If you haven’t heard this cliche while discussing your neurodivergency with someone, then I envy your luck. Yesterday I fucked up, I feel shitty, but also I am pissed.
Our brains are impulsive af and tend to forget the most important information. We mess up, our RSD (and empathy) kicks in, we feel terrible, we vow to be more careful, but guess what? Thats fucking exhausting.
As a result, we start overthinking our every waking moment, stressing over every little thing. Because, we are trying to be aware of the things we cannot perceive.
At some point, hopefully we realize that we cannot live like that, and we start to arbitrarily ignore our compulsion to overthink. Most often that works out great because most often the threat is not real, but sometimes we make the wrong call.
The times we overthink are still more than the times we do not, and we still mess up. Let us have our fucking peace.
I’m in my mid 30s, and I have been dealing with ADHD my whole life. I have some important, but hard advice. If you aren’t up for that, just don’t read the rest of my comment.
I get the frustration of having people not struggling telling you to just struggle harder, and people you would expect sympathy from (friends, family) not supporting or sympathizing with you.
That said, and this is a bitter pill to swallow, the world at large does not care about your personal conditions. Whether you are a reliable friend, teammate, worker, spouse, etc matters far more than your ever present inner turmoil.
Work with medical professionals to get your symptoms under control so you don’t beat yourself up at every turn for fucking up in ways that you are predisposed to. Learn to work with and around your own shortcomings and limitations instead of beating your head against the same damn wall every time. Build proper internal responses and coping skills to these events.
You clearly are aware of some of your own behavioral and thinking patterns that are not good or helpful, like overanalyzation after a fuck up. You already have your targets for things about yourself to work on.
This is not a nice thing to hear or to have to do, but it is essential if you want to survive as a grown ass adult in this world. You don’t need to be perfect, but you will need to keep trying to do better, forever.
You can blame the condition that you are just going to have to live the rest of your life with, or you can take ownership that you fucked up again and work to not do it going forward. The fact that you are already beating yourself up about your mistake does not invalidate the right of other people to be frustrated at what happened.
No one has the right to make their internal turmoil everyone else’s problem, even if it may be particularly burdensome. The world should be far more sympathetic and empathetic, but at some point you have to take responsibility for you. That means more than “I feel so bad”, it also means “What can I do to prevent repeats, that I can actually follow through on rather than just have as magical thinking?”
Don’t make plans dependent on getting your shit together. Make plans that will still work even if you keep fucking up in the same ways you did before.
It all gets easier with time, as long as you keep trying.
I mostly agree, but (what else ^^):
No one has the right to make their internal turmoil everyone else’s problem, even if it may be particularly burdensome. The world should be far more sympathetic and empathetic, but at some point you have to take responsibility for you.
IMO you do take responsibility when you tell others about your boundaries and how they can work around them. If they don’t want to because it also costs them a little bit of energy and disrupts their typical workflows they have (again: IMO) no right to blame it all on you. If I tell them “I can’t do X” or something and they again and again expect me to do X, it’s also on them.
Simple example: I tell colleagues, family, whatever to please remind me again if they feel I missed something they expected of me. If they do, all is good. If they later are pissed that I missed something and immediately blame me … sorry my friend, I warned you. (If I had the ability to set a reminder, sure that’s on me for not doing that. But it doesn’t always work that way.)
There are times in our lives when people will need to rely on us. Whether or not you tell them that you are unreliable, or ask that they remind you; it is reasonable for them to be upset if you wind up letting them down. You are not immune from blame. It doesn’t suddenly become their fault for relying on you when you mess up. It is still you who messed up.
If you tell them you can’t do what they rely on you to do, then no, you haven’t fucked up, they have fucked up. They should not have relied on you. When you promise someone to do something and you don’t, yeah, then you fucked up, but if you don’t do that, then it’s 100% their fault.
yeah, but “I have ADHD, so I’ll never be on time” is a very shitty excuse. You waste other people’s time.
“I have ADHD, so I hate queuing, so I’m not going with you to that famous museum” is boundaries.
don’t confuse boundaries with expecting everyone around you to put up with your symptoms all the time.
There’s also a big difference between “I’ll never be on time” and “there will be times I’m late because I have adhd”. But seriously if someone can’t handle my adhd symptoms I don’t expect them to, but they should also not expect me to care that they can’t deal with them. Because I don’t.
Why the fuck is that not a valid excuse? It can be impossible to find sufficient support and adjustments to enable yourself to reliably arrive on time, saying shit like this is a great way to make people who are already struggling feel even more worthless, jesus christ.
Yeah sure, you can’t expect people to literally always be able to accomodate every struggle everyone may have, but to just summarily say “deal with it” is so heartless…
This doesn’t seem reasonable… If you accept some responsibility, duty, job, whatever, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you take whatever steps are necessary for you to complete that task. It’s not everyone else’s job to babysit you and make sure you actually do the thing you agreed to do.
I probably just wouldn’t ask you for anything anymore after you burned me the first time and just go with someone else… You might think that’s unfair, but we’ve all got our own problems and my time is better spent going with a more reliable option.
This doesn’t seem reasonable… If you accept some responsibility
But … that was the point. “Telling them your boundaries” implies not accepting something you are not up to. My managers know that I am not a good manager myself. I have a lot of qualities, at being a driving force in a project is not among them. So they don’t utilize me for that. Which is good.
Yes, it would be on me if I constantly tell them “sure, just let me handle it” and then not handle it. But that would be the opposite of what I wrote above.
ADHD is a reason not an excuse.
Not for this specific case but I’ve often said “It’s an explanation, not an excuse”
The thing I learnt is only assholes expect you to remember 100% of thing 100% of the time.
If you get asked something you can always delay them by saying “I added that to our documentation, let me pull it up”
Now suddenly you go from someone others think as doesn’t know anything, to the person who actually updates documentation with evolving changes.
I needed 3 years of ritalin therapy before realizing that all these self managment tips from people that dont have adhd CAN’T work. I saw that because 3 years of ritalin changed me like I never did before.
the problem is: people think I am diddling around because I do nothing. before, I would do a lot of things and always have breakdowns and stop doing them. I was depressed and worse all my life, well maybe not till age fourteen.
Now, I do nothing, i am am kinda happy and pleased with my self like I never was before.
people just dont get it.
i dig being happy. But they want me to be a busybody.
But I really dont know WHY I should be. I just wanna have peace.
Perhaps you can take solace in knowing that when you hear the phrase “good in a crisis” you can bet your ass that they only got that way by constantly fucking things up and making it work at the last second.
Those “planners” and people who can “remember things that aren’t directly in front of their face” just freeze up like a deer in headlights when things go sideways.
Where do I learn the skill of remembering/noticing things that are directly in front of my face
Most of my brains bandwidth is used up by remembering things like that my passport is in that canvas bag half under my bed and that my birth certificate is in a specific stack of paper at my mums house in my former room. So yes, let’s!
