Of all the gin joints...

“Regardless of my transient joys, I am never free of a feeling of melancholy which somehow forms the base of my heart.”

(the majority of this post is pulled from an older reblog I did on my main, @vantasticmess.)

it’s ADHD Awareness Month so here’s a post about it. :D

I’ve gotten sooo many ‘#not adhd but man i feel this’ tags on adhd posts i’ve made, and tbh tags of this type drive me nuts (b/c they make me doubt the validity of my diagnosis.)

but if you, a not-adhd person, see a post about adhd experiences and relate to it, please consider the following: 

maybe you do have adhd?

maybe it’s because most things that adhd people experience are things that most everyone experiences sometimes, only they experience it all the time.

at its heart, adhd is the inability to pick what your attention is locked onto, sometimes combined with a need to move constantly (hyperactivity).  This manifests as:

lively internal life + rapid thought & intuitive leaps of cognition - good when being creative, bad when trying to make a logical decision

overthinking things

impulsive behavior

short attention span + being easily distracted

unnaturally long attention span + inability to notice outside stimuli

short term memory dysfunction

executive dysfunction

no sense of priority (everything is equally important)

no sense of time in relation to self (cannot effectively tell how long an activity will take or develop a sense of urgency based on a deadline until the deadline is perilously close or already passed)

failure to follow through (leaving work incomplete)

forgetting to remember/remembering tasks at inappropriate times

intrusive thoughts

And pretty much everyone experiences one or all of these things at times, and these symptoms can spring from other causes than ADHD (for instance, executive dysfunction accompanies depression and anxiety as well).

But adhd people have this happen so constantly and so intrusively that we cannot complete basic tasks, even if we want to:

The only thing consistent about us is inconsistent results: sometimes we’re on time, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re reliable, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re studious, sometimes we’re not … (and trust me we’re not enjoying it any more than you are)

We fail classes, we drop out of college, we lose jobs, and no matter how much we try, we cannot fix it.

We can’t just remove distractions - our brains are a distraction.

We can’t just ‘try harder’ - our wayward mind might be focusing on our studying today, but tomorrow it might not. The same effort level will have wildly different results on different days because our attention cooperated … or didn’t.

it is literally impossible for us to choose our focus. pretty much ever.

it pisses off our friends, it pisses off our bosses, it pisses off our family, and it even pisses off ourselves. it affects every part of our life.

& here’s some more stuff that can look like adhd - or that adhd can look like - but aren’t adhd:

auditory processing disorders

dyslexia

various learning disabilities

anxiety

depression

obsessive-compulsive disorder

bipolar disorder

under-educated/unpracticed in decision-making/critical thinking skills

something I’d like to make clear: 

the OP post is aimed at people who are neurotypical & mentally healthy (or rather, people who believe they are NT & mentally healthy).

It’s a rebuttal to the deeply invalidating claim often thrown at ADHD people by (supposedly) NT people when ADHD people describe their symptoms: ‘I do that too.’ ‘everybody feels that way.’ ‘that’s normal.’

NT & mentally-healthy ppl adding/tagging posts about the experience of having ADHD by ADHD people with ‘I don’t have ADHD but I do this/I feel this’ is … very adjacent to the experience of being told ‘I do that too’/’that’s normal’/’everyone feels that way’ by NT & mentally well people IRL.

it’s often well-meaning, but it feels like ‘your diagnosis is BS’.

but of course, plenty of people who don’t have ADHD DO find ADHD symptoms relatable because of some other neurodiverse state or a mental illness. And they have absolutely no obligation to divulge that information in their tags/reblogs! 

also: frankly, it’s wrong of me to assume that everyone who tags my ADHD posts ‘I don’t have ADHD but’ is NT &/or mentally healthy!

the takeaway I would like people to have from this post is:

if you think you are NT &/or mentally healthy but you strongly relate to significant numbers of posts made by neurodiverse &/or mentally ill ppl about their experiences: consider that you might not be as NT/mentally healthy as you believe.

if you think you are NT &/or mentally healthy but you strongly relate to and reblog posts made by nd &/or mentally ill ppl about their experiences: is it really so important to make sure everyone knows you’re not nd/mi? (besides, it’s not anybody’s business why you relate to/reblog a post if you don’t want to explain yourself. I’m not judging you - I promise!)

this is WAY LONG so I’ll probably make this addition into its own post later.