it was Spanish, but I still understood almost none of what was being said between the crew at the site. Over the course of about three months we developed this kind of pidgin language when he wasn’t there to translate. After figuring out that I had nothing to eat but popcorn during my shift, one of the guys started bringing me lunch, which was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me at 19.

I have no idea what Mr. DeVito-Gatsby thought these guys were going to do. He made some noise about how they were probably going to “steal something”, which would have been impossible because most of the audio equipment weighed hundreds of pounds. It apparently never occurred to him that the person most likely to steal anything would probably be the person who made the least money–which was me, making $6.50 an hour. 

I didn’t actually steal anything, though. Occasionally I’d make off with an extra cup of popcorn on my break, and one time one of the concessions people felt bad for us and brought us the hotdogs they were going to throw out. Mr. DeVito-Gatsby yelled at them for it.

I literally did nothing for months. I just…sat there and took naps and played Pokemon on my Gameboy. There was literally no point in me being there at all, and I was probably in the way sometimes, but I was being paid $6.50 an hour with the owner’s approval to sit there and literally do nothing at all because he was racist. 

Eventually, DeVito-Gatsby started adding stickers to my hardhat for some reason. He didn’t tell me why–I would just show up and there’d be more stickers. I would later find out that apparently he went into the equipment room and would just add a sticker whenever he felt I had done an “especially good job”, and I have no idea what that even means considering I was doing literally nothing. One day I came in and he had added “SPORT!!!” to the font in sharpie, so now my hardhat said “SPORT!!! IN CHARGE” with a bunch of random stickers. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything at all, and I don’t know what the exclamation points were for.

Months went by and the IMAX was basically finished, but neither Donald DeVito-Gatsby nor any of the managers ever showed up to reassign me, and I wasn’t going to ask about it because I Really Liked this gig where I was basically being paid to sit there and sleep and play video games all day. 

One morning, I came in and the crew was finally packed up and gone, the theater was finished, and I had…nothing to do. At all. It was just… empty. When I went to find a manager to ask if I needed to go do something else, he waved me off and told me that my job was now to “babysit” the IMAX theater until they started selling tickets for the first show. Owner’s orders. OK, I said, and went to sit in the now finished IMAX theater by myself.

This went on for several weeks before my desire to see other humans finally outweighed my desire to be paid to do nothing. I asked again to be reassigned again, but nope, that was my job now. When the theater wasn’t going to be showing movies, my job was going to be to just…sit in the theater. For no reason, and just…I don’t know, stare at the blank screen. 

Legit saw an ad talking about which in-game corporations to work for would be nice. One of them said something to the effect of

“ONLY AN 80 HOUR MANDATORY WORK WEEK! PERFECT FOR SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH FAMILY!” and like, I KNOW they’re trying to make a comment about how Capitalism gets in the future, but seeing as the people who CRUNCHED for 100+ hour work weeks, I’m just like...

can affect on functioning in every day life so badly that it interferes with taking care of very basic human needs

is not 10 yrs old white boy exclusive disorder

is not a fake disorder created to benefit medicine companies

One of the most treatable “psychiatric” disorders (although it’s more accurately a neurodevelopmental disorder), with approximately 90% of patients able to find a treatment regimen that works well for them, given appropriate medical support. ADHD stimulant medications in particular (Ritalin and Adderall and their variations) are some of the most effective psychiatric medications in existence. 

Contrary to popular opinion, extremely under diagnosed overall, particularly in populations that are not young white boys (women, adults, people of color, etc.)

So there are a LOT of people out there who could be helped by getting a diagnosis and treatment but are not, in part because of the negative stereotypes around ADHD and ADHD medication that are prevalent in pop culture.

Able to coexist with a number of other conditions or traits that may change its presentation and/or impact, including mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression and various learning disabilities but also giftedness/high intelligence.

In fact, in adults diagnosed for the first time, it is extremely common to have comorbidities, in large part because ADHD can be so hard to cope with.

Sleep disorders are also frequently comorbid with ADHD. Additionally, being poorly-rested makes ADHD symptoms worse, which makes you more likely to sleep badly. It’s a hellish merry-go-round.

In some cases, “twice exceptional” people (gifted + ADHD) have extra trouble getting appropriate support, because some ADHD symptoms can be masked by intelligence (for instance, if a child is bright enough to do their homework in the ten minutes between classes and master the test material by cramming the night before, they may never see the poor academic performance that might lead to testing), and because the symptoms of ADHD may also mask their giftedness - so they end up stuck in classes that are too easy for them, and therefore boring, which makes the ADHD symptoms worse. Also, people who know they are intelligent but have untreated ADHD can be really prone to some of the other psychological comorbidities, especially as they become adults, because they know what to do and how to do it and that they SHOULD do it, and they WANT to do it, but they still can’t make themselves actually do it, so they start to beat themselves up, thinking “I’m too smart to constantly be this stupid, I must just be really lazy, maybe I really DON’T care, maybe I’m just a terrible person.” Ask me how I know.

Can also have less-common symptoms associated with it. I actually had my hearing tested before my diagnosis because I had so much trouble following conversations if there was background noise. My hearing is fine: my issue is auditory processing. My brain just can’t focus on conversations if too much else is going on. (This also applies to following dialogue on television if there is a lot of background noise/music. I use the captions a lot.

In some cases, extremely disabling. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, a disability is “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity.” A sampling of major life activities that might be substantially limited by untreated ADHD includes:

Managing finances (largely through impulsive spending, frequent lost items that need replacing, forgetting to pay bills, forgetting to do routine maintenance and having issues like larger repairs needed)

Basic self-care (remembering to take meds, go to doctor appointments, eat and drink at appropriate times, go to bed at appropriate times)

Employment (difficulty being on time for work or work activities, difficulty meeting deadlines, propensity to make “careless errors”, difficulty with emotional regulation)

Interpersonal relationships (memory problems so you never remember important dates, time issues meaning you’re late meeting them, forgetting commitments, easily distracted during conversations, impulsivity leading to interruptions/saying or doing stuff you didn’t think through, difficulty responding appropriately to social cues (through distraction/impulsivity), difficulty with emotional regulation)

Maintaining a clean and sanitary home (forgets steps in household chores, distracted away from finishing them, loses key equipment, impulsive purchases clutter up the home, loses interest in projects and leaves them out half-done)

If untreated, linked to higher rates of all manner of negative outcomes when compared to similar neurotypical populations, including: 

unemployment

divorce

substance abuse

injury or death in accidents, especially car accidents 

arrest

None of this is because people with ADHD as a group are, like, bad or lazy or evil or irresponsible or don’t care. People with ADHD are just people, and exist on the same range of good, bad, and in-between that all people do. However, the parts of our brains that are meant to help us regulate our emotions, plan for the future, remember to do important things, and not act on every impulse that crosses our minds just don’t work properly. A lot of us might lean in to an airhead, spacy artistic type, class clown, or similar persona to mask our deep shame over not being able to “just” do all these basic things that other people seem to do with no trouble at all. 

Additionally, even accessing ADHD treatment can be extremely challenging, because stimulant medications are controlled substances and there are so many false and damaging perceptions about the condition and medications out there. And even when you have a well-established diagnosis and are well controlled on a medication you’ve taken for years, you are never far away from potential disruptions to your treatment. I personally am a white professional with good health insurance and was able to get diagnosed and medication prescribed - which in itself is often really difficult - but even from that position of privilege I have experienced multiple gaps in my treatment for reasons like:

My pharmacy lost a prescription and had to get a new one. (My medication cannot be refilled; each month has to be a brand new prescription.)

My pharmacy was out of stock of my medication (I can’t transfer that prescription to a different pharmacy, and even if I had a paper prescription, you can’t call a pharmacy and be told the medication is in stock, you have to physically go there and ask.)

I forgot to make a doctor appointment in time (I have to have a doctor visit every three months to continue to get the prescription.)

I forgot to fill the prescription (since I, you know, HAVE ADHD, and you can’t set them up to auto-renew like you can other meds.)

My prescription is really expensive and there aren’t many savings options because it’s a controlled medication. (Even with savings I pay over $100 out of pocket for my ADHD meds every month. If the manufacturer isn’t offering a coupon that month it’s close to $300.)

Again, this is a LEGAL medication that I am LEGALLY prescribed by my supportive doctor with consultation from my supportive psychologist, for my actual disabling medical condition, and which all parties involved agree is extremely effective in helping me manage said condition. I’m in about the best situation you can be in short of being a millionaire who doesn’t have to worry about things like preapprovals or copays or taking sick time from work. 

I’ve also heard from others who have had to change doctors due to moving, job or insurance changes, etc., only to get issues like:

medical practices that flatly refuse to prescribe any controlled medications at all.

medical practices that don’t deal with ADHD specifically at all.

doctors that “don’t believe in” medicating adults/women/people with good jobs/people with good grades/anyone for ADHD.

doctors that won’t accept existing diagnoses or treatment plans.