"....What?"

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I just had a goddamn epiphany!

If you have this same issue, make yourself a Responsibilities To-Do List and a separate ADHD To-Do List for those distracting thoughts.

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[Image Description: iphone text message conversation.

Sender: “I’m a dumbass

Receiver: “Why”

Sender: “So you know how whenever I don’t do what I’m supposed to do it’s usually because I had a thought that my adhd convinces me is urgent because I can and will forget it so I act on the thought and snowball into the abyss?”

Receiver: “Yea”

Sender: “I just realized if I just kept a notebook on me to write those thoughts down for later, that wouldn’t fucking happen”

I’d definitely like to do videos on psychological and queer topics, and I might get @pechaberi to talk about political and sociological topics with me as well. I do intend to make the videos well-researched and at least somewhat scripted as well.

For visuals, I’d like to do either animatics and/or speed draws depending on the topic and my mood.

We tend to have alexithymia, meaning we have difficulty identifying and describing own feelings. 

You can’t say how you feel if you legit don’t know.

Self monitoring is an executive function; our self awareness about how we are doing presently .. which is hampered in ADHDers. 

We found a post that says “my sister is autistic” and “I’ve worked with autistic people,” and it made a good and valid point instead of being full of trash

Dealing with executive dysfunction and ADHD becomes so much easier when you stop trying to do things the way you feel like you should be able to do them (like everyone else) and start finding ways that actually work for you, no matter how “silly” or “unnecessary” they seem.

For years my floor was constantly covered in laundry. Clean laundry got mixed in with dirty and I had to wash things twice, just making more work for myself. Now I just have 3 laundry bins: dirty (wash it later), clean (put it away later), and mystery (figure it out later). Sure, theoretically I could sort my clothes into dirty or clean as soon as I take them off and put them away straight out of the dryer, but realistically that’s never going to be a sustainable strategy for me.

How many garbage bins do you need in a bedroom? One? WRONG! The correct answer is one within arms reach at all times. Which for me is three. Because am I really going to get up to blow my nose when I’m hyperfocusing? NO. In allergy season I even have an empty kleenex box for “used tissues I can use again.” Kinda gross? Yeah. But less gross than a snowy winter landscape of dusty germs on my desk.

I used to be late all the time because I couldn’t find my house key. But it costs $2.50 and 3 minutes to copy a key, so now there’s one in my backpack, my purse, my gym bag, my wallet, my desk, and hanging on my door. Problem solved.

I’m like a ninja for getting pout the door past reminder notes without noticing. If I really don’t want to forget something, I make a physical barrier in front of my door. A sticky note is a lot easier to walk past than a two foot high cardboard box with my wallet on top of it.

This quote comes from his lecture “30 Essential Ideas You Should Know about ADHD,” which you can find on YouTube as a 27-video playlist. This part is specifically in the second video of that playlist (about 8 minutes in).

Here are 20 Unexpected Symptoms of Mental Illnesses You Probably Never Knew

- Meditation/ is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.

Meditation offers time for relaxation and heightened awareness in a stressful world where our senses are often dulled. Research suggests that meditation has the potential for more than just temporary stress relief.

Educators, spiritual leaders, and mental health experts have developed dozens of forms of meditation. The variety suggests there is a form of meditation to suit most people, regardless of personality or lifestyle.

Even the picture of me isn’t showing my face… that much. Oh and the “black and white filters?”?

- “Dysphoria” is just the opposite of “euphoria”. It doesn’t have to mean gender dysphoria. Lots of things can cause different kinds of dysphoria - PMDD is Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder (which is like PMS but much more severe, and causes intense depression and mood swings). Or, in this case, RSD - Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria

- When it’s mentioned at all, it’s almost always in relation to ADHD. (And it tends to be described as “this is exclusive to ADHD” but I don’t think that’s actually true.) It’s also a thing with C-PTSD and BPD. (And probably more. But a lot of this stuff co-occurs with ADHD so like …  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

- I suspect it’s actually more of a trauma thing that’s exacerbated by ADHD. (A lot of the way people respond to ADHD is inherently traumatic. Being told your whole life “Well you could do the thing if you really wanted to” when no, you actually CAN’T, etc, has the same effects as emotional abuse and gaslighting on your self-esteem. And well. Being shunned for your whole childhood for being too loud/too weird/etc tends to … yeah.)

- Just being insecure or even anxious isn’t the same as Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria. RSD - to me, at least - feels like being slapped or getting stabbed in the chest. It’s going from “Everything’s pretty much fine” to, upon a mild correction, being “I’m the worst. I should die. Nothing will ever ever get better.“  And even when I rationally know that’s not true, I’m having physiological responses that I can’t just turn off. (It’s a lot like an emotional flashback in that regard, honestly.)  You’re responding to the thing as if it’s a threat.

have you ever seen a junebug get to grips with a window screen? it’s remarkably persistent, but not very focused. all that matters is location.

how to junebug: choose the location you feel you can probably get some shit done on today. be specific. not ‘the bathroom’ but ‘the bathroom sink’. you are not choosing a range, you are choosing a center; you will move around, but your location is where you’ll keep coming back to. mentally stick a pin in it. consider yourself tethered to that spot by a long mental bungee cord.

go to your location. look at stuff. move stuff around. do a thing. get distracted. remember you’re junebugging the bathroom sink and go back there. look at it some more. do a different thing. get distracted. get a sandwich. remember you’re junebugging and go back to the bathroom sink.

nt’s will go crazy watching you, and if they demand to know When You Will Be Done you will probably have to roll them in a carpet and stuff them up the chimney. you’re done when you feel done, or you’re too bored to live, or it’s bedtime, or any number of other markers, you get to pick. but the thing is, by returning repeatedly to that one spot, you harness the ‘hyperactivity’ part instead of wasting all that energy battling with the ‘attention deficit’ part.

not only will the bathroom sink almost certainly be clean, and probably the mirror and soap dish too, you might’ve swapped in a fresh toothbrush, a new soap, you might’ve unclogged the drain – you will probably also have cleaned or fixed up several things in the near vicinity, or in the path between the sink and where you get the fresh toothbrush, or maybe you did your grocery shopping cuz you were out of soap, or maybe you couldn’t find a clean hand towel and ended up doing laundry.

this is good. you got shit done! it wasn’t necessarily Cleaned The Bathroom in the way nt’s think of it, but screw ‘em. things are better than they were.