So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that Iâm not shit at being an adult, I just canât do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single âorganize your lifeâ books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on âaestheticâ over âfunctionâ. And the function of most standard âorganize your life booksâ is to âmake things look Show Home Perfectâ.
So the standard âhide all your unsightly things by doing xyzâ may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week itâll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.
To give you an example of the kind of hell Iâve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I canât wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I canât make food, which means I donât eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I donât have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I canât cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.
Pinskyâs solution to this was âremove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.â
And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.
Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????
Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or âjunkâ basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.
Like Iâm not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of âperfect house keepingâ, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldnât be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?
My lived space will never look a certain way, and thatâs okay. It will never look show home perfect, and thatâs okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and thatâs okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and thatâs okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.
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