Reminder that spring will always come back, music will never stop being created, and there are still so many books left to read! You’re alive! You’re alive! You’re alive!

(excerpted from Leila Chatti's poem: "Tea", published in Missouri Review)

negative self talk IS unproductive and painful for you and often those around you. but like every other post that talks about this is like “yeah it makes you an exhausting and burdensome person to be around and if you don’t stop now everyone in your life will abandon you. Also I personally hate you for it”. and it’s like hey hi hello. basically the theme of all my negative self talk is that I’m an exhausting and burdensome person to be around and that everyone in my life will soon abandon and hate me. so like haha what’re we doing here? are you going to provide any actionable advice for how to get out of this habit, or just tell me that I’m Doing Bad And Wrong And Must Suffer For It?

Anyway. If you struggle with negative self-talk I feel for you. It’s hellish, and it’s not something that can just be bludgeoned out of someone by telling them it sucks. We know! I’m not out of the weeds just yet by a long shot, but here’s some of the stuff that’s been helpful for me:

• Fake it til it’s real: cliche, I know! but it really has helped for me, even though it makes me suuuuper uncomfortable at times. but literally tell yourself that you’re super charismatic and sexy and everyone loves you. or whatever version of that feels good for how you’d like to be seen. it’s gonna feel silly and untrue for a really long time, but it helps!
• Reframe: I struggled to phrase this one, but what I mean basically is like… taking that notion of “hey negative self-talk sucks for the people around you too” and turning it into “wow, it is kind of mean to my friends to just assume they’re lying when they say they love me. I don’t want to be mean to my friends. I’m going to take the risk of trusting them”. Try not to go too far in the direction of “oh god I’m being mean to my friends” and stay on the path of “I want to and CAN do right by them”
• Separate from it: I like to kind of act like my negative self talk is something of a different entity from me. Your mileage may vary on this one. I was a really mean really sad teenage girl once, and for me that kind of feels like the place the negative self talk comes from. So instead of being like “I guess I just hate myself and always will”, I can be like “I have this wounded inner child who is lashing out. I’m going to be gentle with her, but I’m also not going to listen to the things she tells me we are, because she is 16 and hasn’t experienced anything good yet.”

This is far from a comprehensive list but this post is getting long—feel free to add on if you have any tactics that have worked especially well for you!

There is still time. It's never too late to transition.

Being asked to do small favors while having adhd task-switching and executive dysfunction issues is such a shit situation cause it's like

• Switching Tasks: This costs 10 Executive Function Points
• Doing the Task: This costs 5 Executive Function Points
• Resuming the Task you were doing before: This now costs 15 points for some reason???
• Saying "no I can't because I need to save my Executive Function Points right now, I want to complete my current Task but only have like 20 points left": This costs 25 points.

Meanwhile, for the person asking, every bullet point here costs like. 0-2 points.

you are allowed to be wrong you are allowed to mess up you are allowed to be embarrassing.

i think i think i think