What really scares me is that I don’t meet the classical medical criteria for ADHD, but I relate to these memes like a motherfucker…
The main thing to remember about these diagnoses is that you don’t have the disorder unless it disrupts your daily life.
A lot of people have a lot of symptoms of some of these disorders without having the disorder itself.
I mean some of us have become experts at not letting it disrup life as we had no choice. But my therapist says I’m all kinds of adhd she is baffled I never went to a shrink before. Nothing has to affect your life not even hallucinations and lack of short term memory. You pretend to be like every one else and smart phones do the rest.
I’ve had some time to think about this, and honestly at times it does disrupt my life. There are many examples in my life, which some of these memes hit really close to.
When I say I don’t meet the classical medical criteria, I meant that I don’t meet all of the multiple criteria necessary for a diagnosis. But some of that could just be from my upbringing. For example, I don’t have the complete lack of impulse control that seems to be almost a requirement for diagnosis. I also was constantly browbeat and ridiculed for my lack of patience as a child, and had to develop ways to avoid the constant criticism. I learned patience as a coping mechanism.
I am affected by my lack of planning ability. I’ll get the job done, but it’ll always take longer because I didn’t account for many different things. People constantly comment on that, because to them it was obvious how it should have been done and they can’t understand why I just didn’t do that. I try to control my budget with diligently developed spreadsheets, but it often goes off the rails because sometimes I just need to buy myself something to satisfy the itch when I’m stressed. I had serious boredom problems when I was in IT and stuck in front of a computer 8 hours a day, which might partially explain the 2-3 year layoff cycles. I loved developing code, but I hated working on the same program for more than 6 months. I also hated doing tech support with a passion, which I got stuck doing for over a decade.
I’ve just tried to pivot and work around things the best that I can. People have talked about it like it’s living life on hard mode. But it’s the only way I know how to live. It’s barely holding together with Duct Tape, bubblegum, and a whole lot of hope, but I’ve gotten this far in life like that. My fear is that disrupting that to try to find a new path might completely tear everything apart.
Y’all still trust your brains? Lol
Oh I see. I just gave up haha and now whenever I hear a task I need to do/anything I need to remember I just write it somewhere.
Something along the lines of “your brain is made to think, not to remember trivial tasks”
Hahaha too relatable. My solution was to buy a bunch of tiny pencils and literally leave them everywhere (pants, coats and hoodies included)
Note app on my phone that sync with my PC (actually, with a server that both syncs with) and has several notebook to keep everything kinda sorted is the way for me, although looking at the notes aren’t always works lol. Trying to build this habbit rn
Thank God for auto pay
My memory really only seems to function properly for keeping track of large sets of complicated variables, like writing lore or designing a rule set or coding. Ask it to remember something simple and it’ll completely throw it out the window. Which, okay, it’s a pain in the ass, but I can really do that first bit in a way that I watch other people struggle with.
I may operate like a confused blob spreading in all directions, but every little piece of that work is a chunk of a bigger picture that I can see clearly. I may be flitting from task to task within that work and advancing ideas as my brain spontaneously shifts focus, but when they’re all tied to the same end result they all advance the work in an organic and automatic way.
When I let myself work that way, that’s when I really feel what Bukowski meant by “Don’t try”.
Yes, it takes me literally forever to leave the house in the morning. Sure, numbers without a specific meaning and immediate use swim around in my head like alphabet soup. Okay, I literally can barely tell the difference between one hour and six hours if I’m not using some sort of event to track the time.
But my awareness in the moment is pretty on point. I’ll catch things other people won’t. I’m great at spotting the silhouettes of animals out in the dark and I notice erratic drivers from a mile away. The same things about my memory that make me terrible at getting my day going or that make it hard for me to keep up to date with people or deal with paperwork also make me way more observant than I would be otherwise. They’re also the reason I can track these massive piles of inter-related data and not feel overwhelmed. My memory works differently, but it’s pretty useful for what I need it for.
We’re different, and sometimes it sucks. But a big part of the reason it sucks is because society isn’t built for our particular variety of human. That doesn’t mean we’re not beneficial to ourselves or our species, and it doesn’t mean we’re broken. It means we work differently and we have different capabilities.
For some people it may make sense to medicate to make it easier to keep track of things, and some people may not have or may not have found applications for the way their memory works differently; we all have to find what works for us.
But I also think that we don’t necessarily have to frame our experience of our own brains around apologizing for not being what society expects or overly pathologizing our own variation from the perceived norm.
I’m the same way. It’s as if my brain is very good at holding connected ideas and forming complex models, but hopelessly bad at holding unrelated information. Like, I can hold an entire schematic in my head all day but can’t remember a random zipcode longer than a few seconds.
Based on this diagnosis, I have ADHD, despite not having trouble concentrating on things, just hard to remember things.
Is it possible that I have ADHD but only while driving? Opening the door of my house often triggers what I supposed to get on the way, kids included.
