Mali’s playground

A post on executive dysfunction, ADHD inattentiveness and hyperfocus, and whatever else occurred to me as related as I originally wrote this for twitter.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been called lazy by people in your life. But the thing is, there’s almost no-one (if anyone) who’s actually lazy. And I promise you, if you’ve felt guilty because there are things you should be doing and can’t get them done? You are NOT lazy.

I’ll get to executive dysfunction, the main focus of this thread in a moment. Because I want to start by talking about ADHD and hyperfocus.

Is it hard for you to pay attention to things you don’t enjoy, but can focus for hours on things you do?

Does the world ever disappear to the point you forget to eat/drink while you’re working? Can you suddenly get days worth of work done in a short amount of time, but only once it’s the last minute, or when you get into the zone? But you don’t necessarily have control over getting into that mode?

Hyperfocus

The reason this is related to this thread is that often this is the “proof” that you’re lazy. Look, if you’re interested you get things done! Look at how much you can do when you “just make yourself” or “just focus”! Clearly you just don’t want to do the thing.

I can’t tell you how many days I’ve sat there trying to get into a zone that’s eluding me, losing sleep and feeling guilty, just to finally hyperfocus in the final day and pull out a miracle.

But I have ZERO ability to force it (I have tricks! but it’s not the same).

Hyperfocus often gets brought up as a “you can’t have ADHD, look how focus on the things you enjoy! Look what happens when you do focus!”

But actually, it’s a major aspect of inattentive ADHD!

So, that’s why hyperfocus matters in this convo.

Now onto Executive Dysfunction.

To start with, a quick note: Executive dysfucntion is not just an ADHD thing. It’s an aspect of a lot of different neurodivergencies.

Also, this is primarily from my perspective as a person with ADHD, I’d love to hear your versions of these experiences!)

I like to describe executive dysfunction as “the start button isn’t there.”

Also, this isn’t just for chores or boring things.

Have you ever sat there going “I want to game” but it just never happens?

I sure have!

When you have executive dysfunction, this means that starting tasks can be near impossible. You just can’t get yourself to start it. Often, you may sit there staring at the document with the blinking cursor, or looking at the stove, or glancing at the full laundry basket, etc

But again, there’s no start button. You just can’t do the thing. Which makes it really hard when people tell you to just focus, or that you could do it if you just cared, or that you’re just lazy.

Because we want to do the thing! We do!

(I mean, okay, want may be a strong word sometimes, I never WANT to do chores, but it’s still not an intentional putting it off. It’s more an “I need to do this thing, I know I need to, I want it to be done, but I can’t get myself to do it”)

Now for me, and many with ADHD, once someone points out you haven’t done the thing, or when the deadline comes close, suddenly the start button appears

Which again, people use as proof you totally could have done the thing the whole time.

So clearly you were just lazy & are only doing it cause you got yelled at/prodded/nagged.

But this isn’t true, there was no start button!

@adhd-alien has a PERFECT comic on this: https://twitter.com/ADHD_Alien/status/1138475368191598594

Now, we learn tricks to deal with this. Or meds may help.

For me, I find ways to enforce outside deadlines, or I’m more likely to have. a start button for something I’m doing with/for other people.

But ultimately, our brains just don’t work the same.

So for someone where the start buttons are always there, who assumes everyone is the same as them, it looks like we’re actively making the choice not to hit start.

So they call us lazy, unable to see us desperately trying to hit a button that’s just. Not. There.

Now, add on to this all the other comorbidities that come with neurodivergency, we almost never have just one thing. Add on physical disabilities or chronic/invisible illnesses or chronic pain or fatigue.

All of these make it so much harder.

There are SO many things that affect our abilities to get things done.

For example, I had a doctor appointment four days in a row (OT, neurologist, OT, infusion). I also helped schedule an event, and did a stream.

Before MS and chronic pain that would be nothing.

I could have done SO much more, filled my days with getting things done.

Now? I’m spending today on the couch, recovering before my stream tonight.

And I have to fight so much guilt, because I feel like I should be doing more. But my body just CAN’T.

So.

Do you feel guilty, but you just can’t start the thing?

Is there no start button?

Are you exhausted and your body is insisting you rest?

There are so many things that affect our ability to do things.

Brains, bodies, the world we live in.

When you claim abled people shouldn’t use delivery services, or buy weighted blankets, or use fidget toys, etc, it risks making them unavailable/too expensive for those of us who need them. (Unless there’s an actual shortage)

Similarly, it’s hard to know who’s disabled by just looking at them/their actions. Many of us mask, or are forced to do more than we really can. There are also loads of invisible disabilities.

All right, y'all, buckle up, because with Passover this weekend & a certain wizard game having goblins talking about kidnapping children, it's really important that you all understand what blood libel is, and why this plot is SO bad.

First of all, goblins are based on antisemitic stereotypes. You can look it up, it's been written about extensively. Did Rowling intentionally make her goblins this way? Probably not, but she did pull from a deep history of antisemitic tropes when she created them. The thing is, by the time of this game coming out, we've been talking about the issue and the ties for years. It's no longer a question of was this done intentionally, it's now "this has happened, the connection has been made, so please don't lean into it? Please?"

But...well, we've got goblins talking about kidnapping children.

Enter blood libel.

One of the accusations thrown against Jews for centuries, one of the ones that was used to justify persecution and horrible things done to us. I'm actually shaking a bit as I type this up.

So, supposedly, Jews need blood, preferably the blood of christian boys, to bake into our matzos for Passover. Now, if you're paying any attention, blood is SUPER treif (not kosher). Humans aren't kosher. Not murdering? One of the ten commandments.

But neverless this persisted.

So any kids going missing? Or worse, found dead? Jews. Totally the Jews. And hence a clear reason to punish Jews, sometimes even to the point of killing all the Jews in town.

This accusation that Jews use Christian blood for matzos or rituals has been insidious.

Heck, it's still comes out every now and then, there is still a conception in some places that ritual murder is part of Jewish practice (or at least it is used to preach hate).

For more info, check out the wiki, lots of specific examples there, including up through the 2020s:

(On an interesting but unrelated note, blood libels were the impetus of the Golem of Prague, and golems being a Jewish thing is another discussion for another day. But I need a breather because dear god this whole thing is a lot)

Anyways, back to the point. So, children going missing straight out led to the blaming and murder of Jews. And when the goblins have been linked to Jews? And goblin lore is based off antisemitic tropes?

Yeah.

This is a problem.

Some more threads on the topic can be found here:

we know all about sin, and about jesus, and about god-as-anthropomorphized-dude-in-sky, and many of us didn’t know that those AREN’T actually part of judaism for a long time, since they are SO entwined in “secular” culture.

so yes, most of us are fully qualified to talk about the differences between christianity and judaism, since one is our religion and the other is forced on us in every conceivable way.

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

Most characters in mythologies are personifications of concepts, or embody some natural phenomenon - like the story of Hades and Persephone is there to explain why the seasons change, Persephone being spring, Demeter - summer, and the absence of them both resulting in death (Hade's domain) and winter, and so we can't have Persephone stay in underworld all year round or have Demeter steal her back to earth permanently, otherwise they myth would lose its core function.

Interpreting the myth without the lense of the natural phenomena that it explains would make it lose an integral part of itself, and therefore make the plot and characters seem strange or unnatural. Why does Demeter hate Hades so much, seeing how so many mothers are okay with Zeus doing atrocious things to their offspring just because he's Zeus? Does Persephone actually want to stay or not? What's with the bizarre arrangement?

Most modern interpretations strip myths of their natural contexts, making them character-driven instead of phenomena-driven, which just makes them land differently - they can still be fine stories, just not myths, not is the traditional sense.

And now we get to this beauty. This is absolutely a myth, the most classical kind. The relationship between characters, who are personifications of objects, phenomena or concepts (in this case, online platforms) used as an intuitively understood metaphor for an event (the demise of Twitter and the Tumblr userbase being unwilling to accept Twitter's userbase).

The modern myth that is The Divorce of Tumblr and Twitter carries the themes of regression, corruption and downfall. Some of Twitter userbase used to be part of Tumblr userbase, but they left and changed (corruption). Now that Twitter is becoming uninhabitable (downfall), people are trying to return to Tumblr (regression, possible downfall of Tumblr), and to keep them off Tumblr is returning to its old cringe self (regression).

There once lived a young man, handsome as daylight, bright and strong. He was known as Twitter, beloved by the people, a favorite of the gods. His chosen companion, Tumblr, was not dear to the people or the gods. He, a traveling storyteller, preferred solitude. His tales were strange and often unpleasant to the ears, but enchanting in their vulgarity. 

One day, Tumblr's patron goddess, Yahoo, enraged by his vulgar words, put a curse on him. He was not to utter vulgarities, speak of the pleasures of the flesh. His stories of lycanthrope companions were lost to the sands of time, and with them, his last listeners turned away from him. 

Twitter watched others laugh at his beloved, turn him away from their doors, and a dark thought settled over him. He was perfect in every way, his only fault was the affiliation with the cursed taleweaver. And so, little by little, they drifted apart. 

In his travels, Tumblr stumbled into the temple of Apollo, who bestowed upon him the gift of prophecy. He made acquaintance with the trifecta of wise temple maidens who induced visions through hallucinogenic incense. His stories changed, still bizarre and often vulgar, but at times full of wonder and truth. 

At that time, Twitter enjoyed all the luxuries of the mortal world. He was the companion of kings, wealthy merchants, legendary heroes, wise philosophers. 

One day, a man richer than rich, richer than the God of wealth, went to the senate of directors and asked to buy the most precious thing in the entire polis. 

The senate thought long and hard, and said: "do you wish for our finest singer, the most sweet-voiced of the land, Spotifia? I am afraid I cannot part with her. "

"No, " said the rich man, his voice cold and harsh, "I said I have come to buy your most precious thing."

"Have you come for our gambler, the chosen of the god of luck, MAXimil? They earn us more riches than you can offer. I shall not part with them. "

"No," the rich man repeated, "I have come to buy your most precious thing. I have come for Twitter."

The senators laughed, then, for they knew this must be a joke. Twitter was too beloved by the gods to be owned as a servant. But the rich man did not smile. He offered money, then more and more still. As the goddess of hubris clouded his mind, he offered more money than he could afford to spend, more than the senate could afford to refuse, for it was enough gold to form armies five times the size of their polis. 

And so Twitter, the proud Twitter, the untouchable Twitter who laughed at kings and scholars alike, became a servant. 

As he was put onto a gilded ship to be sailed off to the rich man's land, he prayed to the gods that granted him beauty and strength and a sharp tongue, but none answered. His cruelty and vanity made them turn away, and he was too full of his power to notice. 

Finally, the young man remembered one more name. He called for Tumblr, his forgotten companion. 

First time he called, the birds took off and flew in all directions. Second time he called, the animals fled in fear. Gathering all the strength he had, he called a third time.

His call shook the earth and the skies, and in an instant, Apollo's taleweaver stood on the shore. 

Twitter cried in relief. "My love!" he called, "save me! Save me, and I shall be yours for the eternity to come. I shall bask you in glory and riches. I shall make the people love you."

Tumblr looked at the rich old man, at the gilded ship, gilded chains, at the other slaves that were meant to please the rich man during his trip, dressed in the finest clothes fit for kings and immortals. 

That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.

I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.

My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”

He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.

When I was 18, only a few months after graduating from high school, I started having seizures. Serious, triggered at the drop of a hat, knock me unconscious for an hour or more and leave me dazed for days kind of seizures.

I was rushed to hospital two or three times within the space of a week after passing out in the middle of cooking dinner or talking with my family, but the hospital could not find anything wrong with me. I spent a week in the hospital in a planned admission, connected to an EEG monitor for 23 hours a day with the doctors hoping to catch my seizures in action and finally figure out what they were. I don’t know how many seizures I had during that week, but at the end of it, they said that even after all that, there was nothing wrong with me. After that, they sent me to a psychologist.

I was diagnosed with PNES - Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Siezures. Essentially, it was explained to me, I had been ignoring my anxiety and PTSD for so long that my body was acting out just like @kamorth ’s had. When they started treating me for anxiety and PTSD, my siezures eventually turned into panic or anxiety attacks, and then stopped altogether.

I mean of course they have songs that go ‘gold gold gold’ and the right to kingship is handed down via a petrified loaf of bread with someone’s butt imprinted on it.

But in the same breath you’ve got the knockermen, who go down mine-shafts with no source of light on them to face fatal explosions, and the ones who come back are regarded as exponents of sainthood, because they’ve done the impossible. And they talk about what they’ve seen down there, and everyone knows seen has nothing to do with the senses, but with the kinds of things that come to you when you are alone in the silent bowels of the earth with no light. Which. If this doesn’t sound like the perfect setting for the birth of mysticism and religion, I really don’t know, man. 

And this, this seen, changes the profession from something dangerous and full of fear into something sought-after, that young dwarves volunteer for. And then you’ve got an entire category of people believed to walk between life and death at all times and not really part of the mortal order of things. You enter this profession, your family will kiss you goodbye and think of you as if you’ve left this world. 

And then there’s something that Tolkien doesn’t have - religion as politics. By tradition successful knockermen become kings. And other knockermen become fundamentalists to the point where they decree that the amount of time you spend above ground dictates whether or not you’re a dwarf. Like, literally this one thing would bring into question your own nature and, more importantly, whether or not you would belong to a community. You’ve got debates on modernity and traditionalism, the generational effects of immigration and who should rule an entire people and why. There are mentions of social practices that sound an awful lot like religion - like how when a dwarf dies their tools should be melted so they can never be used by a living one, or the fact that it does not matter if you are literally six feet tall, you can still be a dwarf if you performed certain rituals.

And the fact that all of this happens in one of the City Watch books and is pitted against champion doubter Sam Vimes and it still leaves you as a reader kind of speechless and wowed, is saying a lot. 

I will argue this always and forever: compared to Terry Pratchett, Tolkien is a pretty lazy writer. A lot of what he did strikes you as extraordinary because he tried to do it systematically and on such a sweeping scale. But going into the smaller details of his world-building, I think the only things he’s ever taken 100% seriously are genealogies and made-up grammar. Tolkien does a lot, and I say this as someone who grew up as a fan of his work. But at the level of story-telling, he builds histories, not societies. He writes with the underlying assumption that we as an audience understand how his world works, because we’ve read what he’s read and have some notions that the Shire is pre-industrial England and the whole War of the Ring thing is basically feudal warfare blown out of proportion etc. etc. Tolkien’s world is fixed, lives in its own past, moves on in forms but not in substance. ‘The King has returned’ is really more of an end of history thing, because past that point evil has been vanquished and everyone will live in peace in an ordered world. 

In Terry Pratchett’s writings history only shows up if it has to, sometimes as exposition, rarely as plot, mostly creeping up on you in the form of remarks like ‘Ankh-Morpork is built on Ankh-Morpork’. And this is because Terry Pratchett writes societies, with all that writing societies entails, including religion.

Vimes saw the images in his mind as Cheery explained…

The miners would clear the area, if they were lucky. And the knockerman would go in wearing layer after layer of chain-mail and leather, carrying his sack of wicker globes stuffed with rags and oil. And his long pole. And his slingshot. Down in the mines, all alone, he’d hear the knockers. Agi Hammerthief and all the other things that made noises, deep under the earth. There could be no light, because light would mean sudden, roaring death. The knockerman would feel his way through the utter dark, far below the surface. There was a type of cricket that lives in the mines. It chirruped loudly in the presence of firedamp. The knockerman would have one in a box, tied to his hat. When it sang, a knockerman who was either very confident or extremely suicidal would step back, light the torch on the end of his pole and thrust it ahead of him. The more careful knockerman would step back rather more, and slingshot a ball of burning rags into the unseen death. Either way, he’d trust in his thick leather clothes to protect him from the worst of the blast. Initially the dangerous trade did not run in families, because who’d marry a knockerman? They were dead dwarfs walking. But sometimes a young dwarf would ask to become one; his family would be proud, wave him goodbye, and then speak of him as if he was dead, because that made it easier. Sometimes, though, knockermen came back. And the ones that survived went on to survive again, because surviving is a matter of practice. And sometimes they would talk a little of what they heard, all alone in the deep mines … the tap-tapping of dead dwarfs trying to get back into the world, the distant laughter of Agi Hammerthief, the heartbeat of the turtle that carried the world. Knockermen became kings.

(Fun fact: Knockers, also knackers, are mythical creatures that live/exist/dwell in mines. There are two schools of thought on the knocker: one holds that he is a malicious spirit who taps on the walls and props of the drift to cause cave-ins, and the other believes him to be a friendly and helpful spirit whose tapping and knocking on the walls is meant to warn the miners that collapse is imminent and to get the hell out. They are sometimes considered to be souls of dead miners, but whether they are tapping to get back into the world or to warn of impending danger is up for discussion.)

This isn’t even going into the whole Things Tak Wrote, or that Tak does not require dwarfs to think of him; he merely requires them to think. This kind of stuff that makes you blink and go o-oh… isn’t limited to the main Discworld books. Read The Amazing Maurice for another wonderful, creeptastic, moving description of religion: people going into the dark, alone, for the good of the clan; hearing things, coming back changed.

It wasn’t just a random crowd, when you looked closely. It was also a queue, along one side of the street, moving very slowly towards a side door. They were waiting to see the grags. Please come and say the death words over my father … Please advise me on the sale of my shop … Please guide me in my business … I am a long way from the bones of my grandfathers, please help me stay a dwarf… 

yes, it sucks that we’re likely losing the house and it sucks that the senate is still up in the air and it super sucks that the democrats have basically given up on bothering to campaign in florida. but losing the house was always likely and we have not lost it by nearly as much as we were predicted to, and honestly, without a filibuster-proof majority, even having both chambers of congress isn’t a guarantee of being able to get much done there. there are definitely disappointments, but this is nowhere near a disaster. ultimately, from what I can tell, there are a lot more republicans disappointed by this election than democrats, because this was supposed to be a massive blowout for the republicans and it very much has not been. like, at all. 

again I am not saying there are not things to be disappointed by, and it sucks immeasurably that we have to take “this didn’t go as badly as it could have” as a victory, but also, it really, really is a victory. at the very least, it’s not a flat-out defeat, and there are a lot of reasons not to feel despair. the smaller, state-level victories are not as flashy and dramatic as the higher-profile ones like the house or senate, but they’re extremely important, and will make a huge difference in a lot of people’s lives — in many cases a greater difference, day-to-day, than the senate or house elections will make. it’s really important not to lose sight of these wins.

you know what happened local to me, in just one race?

a White Christian Nationalist who was attempting to criminalize gender-affirming care and who denied reproductive autonomy across the board lost the governor’s race.

Among lots of other things, this means that my spouse and I don’t have to pack everything we own and move to a different state for the safety of our child. It means our child’s in-process legal name & gender-marker change will go through instead of possibly being denied.

MI state legislature is held by Democrats for the first time since 1983. NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. The WI gubernatorial candidate who vowed that if he won, Republicans would never lose another election in that state again… lost. WI politics is a giant conservative dumpster fire, but at least they have a Democrat in the governor’s mansion to help keep it from getting even worse.

VT sent their first woman to Congress (Becca Balint).

NY elected their first woman governor (Kathy Hochul was appointed after Cuomo, this was her first election.)

MD elected their first Black governor (Wes Moore), only the third Black governor ever elected in this country. MA elected the first openly lesbian governor (Maura Healey). NH elected the first transgender man to a state legislature (James Roesener). (In fact, it was a really great year for LGBTQIA+ candidates. You can read about even more wins here.) FL was overall disappointing, but they did elect our first Gen-Z congressperson (Maxwell Frost). Voters under 30 turned out in big numbers, and overwhelmingly for Democrats. KY had an amendment to ban abortion in the state on their ballot. It failed. MT had a fetal personhood referendum on their ballot. It failed. MI, CA, and VT all had measures on the ballot to uphold abortion rights on the state level. They all passed. We are likely to lose the House (but only just barely, which is not at all what was predicted), but there’s a chance we may not only hold the Senate but pick up a seat, depending on how these last 3 races shake out. It was a great night for Democrats, a great night for women, a great night for queer folks, and a great night for Democracy. And all of this with a President whose approval ratings are in the mid-40s, and a country struggling with high inflation. That is unprecedented.