Madamer Gate

Having someone else play 'me' while I was playing my friend removed a lot of the ego, I think? Like, my goal was 'how do I think Friend would act in this moment' rather than 'what are my values and ideals and ego-driven beliefs about how I would react in this moment.' And at the same time, someone else was doing that for me, and I couldn't argue or edit him. Character-me was doing the things my friend described, even if I didn't think I'd behave that way.

We eventually reached a place of relative safety and everyone switched back, to portray/inhabit that the character-versions of us were coming down out of reactive adrenaline mode into a more calm and intellectual mode.

Can I perhaps also introduce you to the kazoo trombone?

He does work, you return problem to sender (your bosses) because suddenly your productivity goes to shit. Right now, they are not feeling enough pain. Make it hurt. And stop giving them cover that there's no work for your guy.

(But no sharing rn on account of fun vacation focus)

Oh see, I love planning, so for me that's half the fun. I'm already plotting my next one, including a (likely fictional) version where I bring my parents along. Let me try and give you a combination of itinerary and methodology :)

If you book the normal way (multi-leg itinerary, possibly with partner carriers providing some of the service, but all of your flights are on the same record), then if something goes wrong, the airline you booked with has a legal obligation to get you sorted out and to your final destination, in one piece. You may not get there when you planned to, but they've got to accommodate you.

If you book your way, with strung-together one-way flights: each individual flight is a separate entity, and nobody has any obligation to fix it if something goes wrong on a previous or future leg.

You're thinking, "but what could cause flight delays of more than a few hours?" Glad you asked. Remember that big flight software outage that took out 90% of flights in the US last year? Hurricanes, winter storms, volcanic eruptions (remember Iceland taking out air travel in Europe for like a week in the oughts?), strikes, and more. And this matters for every leg of your trip, every connection.

When you're booking flights, this kind of arrangement is always visible. For example, screenshot from Kayak - these flights are being sold by Delta, but one is operated by KLM and one is operated by Air France. That means Delta is issuing the tickets and you'll have Delta flight numbers, but the actual equipment (plane) is owned, staffed, and run by KLM or by Air France. You can avoid any carrier you want, without putting your whole trip at risk.

Delta 9561 - Operated by KLM Delta 8530 - Operated by Air France

Real-world example followed by hypothetical example - this did happen to customers and we were not able to fix it for them:

Sugar scrub: 1 cup basic white sugar + 1/2 cup light oil - I used salad oil and it took a lot of washing off. I felt like the sugar dissolved really fast, wasn't a big fan.

Salt scrub: roughly same ratios, table salt and oil. I really liked how gritty and scrubby this was, it felt great. My skin is not particularly sensitive or fussy. If I do this again at all, I'll do the salt scrub.

I see recommendations for jojoba and grape seed oil in the replies, those are almost certainly better options.

Humans are cheaper to hire, but even the most loyal human is dramatically less obedient and reliable than a SecUnit. Humans are much more likely to toe the line (or get caught crossing it) when they work in groups, so employing them as station security makes sense - their coworkers and bosses are always around to reinforce norms and company culture.

In a contract labor setting, there's also the issue of an uprising. SecUnits have a massive combat advantage, which means it takes a smaller number of SecUnits to guarantee ongoing control of a situation. With human enforcement, you can increase their training, arm and armor them, and augment them - but they're never going to dominate the field against other humans to the degree that SecUnits do. So you have a choice between a smaller enforcement staff (cheap, very high-risk), or larger (very expensive per degree of risk lowered. By the time you have a human security staff big enough to guarantee zero risk, there's probably almost as many of them as the workforce population).

For-profit Corporates (now and in the future) are all about managing risk, and SecUnits are a very, very low risk option. They like a sure bet, they like to eliminate variables.

The question is whether this is a tolerable environment for you, or whether you should update your resume with all the extremely good stuff you've been doing and find somewhere else to be.

Option One:

If you can decide to disengage, care less, and be less invested, this may be an environment where you can do acceptable work at no great cost to yourself. You will always be working within the limitations of a fucked up system that you neither caused nor can solve, and and you'll need to stop killing yourself over a business that hasn't even provided you a computer what the fuck? Your business is literally selling computers, what do you mean they make you use your own equipment? What the actual living fuck? They will keep asking you to solve their problems and you will need to get comfortable setting and holding boundaries. Practice saying "I'm at capacity, I really can't take that on" and "Priority check! My plate is full with Ass, Balls, and Cockwaffle. What am I bumping in order to take on this new Dumb Fucking Shit?" in the mirror, to Small Bastard, to Large Bastard, to the steering wheel of your car, to your bosses and coworkers.

Believe that you are allowed to say no. Believe that 'no' can be professional and polite, and also firm.

Believe that your employer is buying a finite amount of your time and effort, generally benchmarked at 40hr/week, and recognize that they are never going to be the ones to pump the brakes when you are literally volunteering your time and effort and health for their profit and convenience.

Believe that by saying no, you are giving your employer essential information about how their business is (not) functioning, and that you are incentivizing them to find other solutions for their problems than your fragile human body.

Believe that nobody is going to die if shit hits the fan. It will suck! It will suck for your customers, it will suck for your employer, and it will suck for you. But also, believe that it's not your fault and that sometimes actions have negative consequences, and that's how we learn. If your employer loses a customer, or loses a bunch of money because they run an incredibly leaky ship - that's too bad for them. Bummer. Not Your Problem.

Checking out sucks, especially at the start. It feels good to be needed, it feels good to get stuck in on a really good problem and apply your cleverness and your brains and Get Shit Done. Checking out can be scary - what if you can't check back in when you need to? You need to be willing to tolerate and get through the distress. You need to trust that you still have the capacity to commit to things and that you'll check back in when it's appropriate.

Option two:

Alternatively, recognize that this kind of sick system is your catnip and that you are very likely to keep getting sucked in. Recognize that you, specifically, will take far too much damage from disengaging and you aren't willing to do it long term. Recognize that you want a job that uses and grows your skills in a safe, sane, and reasonably consensual way, and this ain't it. If that's the case, you need to take care of yourself and bail the fuck out.

Your resume should focus on your accomplishments - you've built out the procurement process for three recently-merged companies, identified areas of improvement and streamlined processes. Risk management - you've proactively identified unrecognized areas of risk, flagged them for your management team, and taken steps to address those risks to the extent possible for your role, while also advocating for and participating in planning to address workflow and process issues that are outside of your individual scope to resolve. You are conscientious. You advocate for your customers and proactively monitor to catch upcoming issues as early as possible. Your skills are VALUABLE and you have OPTIONS, but you have to put in the legwork.

Job hunting sucks but working yourself into an actual health crisis sucks even more and takes longer to recover from. You are actively harming yourself right now, and for what? A barely acceptable wage and exponentially increasing stress.

Believe that you get to leave when a situation no longer serves your needs.

Believe that you can do better.

If you're not familiar with Issendai's Sick Systems article, I highly, highly recommend it. Ask a Manager (advice column) also has a lot of letters about identifying when you're in this kind of unsolvable situation and your options are check out, or get out.

The thing is, they're not. I'm not actually all that competent, I think my efforts are being wasted, and shit is falling apart.

I am really upset about this and having trouble functioning today. I'm shaky, I'm emotional, my attention and focus are shot.

I can't even look around at the problems and figure out what needs to be done first. We need to set standards. We need to document our current systems. We need to do a per-client cost analysis. We need to do a license audit. We need to do a security audit. We need to get our billing straightened out. We need to get spares to all client sites right away. We need to get our processes dialed in. We need to define roles. We need to set up an escalation structure. We need to standardize our maintenance. We need to stay on top of tickets for customer satisfaction. We need to prioritize communication.

This is a tire fire. Everything is broken and it's broken *right now* and it's very clear that management is trying to fix that but I don't know that this is fixable before the company implodes.

"we need we need"

I want to be clear this question isn't rhetorical even though it sounds like it:

Who is we?

If you are a good capitalist like Yours Truly, there's no "we" here - if this entire thing destroys the whole company wow that would suck - but also if the people who own stock want you to "take ownership" they are trying to make you go above-and-beyond, there's a way to give you ownership and it's stock options.

But you're not a good capitalist, are you? You are a capital-L Labor Sympathizer which, kudos to you, love that for you, quick quetion though since when is the bosses problem also labor's problem?

It sounds to me like you are burning the candle at both ends + the middle in order to... single-handedly save the entire company so you won't lose your job? Is that right?

Is that who "we" is?

Or did you maybe get one-shot by finally having a boss who isn't Gary and now you've attached an entirely out of proportion amount of loyalty to the first person to show actual leadership? Understandable but not worth killing yourself over.

I don't know who "we" is. I'm trying to decide if this is where I go "not my circus" and apply for other jobs while coasting until this crashes and burns, or if this is where I go "ooh, free growth opportunity" and try to leverage "look at this terrible mess that I cleaned up" into a position with a better title at my next review.

Upper management wants people to try to do that shit. They are clearly labeling these problems "corporate ladder" and pointing out how to climb it. This is me writhing and kicking and spitting because it's now clear that not only is middle management not going to help, they are being an active barrier to progress.

We're too small for stock options, which means we should be too small for all this bullshit, but we've got this bullshit nonetheless.

I don't think this is me imprinting on management like a lost duckling, I think this is me pretty pissed that middle management covered their tracks to look like they had their shit together for as long as they did. (Also, note, upper management are not NOT being shitty here, and I can see that - I don't think this is a particularly productive management style but I think it does leave decent openings to shove myself into the company culture if I'm proactive about it)

I am *NOT* a good capitalist, but this might be the only opportunity my Labor Sympathizer ass has to find its way into a C suite because if the company survives this, it is going to grow, and if it grows I want to be in a position within the company where I can make it a better workplace for its employees (and also, it's not just my job, it's a few dozen other people I don't want to lose their jobs either).

So I'm trying to figure out if I'm confident enough in myself and confident enough in the company to put in the awful amount of work that is going to be needed to try to be all corporate about this shit. I'm pretty confident in myself. I'm less confident in the company.

But fuck it, I didn't outlast Gary at his own goddamned business to give up six months later. Large Bastard and I are sitting down this weekend to make a list of milestones. If I hit the milestones without some kind of material (financial AND professional) recognition from the company then fuck it, head down, not my problem, I just work here. If they DO give the material recognition then hey, problem solved, I'm the captain now.

I can apply for other jobs in the meantime because honestly, if something better presents itself as an opportunity I'd rather not try to be the VP of anything ever.

Management culture comes from the top, and so does change.

If they wanted things to operate differently, your employers would make it a priority to drive that change. They own the company. They literally own the company and employ you and all of your colleagues. If they want something done, it will get done.

In a corporate setting, responsibility, authority, and money go hand in hand.

You do not have authority to push changes (literally. Like, you ask people to do things and they do not do them. Within this setting, you lack authority). Therefore, asking you to take on additional responsibility is disingenuous at best. "Oh, Alli will figure it out" is bullshit.

If they want you to have, or take, more responsibility - then - they must offer you more authority - and - pay you more money.

You don't have a server problem, or a techs problem. You have a management problem.

Yes, middle management is sweeping their failures under the rug, but also:

Upper management is not looking under all the rugs on a regular basis.

I am about 2 years out from an acquisition going approximately the opposite direction as you - my org had fantastic management and culture overall. Got acquired by a soulless behemoth and now everything is somewhat awful.

At my old job, pre-acquisition, I had regular 1:1 meetings with my manager (every week or two), her manager (monthly), and his manager (monthly). That's me, individual contributor, my boss the Support Manager, her boss the Director of Technical Whatnot, and his boss the VP of Customer Success. Above the VP was a C-suite and then the owner.

In those meetings, my grandboss and great-grandboss would ask things like "how are things going with [Support Manager]" and "how is the team doing?" and if I brought up a problem they fucking paid attention and took it seriously.

Also, we had a clear escalation process that looked like this: If you are very stuck on a thing, call in backup. Here is how you call in backup (slack channel named [Acronym}_Customer_Issue) and here is who you call in (at minimum: your boss, their boss, the relationship manager for that customer, that person's boss, anybody who's been working with you on the problem, their boss - and if that didn't do it we were regularly reminded that we could keep escalating all the way up to the owner, if necessary). Here is what will be helpful to communicate so we can find a resolution.

And then stuff happened. Usually a bunch questions as everybody got up to speed, then discussion about how to solve the problem, discussion about how to prioritize, game plan for moving forward with clear next steps. If it was a particularly sensitive problem or customer, guidance on how to communicate.

If things stalled, or you need guidance at any point, ping the channel again to provide or ask for an update.

Back to you, Alli, it's easy for them to say "escalate problems" but if you don't have a meaningful escalation path, then you don't have a way to escalate problems. Words are cheap, procedure is necessary, and modeling is also necessary.

Frequently, when I started an escalation channel, the first thing that happened is people above me pulled in people above them. Because at the bottom of the stack, I usually didn't have the full picture of what was going on with the customer, or who might need to be aware of the issue.

Even if it is not an anglerfish lure and they actually offer you the job, I would be very, very cautious about jumping straight from the role of Underpaid Abusevictim at Toxic Management R Us to C-suite at Normaltown Inc. Working in a fucked up situation warps your expectations and means that you are missing knowledge about norms and best practices that would make your life and the lives of your prospective underlings easier.

If you aren't currently reading Ask a Manager, highly recommend. Really good on workplace norms (both how things should work in a functional environment and how things do work in the real world or in fucked up environments). Has answered "is my employer taking advantage of me?" and "I've been asked to be responsible for [problem] but I have no authority over [cause of problem], what do?" type letters many times over.

Very, very often, her diagnosis of an issue is "the much bigger problem here is what your manager isn't managing, here's some guidance on turning your problems back into their problems, which is where they belong"

Anyway your old boss was taking advantage of you and your new bosses suck less but have not yet cleared the bar of not sucking. You have been overperforming for a decade and your norms are completely skewed. It is super not reasonable for them to ask you to overperform more so that they will consider offering you a job that you don't have the tools for.

You can't solve this company's problems with your fragile human body.

This isn't necessarily an issue of him being a shithead, but it also isn't a sustainable situation. It's not good for you and there's a level of clutter that's probably not good for him either.

Large bastard is a lot more clutter-y than I am. The solution we've come to is trying to keep our messes at least isolated from one another; he can have his messes and I can have mine, but he can have those messes in his spaces, not all over the place. Sometimes those messes migrate, and that's when it's important for him to make the effort to rein them in rather than trying and failing to make a daily effort to keep our entire shared space tidy.

I think when you say "we've both essentially accepted he won't clean his mess" what I'm hearing is resignation; you're not happy about this but you don't know what to do so you've thrown up your hands and he feels helpless and unsure of what to do to improve the situation. This is the kind of "it's fine" that isn't really fine.

I think it would be worthwhile for you to each separately think about the mess and talk about it together. Are there areas that YOU *need* to have not-messy? Both for utility and your mental health? Are there areas where you can tolerate more mess than otherwise? Are there areas that are going to be harder for him to keep the mess out of than others? Are there things he doesn't *know* about cleaning up the mess?

I'm obviously a big "communication communication communication" person so I'm going to recommend a lot of talking about stuff, which is probably going to mean a lot of thinking about and interrogating stuff. I'm going to say "talk to him about why the mess bothers you" which means you also have to really articulate to yourself why the mess bothers you (for instance I'm not actually *bothered* by a messy kitchen, but I know it's going to reflect badly on us - and me specifically b/c of presumed gender roles - if someone pops by and the kitchen is a disaster, AND a messy kitchen is going to be harder to use). Genuinely, sometimes knowing *why* something is a problem might make it easier for someone with ADHD to do something. And it's not that he doesn't care that it upsets you, it's just that "Oh if I don't wash my breakfast dishes Anon won't have clear counterspace to make lunch" might be stickier in his brain (and less hard to look at emotionally) than "this thing I forget to do upsets my partner so I should do it."

For the record, I think that people with ADHD should read up on Demand Avoidance and see if it might explain some of the issues that they have in their day-to-day life; I've seen some really unfortunate situations with friends where trying to do things that their partner needed became the subject of demand avoidance. *I* have experienced negative outcomes of demand avoidance. The solution to that, however, isn't to stop making attempts to do the thing OR to simply try harder to do as they're asked/told (which reinforces the demand), it's to work on setting up a situation where the partners' needs are not interpreted as a demand. This is fuck-off difficult and requires a lot of patience and care and many attempts to succeed and will be different for each person and relationship.

(Also for the record demand avoidance isn't *super* strongly linked to ADHD and it's not a definitive symptom; like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, it is something that occurs in some number of people with ADHD and can be a useful lens through which to examine various behaviors; you don't need to have DA or RSD to have ADHD, and having DA or RSD also doesn't invalidate your diagnosis; they're symptoms. For me, DA often feels like "if I don't look at it, it can't get me" - If I ignore all the messages I've got they aren't real and don't have real consequences so I'll just ignore my texts. If I don't look at the vendor email about the order, the problem with the order isn't real and it won't get added to my task list. If I don't look at the requests in my inbox I can't let people down when I don't do them. It's a self-protective coping mechanism but it's *maladaptive* and I can't just ignore the vendor email or all my texts. I need to work on a way of doing the stuff that I'm avoiding in a way that makes it less stressful and doesn't hurt the people relying on me. That takes a lot of effort, personal insight, trial and error, and )

But before I dive into specifics I want to be really really clear about one thing: sometimes people are simply incompatible. Sometimes one person has such a low tolerance for "mess" and the other person has such a high threshold for "mess" that it can't be reconciled. It sucks that this can end up being a thing that people break up over, but it is MUCH better to acknowledge incompatibility as early as possible instead of spending years and years building resentment.

There used to be a great forum called MiL's Anonymous that I spent a lot of time on. It had a lot of people in a lot of difficult situations struggling to get by and hold their relationships together. The question that was used as a litmus test to approach each situation was simple: If you knew today that everything about living with this person would be the same in five years, would you stay?

Because you can't control your partner. You can't control the future. You can only control yourself and your proximity to situations that are harmful to you. If you knew, 100%, that things wouldn't get better in five years, would you be okay with staying in this relationship? If the answer is "no," then that's that. Don't worry about questions of whether or not your boyfriend is a shithead, start the process of ending the relationship because there's a good chance the situation is going to be exactly the same in five years.

If the answer is "yes," and you'd stay in the relationship regardless of whether or not things changed, then it's time to take actions to improve your life within the context of the relationship.

(No judgement on that yes or no, btw. If you would hate living like this for another five years, and you would feel like you'd wasted your time and hadn't done the things you wanted to with your life, get out. Bail. Go. It will be better for you and better for your partner if you split instead of spending half a decade building resentments and and problems that you'll have to spend another half a decade healing from.)

Also, a note: you describe your boyfriend's mess as borderline hoarding - is the issue *mess* or is the issue *clutter*? I have friends who are very tidy, but whose homes are very cluttered. They like things, they have many things, they keep many things around, but their houses are always clean and well-dusted and orderly, just with a tremendous amount of *stuff.* I am addressing all of this as though the issue is mess, not clutter. If your boyfriend's situation is clutter (the space is busy and packed with things but it is functional and clean) and your issue isn't with *mess* (things out of place, things not having a place, things that need to be cleaned up gathering in stacks, falling behind on regular chores like laundry and dishes and taking out the trash) then you definitely need to assess whether or not you are compatible.

For instance here's a room that is messy but not cluttered compared to a room that is cluttered but not messy:

That first room is a *mess* but it would be very easy to clean up in under an hour. The second room is fairly tidy, but would take significant effort to pare down and declutter. BOTH of these can be difficult to live with but the second one is not dangerous or threatening to anyone's health. (The second one is QUITE cluttered and if every room in a house looks like this it can be overwhelming to live with; this is actually harder to deal with in a relationship than the first one in a lot of ways. I don't have a lot of advice for what to do if your partner is a high degree of tidy-but-cluttered because I don't actually think it's a problem or wrong to have thousands of books or bins full of lego or a million kitchen appliances as long as you have the space and can keep it safe and well-maintained; this is a really significant compatibility issue)

Okay, all that out of the way, here's the hard work.

Talk about this shit

Talk to your partner and define "mess." Make sure you are on the same page about what you mean when you're talking about what a messy room looks like versus what a tidy room looks like. Gather reference pictures. DRAW reference pictures.

Explain not just that the mess upsets you, but *why* and *how* it upsets you. In this context don't think of it as your boyfriend's mess, think of it as an unpleasant roommate. Discuss this using "I-statements". "When I have to pick up laundry all over the apartment, I feel like a parent more than a partner." "When there are piles of miniatures all over the table, I feel like I don't have anywhere to do things I'm interested in." "When there are dishes in the sink, I feel frustrated because I have to clean before I can feed myself."

Discuss, frankly and openly, whether he knows how to clean. I'm not trying to make excuses for him here but a lot of people with ADHD have a lot of stress and avoidance around cleaning because they spent a lot of time getting yelled at for not knowing how to clean properly.

Discuss your needs, be firm about what you require but willing to compromise. You *need* some spaces to be clean, and some spaces may be harder for him to keep clean than others. It may be MUCH harder for him to keep a bedroom tidy than it is to keep a kitchen tidy; if you need a clean and empty bedroom with everything put away and he simply cannot do that, that is a compatibility issue. But perhaps you need *your* side of the bedroom to be very orderly and can tolerate a moderate level of mess and clutter on his side. Maybe you're really really bothered by a messy kitchen, but it doesn't bug you if the dining table is covered with projects and papers. Figure out something more workable than "his mess goes everywhere and i live with it because he's incapable of cleaning" because he probably is not incapable of cleaning and you deserve to have places in your home that are comfortable for you.

Reduce friction for cleaning

Sometimes the problem isn't cleaning, the problem is the many many steps before cleaning, or not knowing where something should go when you are done cleaning. One of the absolute best things I've done for myself for cleaning my space is getting a broom holder and mounting the broom to the wall. Sweeping is now essentially thoughtless. I don't have to find the broom or pull it out from a pile of fans or go scrounging around for a dustpan it's right there on the wall, frictionless. So here are some ways to reduce the barriers to cleaning:

Make sure you and your partner both know how to use your cleaning supplies and know where those supplies are. When I switched dishwasher soap I had to re-show Large Bastard where I was storing it and how it was used, because to him what happened was the dishwasher tabs just vanished one day and he didn't know what I was putting in the machine or the process I used. He sometimes puts tools away in places that I can't see (he's more than a foot taller than me) so sometimes I can't get started on a maintenance project until he shows me where he put the battery pack for the drill.

Consider making a how-to chart to or having him make a how-to chart to keep someplace accessible so he can reference it while cleaning. Goblin.Tools Magic ToDo is great for this. Basically a lot of the time people with ADHD have trouble knowing what to do from step to step even if they've done something before, so having a step by step guide can make it easier (I have notebooks full of step-by-step guides for everything from paying for my tuition to removing licenses for my customers to weeding my yard)

Remove obstacles; don't keep cleaning chemicals in the garage in a box that's behind a stack of parts, keep them in the room you'll be cleaning. Don't keep the cleaning supplies that you use to clean the bathroom in the kitchen. Sometimes this means buying two bottles of bleach solution and two scrubbers and two sets of cleaning gloves but having fewer steps (fetch the windex, fetch the paper towels, fetch the gloves) is often the key to getting things done (open under-sink cabinet and grab windex, gloves, and paper towels that are there instead of in the kitchen).

This sort of overlaps with the next category, which is:

Create Dump Zones

One thing that I've found that seems very different between people with ADHD cleaning and neurotypical people cleaning is that neurotypical people are good at getting to a point where the cleaning is "done." They have checked off their tasks and they have finished and it is over. There are *SOME* chores that are like this (taking out the trash is a binary state, the trash has been taken out or it has not) and some chores are perpetual (horrid cursed dishes) but I think with people with ADHD, some chores that are binary for neurotypicals are actually perpetual chores. For instance "clean off the counter" is not a one and done for me. "Clean off the counter" may involve a three day reorganization project. "Clean off the counter" does not mean "wipe down the tile and put dishes away" it means assessing whether or not I need to make vegetable stock and bleaching three tea containers and reconsidering whether or not the sharps container should live somewhere else and going through the mail and figuring out what needs to be responded to and taking out the recycling and on and on and on.

We have had company at the house for the last two weeks, so I asked large bastard to clean off the dining room table, which is largely a project zone for him. Cleaning off the dining room table meant putting away his meds (and since he's a transplant patient that involves a 30 gallon rubbermade tote), throwing away some trash, and totally reorganizing his workshop. It also incidentally involved picking up a table from facebook marketplace and moving my plants, which has now involved moving my former plant rack outside (moving buckets, finding and organizing planters and gardening tools) and taking the former table to the thrift store (not done yet) and cleaning the rug that was under the former table. So "either the table is clean, or it isn't" isn't really true for us.

HOWEVER "hang on we can't eat until the table is clear so let's drive to Pico Rivera to get that console table right now" isn't a workable plan, so you create dumpzones as areas of holding between the start and the finish of the chore.

A dump zone can be a laundry basket. It can be a craft bin. It can be a back room or under your bed. It is a place to put things that you are going to deal with later because if you deal with them now it is going to derail the thing you are actually trying to do, which is set the table for dinner.

Dump zones are vital to cleaning with ADHD and I recommend them for day-to-day cleaning as well. The day-to-day dump zones might be more for you than for your boyfriend. For instance, Large Bastard works with bullets and he sheds bullets all over the house. I used to get stressed when I found bullets when I was cleaning because are these work bullets? Are these recreational bullets? Are they in testing? Do they need to be pulled? Do they go in the workshop or the office or the garage or does he need these today so they have to stay on the counter? And the answer now is "that's not my problem naughty bullets go in the jar." Which is perfectly sensible because he gets to say "mystery yarn goes in the bin" and "art supplies go in the bucket."

I feel helpless when cleaning a lot of the time. I'm frustrated and lost and I don't know where stuff goes and everything I pick up spins off into three projects in my head and every step feels like a wall to scale. Dump zones help me with that when there's pressure or a reason for cleaning beyond day to day home maintenance. People are coming over? The bedroom is a dump zone, I'll deal with that later. I'm just cleaning up because I need to? Okay I can find a permanent home for this new dish soap.

AS A VERY IMPORTANT COROLLARY TO THIS:

Active projects do not go in dump zones while you or your partner are cleaning. This may mean designating a project sanctuary area like a corner of the table or one particular chair in your main room where a project can be placed so as not to be disturbed. (if my current crochet project ends up in the yarn bin, that may mean that I don't pick the project up for another three months, it lives on the windowsill behind the couch because that's where it'll get worked on)

Do not put things away for your partner, put them in the dump zone for your partner. Your partner has to be the one to put their own stuff away in a way that works for them. I tend to find that this naturally puts a limit on the time stuff sits in the dump zone, because eventually you'll go "hey where's my thing?" and will put stuff away. If that doesn't happen, it's still generally better to have stuff in a dump zone than all over the home.

Do not decide you know what things go together from your partner's stuff and try to "put like things together." The neurotypical urge to put like things together is the mindkiller(j/k). You do not know which things are "similar" in your partner's organization schema and attempting to organize things on your own is going to end up with all of the things "organized" being functionally lost forever from your partner's perspective. Large Bastard's mom would do this and it was infuriating, she'd say "oh I put all the electronics stuff in one box" and she would mean soldering irons, transistors, ham radios, HDMI cables, and cellphone chargers. We are *still* going through boxes of stuff that she "tidied up" when he was hospitalized in 2020 and 2021.

To prevent the need for quite so many dump zones over time, you can work on setting up landing zones and "homes" for projects and tools.

Landing Zones

Landing zones are places where things go when you come inside from doing various things. Sometimes your landing zone only needs to be a tray for your wallet and keys, sometimes your landing zone needs to be a place to take off muddy boots and put a trowel and gloves down before you shower.

To make an effective landing zone, consider what behaviors you're trying to minimize and whether the people using it are ACTUALLY going to use it. For instance I was tired of the corner of my hearth getting cluttered with random junk so I hung up some hooks and put a shelf and a basket there and it became a really effective landing zone for my bag and keys and the mail, but it was VERY ineffective for Large Bastard because it's by a door that isn't the primary door he uses to enter the house. As a result I always know where my keys and bag are but he has trouble finding his keys and wallet. He tends to enter the house through our bedroom and has an overloaded valet next to the door and that's usually where his wallet ends up. Mounting a shelf to the wall above the valet and putting a basket and a hook on it will be a better place for his stuff to land. It's not that he's not using the first zone because he doesn't know that it's there, or because he doesn't care about lost time when I'm searching for my car keys after he borrows them, he's not using it because it's not by the door he uses. That's all.

I have a landing space for when I come in for gardening that's different than the one when I come in from grocery shopping. I have a landing space for when I walk into the dining room instead of the kitchen when I get home.

Landing spaces prevent stuff from piling up all over the place because they are a limited functional space that should be used frequently. Mail ONLY goes in the landing zone. If you have mystery mail or if you're not sure it's safe to toss, you put it in the landing zone. You can't let the mail get piled up too high or you won't have a space for your keys. You can't let the change in your wallet tray get too deep or your wallet is going to slide off, etc., but you also don't just put change on the coffee table or your nightstand because the landing zone is right there.

Homes for items are just what they sound like. They're the place the item goes. It lives there. My meds live on my nightstand. You would not believe how poorly I did with taking my meds on my vacation because they weren't on my nightstand. A while back large bastard lost one of his sets of sorted meds and we tore the house up looking for them because he couldn't find them in his nightstand, which is where they live. *I* found them in his nightstand because I emptied out the entire top drawer (he had only looked on the top layer) and found them underneath a radio and a hammock. Even though they were *hidden* they were in their home, so they were findable. I recently needed ink for an art class. Art supplies live in a dresser by my desk. Ink lives in the art bin or the top left drawer. The ink was not in either of these places (it was on a cabinet in the dining room behind a teacup) so it took me weeks to find it.

Sometimes the reason that ADHD spaces are so messy is because objects have been assigned homes in places that are visible and if they get moved they get lost. This is a genuinely difficult problem that requires a lot of effort to solve and can involve a lot of trial and error for creating a tidy living space. For some people, open shelving and visible storage might be a good solution. For some people, assigning a VERY clear home and inculcating that location by habit is the only way to clean up a space. For some people one very cluttered corner to at least isolate the chaos does the trick (for me and large bastard open shelving doesn't work because anything in one place for too long becomes invisible; that means that I rely on assigning things homes and large bastard relies on having contained chaos and a general idea of where to search but what that DOES NOT mean is that he is clean or tidy. His spaces look like an explosion. But he can mostly find his stuff and do what he needs to do and as long as that's limited to specific places in shared spaces I can live with it; the dining room table can be a disaster, the kitchen cannot).

People organize things differently. It often takes a while for neurotypical adults to settle into an organizational style that works for them and ADHD adults may need to settle into a new system every few months for it to continue working. The cleanup and declutter is most likely going to be a permanent project that is always going to demand some level of attention from everyone in a shared space, but "my ADHD means I can't do it" is not really going to fly. Maybe his ADHD means that he can't keep his space tidy, but it doesn't mean you can't move stuff from shared spaces into dump zones or that he can't do stuff around the house.

If he's insisting that his ADHD means that he can't clean it is possible that he's not being a shithead, he just feels helpless and doesn't know where to start and has adopted the belief that he's a useless piece of shit who can't even keep a tidy space like a grownup because he's internalized a lot of shitty attitudes (hello, my internal monologue about keeping a clean house). But it's also possible that he's just being a shithead.

It's something that's worthwhile to investigate with him. If he's unwilling to make an attempt, then he's being a shithead.

It is also not your responsibility to rehabilitate another person. If he wants to clean and it's something he feels bad about and needs some help and support with the way that someone might need help or support for learning to use a mobility aid, that is fine but you don't have to be the one who gives him that support if it's detrimental to your health, and you don't have to be the one to teach him that stuff if it's not something you're capable of. And if he is NOT interested in working on making your shared living space more accessible for you, that is not your suitcase to unpack and you just have to ask yourself the question from the start: would I stay with this person if I knew the situation was never going to change?

IDK, I'm sure a lot of this reads like "anon you must take on the emotional labor of training your partner to be an adult" but it's really meant to be more of a way of assessing yourself and your relationship. If you created landing zones do you think he'd use them? Would he get angry if you assigned a laundry basket as a dump zone for his stuff while you tidy the living room? Is living with him long-term going to be comfortable for you if nothing changes? Do you have enough of a shared definition of "mess" that you're at least in the ballpark for what counts as a clean house?

I am not someone who thinks relationships need to end if you can't live together, nor am I someone who thinks that once you've lived together a relationship has to end if one person moves out.

But if the mess is in his home, not your shared home, and he is comfortable with it and you are not, then I think you don't necessarily have to split, but you shouldn't move in together.

If you haven't moved in together but you are planning on it, part of your plan for living together needs to include his stuff and how he will manage it (that may mean reducing the stuff, that may mean getting a place with an extra bedroom for him to use (AND PAY THE DIFFERENCE FOR) for his stuff) but that should NOT be based on the premise of "new home, new me" - he is not going to change his relationship to stuff in a new environment without doing a lot of the work and using a lot of the techniques that I mentioned earlier.

Hiring a cleaner can be a bad problem for some people (the 'where did that thing go, neither of us moved it' issue) BUT when I was a kid and my parents were working ten hour days they hired a cleaner to come twice a month and what ended up happening was that forced all of us to get our shit together twice a month to make her job easier. She mostly did dusting/vacuuming/mopping while we did dishes and day to day pickup, but the night before she came was when all of us had to get together and take out the recyclables and put our books back in our room and clean our science projects off the table and put away our laundry so she wouldn't have to deal with our daily mess on top of the stuff that was actually covered by her job description.

Anecdote time - I'm separating this out because I don't want to imply that this is a prescriptive solution that came from the book. Instead, the book lead me to identify a problem, and try a solution radically different from anything I'd have thought of independently.

Reading it had an immediate positive effect on my life in the form of my kitchen, which has been enjoying the longest clean streak of its existence. I changed two things:

First, I started running the dishwasher every two days, whether it needs it or not. This schedule is arbitrarily based on owning two cat food bowls, which get dirtied at a rate of one per day.

Second, she gave me permission to put dirty dishes on top of clean and run the dish washer again, if that's the thing I need to do in order to accomplish #1.

So now my goal is: run the dishwasher every two days so I always have clean cat food bowls. And the result is that the dishwasher is usually mostly empty, so it's really easy to put dishes away when they're clean, and really easy to include bigger things like pots and pans which means they're clean so it's easier to cook, and I can always fit the last two days worth of dishes in the washer, even if I don't empty the previous load at all.