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So when you're through with the epiphany of how to make it physically possible to make the thing you're making, and you're sharing the plan with excitement, because the hard part is over, and now you only have to get your hands moving and do it, they get mad at you like

"it's not that easy! It's a lot of hard work! >:C"

they mean it, because

to them, working is the hardest part.

So I can only speak for myself, but the way I experience depression vs executive dysfunction from ADHD (and let’s be real here, the two can absolutely feed into each other) is that my depression is a lack of desire to do anything, even fun things, where my executive dysfunction from ADHD is a lack of ability to do things even though sometimes I want to.

There are times when I will literally be screaming at myself inside my own head to get up and do something, even fun things, but it’s like my brain just isn’t getting the right signals and I remain frozen/paralyzed/can’t seem to focus enough to get it done, and that’s my executive dysfunction.

So to over simply even further:

Depression: why even bother with ice cream, everything tastes like ash anyway.

Executive dysfunction: man I’d love some ice cream but I can’t get any until I have a bowl to eat out of but all the bowls are in the sink but I can’t wash them until I empty to dishwasher and that is a low reward dopamine task so I’d literally rather do anything else. Ooh, look, TV… man I wish I had ice cream while I was watching this…

I also got my diagnosis last year, also 30+ years overdue. There’s a YouTube channel called “How To ADHD” that I’ve found really helpful, as well as various tumblr peeps. @thebibliosphere has some great advice, and a really cute dog.

UH WHAT

This might have been the bit that hit me hardest, actually:

it would be easy to misinterpret the following scenario as a standoff between two partners: Imagine that your partner asks you to pay the electric bill, and you say to yourself, “OK, I have time to do that today.” But when you sit down to do it, you keep getting distracted. The ADHD brain needs higher stimulation in order to complete this rote task with minimal payoff. Your ADHD brain says, “That task is way too boring, and I refuse to focus on it. Find something that interests me more, which offers me a bigger dopamine reward, and I’ll work with you.” It doesn’t matter that you know you should pay the bill as promised; if your brain won’t engage, it’s an ugly standoff. Perhaps, after a day of procrastination — when your partner will be home in 20 minutes and the bill is still unpaid — there may be enough of an adrenaline rush from a sense of crisis that your brain will engage and you pay the bill.

The ADHD brain and its owner are at odds with one another. It’s difficult to compel a disengaged brain to engage by force of will. In fact, much of the treatment for ADHD involves learning to psych out the brain, so that it will attend to necessary, low-stimulation tasks.

Appreciating the tug-of-war within that pits intellect against neurobiology increases compassion and acceptance for one’s hidden struggle.

I feel SEEN. OTZ

HOWEVER

There are bugs in the system, and these smaller wiring patterns can have negative effects, whether rather inherently on their own or, in combination with others, or under specific conditions.

Attention dysregulation

Emotional dysregulation

Executive dysfunction

Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria

Sensory processing disorders

These smaller pieces suck, I really can’t think of a whole hell of a lot of neutral or positive effects, but I can rhapsodize at length negative ones.

Many of the behaviors/cognitions associated with ADHD within the conditions of standard education disrupt or are disadvantages in or according to that system according to interpretation. This is where “symptoms” of ADHD are ultimately caused by neurography that can also have positive effects, or neutral. They’re “bad” in a particular situation or by a particular interpretation.

Missing or forgetting “important details”—important to whom? Why? Determined how?

Focusing on “irrelevant or unimportant subjects, steps, problems, details, etc.”—irrelevant or unimportant to whom? Why? Determined how?

I can’t remember people’s names to save my life. I can tell you what shoes the person with that face was wearing and that one kept coming untied; they walk with an uneven stride, taking longer steps with their right leg than their left and the left knee bending less; they had some kind of NYC accent; they used an iPhone but not apple earbuds or airpods; they had a green bag repaired with red thread. I talked to and looked at them for less than a minute today, but I’ve met and been told their name 5 times. Sometimes I can remember noticing they’d written their name tag with blue sharpie and wrote the letter u without a tail, and the name was something ultimately derived from Greek. Damned if I know what it was.

For example. People are often exasperated I can remember a name, and creeped out when I can rattle off a bunch of weird shit like that. Or, “what did that guy say their name was? That guy with the green bag?” “What guy with the green bag?” “THAT guy, the one with the knee thing?” “WHAT?” “The name’s Greek...come on, you know who I’m talking about, the guy with the green bag with the red repair!” “Why would I notice that about the BAG?”

If that sounds like anyone famous, yes, now that you mention it, Sherlock Holmes is ADHD as all hell, and if he had to do paperwork for a case to be considered done his closure rate would be 0, because that shit’s boring. And he forgot which form he was supposed to use.

And somehow managed not to learn about the sun-centric solar system thing, and that is Conan Doyle canon. So school must have been an interesting adventure.

In an education system—or social system, since, SHOCKINGLY, ADHD exists outside the classroom as well, or even context, details are subjectively “important” or “unimportant,” so remembering “important details” as a symptom can be avoided by being flexible about priorities. ADHD doesn’t have to be a disadvantage.

Not being able to goddamn do the thing no matter much you want to is not a contextual disadvantage, it’s a life-wrecking disability.

And here, my dudes, we have the problem with ADHD and understanding/treating/talking about it, which is if you only look at it from the outside at how it disrupts a system, the “symptoms” you notice are the ones relating to disrupting that system. I know. Take a moment. Adjust that system and hey, look, no disruption!

If you look from the inside at how ADHD affects someone and their life, the symptoms you notice are the ones that disrupt THEM and THEIR LIFE, even after adjustments have been made. You can change an assignment or classroom setup to work with an ADHD brain, and if the problem is executive dysfunction or perfection paralysis, that brain is still going to struggle Doing the Thing.

So yes, please, DO make learning (and working, and living) conditions that aren’t so easily disrupted! This is a good thing to do for everyone, since ADHD isn’t the only thing that disrupts them. There are problems in the systems that CAN be addressed, if not eliminated.

But DON’T just focus on the disrupted system, because there are internal problems that will show up in any system.

DO focus on the disruptions to the individual as they see/feel/consider them. That’s where the “disorder” is, the things about them that affect them.

Step 1: Bloody well ASK. Start with people already identified with ADHD, ask them what makes things hard. Ask what they’d change if they could, about themselves and the world around them. Ask what they can’t seem to do, or stop doing, no matter how hard they try. Ask what they wish the world would stop doing, or do instead. Ask what hurts. Ask what’s a pain in the ass.

From everything I’ve seen in conversations and just roving the internet, EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION is the worst. And The Worst. Just not being able to do something, like you’re stomping the gas pedal to the floor over and over and the car won’t move. That shit sucks.

For many late-identified, “too smart/successful to have ADHD” people, Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria is big bogey #2, and do I have opinions about calling it “afraid nobody likes me disease” rather than “fear or thought of failure or inadequacy is Everything because it is so damaging and Bad” or something. This one drives perfectionism, people-pleasing, and over-performance...unless it shuts them down, causing apathy/disengagement, resistance/resentment, and under-performance. Someone may do GREAT in school, then hit college, or grad school, or work/adult life, and have it fall completely to pieces around them, because the RSD had gone from a driving force to a crushing one. That shit sucks, it gets all tangled up with Executive Dysfunction, and the both of them screw up everything, not just spelling tests.

Thank you, this has been my TED talk.

Someone may do GREAT in school, then hit college, or grad school, or work/adult life, and have it fall completely to pieces around them, because the RSD had gone from a driving force to a crushing one.  That shit sucks, it gets all tangled up with Executive Dysfunction, and the both of them screw up everything, not just spelling tests. 

Well, if that isn’t just my current situation in a nutshell. I muddled through my MSc and now I’m in my PhD, trying to make it work remotely, and finally the deadline panic adrenaline pedal is broken and all I feel at the prospect of failing and disappointing people isn’t motivation or hyperfocus, only anxiety and nauseousness and feeling tired and wanting to get away from it all.

And I still don’t have that damn ADHD diagnosis because my last attempt to reach out for one resulted in a “Well if you had good grades in first grade, there’s no way you can have it” bullshit. Aka “too smart for ADHD”.

No shit, Sherlock. I know I’m smart. That’s why my life is falling apart at the PhD stage of my academic career instead of the high school stage of my academic career.

Hope you're having a lovely weekend! :D

Aw neat! Those are super cute :D

This sounds so harsh, but please bare with me.

I procrastinated a lot growing up. I still procrastinate today, but less so. And yet, I got good grades. I could write an A+ paper that “knocked [my professor]’s socks off” in the hour before class and print it with sweat running down my face.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to!

And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

If ANYONE could make their top speed/most productive setting the one they used all the time, anyone could do anything. But you can’t. Your top speed is not a speed you’re able to sustain.

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

So all of this to say, I’m not wasting a ton of potential. I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

Like normal people, they repeat something daily for a couple weeks and it sticks. They might miss a day here or there, but the overall habit is formed.

Ok so we’ve all heard of tips involving lists, make a list of everything you need to do, cross it out when you’re done, etc.

Well recently next to each item on my list, I wrote down how to start that task. This can be as simple as “get out my notebook and the assignment” or a little more detailed like “open chemistry textbook to page 235 and review the section on gibbs free energy”

The things is, it’s not like that. It’s really, really not.

Dopamine’s a little bit like glucose (sugar, required for your body to generate energy); a substance that is 100% genuinely essential to having a fully-functioning properly working brain and body, to the point that it feels good when you get more of it because you’re filling a need, to the point that yeah, you can get addicted to it.

But if you’re glucose deficient, that’s hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), where your cells don’t have the energy to keep running because there’s no fuel.  AKA a major issue.

If you’re dopamine deficient… well, just go look up the symptoms of ADHD. All of them, not just the inattentiveness ones. ADHD can and does fuck up your life severely, on multiple levels, because ADHD brains are chronically lacking in a compound necessary for basic function.

Yeah, like anything, you can have too much dopamine. But that’s literally the opposite of the problem here.

That is definitely related! Because the issue is you tend to seek out fun especially when your dopamine is low. But ppl with ADHD don’t produce it properly, so even fun can fail to give us enough dopamine, if it’s not novel enough, which is why we seem to lose interest in things so quickly, or seem to cycle through phases of interest. It’s ALSO why we end up hyperfocusing a lot of the time, bc our brain goes “OH this is giving me the dopamines? Cool, we can ONLY DO THIS now”.

Because dopamine is a REWARD. And normal ppl also can get a small amount of dopamine from things like… knowing that their house will be clean when they’re done cleaning it, for example, but we don’t get that dopamine reward. So not only are we already low on dopamine to begin with, which makes it hard to motivate ourselves and leaves us distracted and tired and our bodies essentially necessitating dopamine-seeking behaviors like eating lots of carbs or only doing the things that are causing dopamine production which are basically never going to be things like “doing homework” that are boring-but-necessary, but the same things other people can use to motivate/reward themselves for doing things they don’t really want to do doesn’t do ANYTHING for us, which means it’s just 100% slog and 0% reward, which is not how brains are designed to operate.

It is SO HARD to function without enough dopamine, and since people a) don’t understand how necessary it is, b) don’t understand how many things cause dopamine production which allows them to find it easy/not too difficult, and c) don’t know that ADHD is basically defined by the lack of dopamine production… well, it’s really hard to make them understand why things are so hard for us, and why we often rely on things like stimulants (which iirc are just “these stimulate the production of dopamine in your system” which is why they help wake you up/energize you and why you get grumpy and shit if you’re used to a high amount of them and then you stop taking them, because your body’s temporarily not naturally producing enough dopamine anymore.)

….like heck honestly? the closest i can imagine to saying “here, do this and it’ll be SORT OF similar to what it’s like having ADHD, now imagine this but forever” is if you’re used to having 4+ caffeinated drinks a day, just… stop using them for a couple weeks. Take a painkiller for the headache, and just… see how hard it is to focus or motivate yourself. And then when you notice yourself starting to reacclimate to not having regular caffeine, think about how much of a relief it is and realize that we never get that, because our bodies never actually will produce enough dopamine on their own.

So… yeah. yeah. Dopamine isn’t bad. Dopamine is necessary and good. The reason dopamine is a problem wrt drugs is that 1) when your body acclimates to how much stimulant you’re taking (whether it’s drugs or coffee), it basically cuts down the non-stimulated production bc too much dopamine is bad too, and 2) when you stop taking them, you get withdrawal due to your body having cut down natural production, and that can also be dangerous depending on how little dopamine your body’s producing on its own.