em, 20s, she/her | bookish blog
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designated haunt of your house, spooky erotica/fantasy writer. i read books often and write them occasionally. 🌙
This is weird bevause ive had this exact thought before
Actually it really does help to paint the picture
“why don’t you set an alarm to remind yourself to put your marbles in your bag?” i will fill your shoes with goo
your secrets are safe with me because i will forget all of them immediately
interrogating me is useless because i won't even remember the question i'm supposed to be answering by the time you've finished asking it
this is an adhd mood.
you know how depression is generally thought of (albeit only embarrassingly recently) as the lack of “happy” chemicals in the brain? i wish more people thought of adhd as the lack of “impulse control” chemicals in the brain, because then we wouldn’t have people out here thinking adhd is just a quirky personality trait, saying we use our diagnosis as a crutch to get out of things we don’t want to do :/
ADHD medication is so ironic. Like don't get me wrong, ADHD meds are a very good thing! It's just so poetic, so ironic that in order to alleviate symptoms such as forgetfulness, and the inability to establish and keep routine habits (such as that of taking your ADHD medicine at the same time every day), you must first avoid forgetting, and you must establish and keep a routine habit.
and worse, you must then avoid forgetting to establish your routine in-person quarterly doctor’s appointment. and you must also avoid forgetting to establish your routine monthly prescription renewal at the pharmacy. and subsequently, you must avoid forgetting to pick up said monthly prescription at the pharmacy in an on-time manner before they bin it.
Disclaimer that this is my own experience with ADHD, which may be totally different to someone else's. But hey, these are some things I've always found useful.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ALWAYS BUY YOUR FRUIT AND VEG PRE-CHOPPED
it’s more expensive initially, but wouldn’t you rather pay $2 more for pre-cut and actually eat it than pay $3 for something that will rot in the back of your fridge waiting for you to cut it?
Fun fact about ADHD:
Prioritizing can be hard! If this is my list of things I have to do today:
Complete math assignment
Listen to the song that’s been going through my head for the last couple days
Help cook dinner
Make a tumblr post
‘Make tumblr post’ and ‘listen to the song’ are just as high on our priorities list as doing math and helping make dinner. Similarly, we know we will inevitably get distracted, and we try to plan for that.
So we work best when we have been given a large portion of time and many things to do in it, rather than small amounts of time to do one of two things.
tldr: our assignments are more likely to get done if they look like “Complete these 5 things before 5pm today” whereas assignments such as “Complete math by 10. complete spanish work by 11. etc” don’t work.
for me, this is less about prioritisation and to-do lists (of any size or structure) not working, and more about the fact that most of the tasks on the list have several different tasks within them, and how our non-linear brains process those smaller tasks.
to the ADHD brain, each task is like a russian nesting doll. math homework is never just math homework. that’s only the blanket term for a bunch of smaller tasks to hide under.
“math homework” is actually: sit down, find a pencil, make sure it’s sharpened/has lead/has eraser, if not go find those things, don’t get distracted, find scratch paper, find calculator, why was i in here?, don’t get distracted, sit down again, open notebook, read problem one, don’t get distracted. likely, problem one has multiple steps because math, so follow all of those to completion. start problem two. don’t get distracted. etc. etc.
it’s much more overwhelming when i list out every little step, but these smaller steps within the larger task are things NTs are able to do on “autopilot”.
so the reason we might have a harder time prioritising is because we know we are not choosing between 5 tasks. we’re choosing between 5 series of tasks that will all require equal amounts of energy to complete, and therefore, determining which task is most important is near impossible.
this is ultimately the reason common tasks are exceedingly difficult for people with ADHD. our brains don’t filter any of that shit out. we don’t have an auto-pilot. we function (or don’t function lmao) manually, non-linearly, constantly. as opposed to NTs who function very linearly in a society that is designed very linearly.
imagine a trolley (shopping cart) that has wobbly wheels. it takes way more effort to push that trolley in a straight line than it does to push one with non-wobbly wheels, right? and every time you add another item to your basket, pushing the trolley in a straight line becomes more and more physically taxing.
now, you could just let the wobbly-wheeled trolley go. but the problem with this is that the store you’re shopping at, like most stores, is set up in narrow aisles (a.k.a. linearly). if you let your trolley go, it would likely swerve off and hit a nearby shelf, knocking things down. or it might hit another shopper and hurt them.
so your option is to keep pushing the wobbly-wheeled trolley forward, in a straight line, because the only other thing you can do is stop all together, and that, too, disrupts the flow of traffic.
but it’s tiresome, and less automatic than everyone else makes pushing a trolley out to be.
given the opposite of narrow aisles (a big fat free space), that trolley would be completely directionless, doing circles all around the store until you realise in the middle of the candy section at the last minute “hey maybe this isn’t conducive to getting the items on the list into my basket” and have to work 3x as hard, racing through the store to get everything you need before it closes.
so it’s not necessarily that a big stretch of time to do 5-10 different tasks will work better for me than an extremely structured schedule, because it won't—ADHD also causes time blindness and poor impulse control, and like the trolley analogy, i WILL put off everything on the list in favour of things Not On The List and won’t realise it until the last hour of the day.
it’s that, the way society is currently set up, is not a society set up for us. it’s for people with perfectly aligned wheels on their trolleys.
and that’s fine. so long as those people realise that sometimes, we may move slower through the aisles than the rest of the traffic flow. sometimes, we may need to take little breaks in the middle of the aisle to rest. sometimes, we may not be able to carry as many things in our baskets. and sometimes, we may need help pushing our trolleys.
snepmaxxing asked:
is it true that people with adhd almost always have a sweet tooth?
tfw-adhd answered:
Yes! Sugary things provide the body with dopamine, and since we don’t get enough dopamine naturally, we tend to be drawn to sweet things to make up for it.
i definitely think it depends on the person. i’m okay with sweet things but would i say i have a sweet tooth? absolutely not. i rarely crave sweets. it’s when the mood strikes, and usually that’s only around my period (which is a notorious time for craving sweets, no matter your natural dopamine levels).
my friend’s brother has adhd. hates sweet things. goes out of his way to avoid them. definitely does not have a sweet tooth.
now, that’s not to say sugar doesn’t help me focus. it does. in fact, studies prove it. i just don’t crave that kind of focus.
you know what’s fun? not reducing jesper to comedic relief when his storyline was about conquering his addiction, his internalized prejudice against grisha, and learning to not run away from people he cared about
with subtle but equally as brilliant notes of adhd.
Nothing reveals how much I like to play god quite like my habit of washing down Adderall with a Cold Brew ✌🏼
are you even adhd if you don’t ingest your controlled stimulant via another stimulant?
Goes for autism too.
may i add
7. you're hungry. but every food you can think of sounds disgusting. ignore your hunger until your ribcage feels like it's breaking and then drink coffee to stave it off for another few hours. force-feed yourself one (1) bag of fruit snacks and then continue with your life.
8. you’re so hungry everything hurts and hunger is the least of your pains. you eat but even slowly it feels too fast. you chew every bite 50x. you barely taste the food as it goes down.
