Rant about "having ADHD is not an excuse for everything"
Rant about "having ADHD is not an excuse for everything"
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.
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.
Goddamn I needed to hear this
thats what i mean. this doesnt help. ritalin helps. because when i take ritalin, i can like understand what you are saying.
its not about KNOWING things, we all know what we shuould do.
Its about executing things.
ADHD is a reason not an excuse.
Not for this specific case but I've often said "It's an explanation, not an excuse"
It can be our greatest weakness if we are not aware of it acting on us. Amd like all weakness it can become our strength when we work with it.
I am stealing that phrase, thanks 🙏
People mistaking reason for excuses is a deliberate act to dismiss our suffering. Deliberate.
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.
There's also a subset of us that were exposed to random, horrific child abuse and developed crisis management skills early out of necessity.
When one of my sites had 2 feet of flooding in the server room and everyone was freaking out, I stepped in, downed the racks, cut the power, and began moving the equipment before my phone even rang.
They praised me for this but in my heart I knew it was nothing compared to having your bedroom door kicked off the hinges by a drunk, angry man four times your size at 3am because you dared to go to bed without emptying the dishwasher.
If I can survive that, no other crisis compares.
I read a Simon Sinek book as part of a management book club and even hit bullshit misinformation on ADHD in there. It's fucking pervasive and, as a millennial, I am now primarily just fighting against my own shitty internalization from years of passive aggressive bullshit.
I am a manager with ADHD who manages some people with ADHD and it's hard for all of us - I try to give my reports space to fail and overcome ruts "If you find yourself in an unproductive mood don't beat yourself up - if your performance is an issue I'll let you know well before any administrative actions are taken" and it's still an issue.
I am hoping it isn't as deeply beaten into genz but school absolutely wailed on us for momentary distraction... I remember being in a parent teacher meeting (there were a lot of those) where my mom asked "And xmunk is doing well on tests and retaining the knowledge?" And the teacher replied "Well yes, but he's rarely focused in class and is disruptive during our quiet study time." ... I seriously want to go back and slap that teacher 'Study time doesn't benefit me, and if I'm being disruptive to others just fucking send me out to run around in circles in the playground or some shit.' But no... my grades suffered not because of academic failures but because I was partially graded on my ability to mask.
Be fucking kind to your brain - there is an expected level of performance for your job and as long as you're above that you can give yourself a brain break and you should not feel guilty about it.
I never mention my ADHD to anyone but my therapist and friends I've known for several years. I don't want people to change how they treat me, whether for better or worse, when they find out about it.
I find it helps navigate certain quirks and get the help I need to thrive. For example, after disclosing I have ADHD, people are much more open to move when I am affected by background noise.
I do the opposite and tell everyone. I am who I am and they can accept me or not, no skin off my back. But when I eventually forget something, I’d rather them already know it’s not personal or because I don’t care, in fact it’s not about them at all. It’s because my brain just sabatoges me sometimes.
100%, either outcome is positive: either i immediately learn that i want nothing to do with the person and that being around them would be detrimental to me, or they're a decent person and can use the knowledge to make things easier for everyone.
"hi, just so you know, i'm autistic and have ADHD so i'm going to be staring at everything BUT your face while doing weird stims, and my leg WILL be bouncing and i might need to take a break to just go outside and jump my excess energy away. just a heads up so you know what's going on and that i'm not trying to make you uncomfortable, and i don't need to feel miserable by trying to mask these things away which would inevitably lead to me avoiding you"
One of the worst things in my life is not knowing where my brain disorders end and where my personality begins. It feels like no matter what I do, I'm never good enough for myself.
What’s RSD?
rejection sensivity disorder, fear of being rejectected
fear is a light word to describe it tbh, i'd opt more for "irrational mental anguish over the slightest implication someone might think even slightly less of you, which is strong enough some can feel physical discomfort when it triggers, and leads directly to an impossible to fulfil instinct of constant people pleasing and having difficulty saying no to anything"
I came here to say something but then I saw a shiny. The shiny has my attention now. The words above no longer have my interest.
Absolutely, I mean, we should still do our personal best when it comes to important tasks, but some days, our best feels like very little to nothing.
I already try to work with lists and break down tasks into smaller tasks, but that can lead to 30 items per week. If it's going really great, I do 25. But among the 5 failed tasks could be something really important, like a last deadline for a bill before it goes to court, tax filing before thousands are lost, even watering a flower etc. To others, it may appear like I achieved nothing, but honestly I'm already happy it went that way and some stuff got done.
Honestly, I can't bear to imagine the rest of my life dealing with this. Truly, I'll never amount to more than scraping by in life, and it's such a shitty bleak picture. But whatever, I've already mourned for the normal life I'll never lead, and I'll keep doing my best which isn't good enough until everything falls apart completely, then I'll kill myself. Happy Friday!
First and foremost, I don't know your circumstances but I can relate and I'm sorry. Your worth isn't measured by "productivity" or "what you amount to", you matter. Work Culture and general North American society isn't great for us with ADHD, all we can do is try our best. I swear to you that even when things look dark and there's no way out, it does end. I'm going to put a ramble of my experience in a spoiler.
Long ramble of my experience
My ADHD got me into a pit of credit card debt, small compared to others at just under $19k CAD but I still had $20k+ in my student loan and I couldn't see a way out, struggled hard, kept deferring payments and hitting overdraft, legit at my worst point I was $20 from bankruptcy, I probably could have got support from family and my at the time girlfriend (now partner) but I was too ashamed of it, I didn't want to admit it to my partner (and she knew it, I don't lie well, not that that's a skill I really want to have). It put a lot of strain on my relationship, made me the most anxious I've ever been and very nearly ended my relationship, my life was on the verge of falling apart completely, I'd be lying if I didn't have the exact same thoughts.
I was diagnosed 3 years ago at 31, I did what my dad (who's likely got ADHD if not AuDHD, but won't get evaluated) did and expended all my energy on work to the detriment of other parts of my life, I also struggled with binging (spending is obvious, but also alcohol and food) and emotional regulation.
My partner is the reason I got evaluated, she convinced me to get into therapy (I have a good therapist who has ADHD, didn't know that when I found them). After diagnosis, it took me at least a year to begin accepting that I have ADHD (funny that putting a name to it changes things right), that it effects everything I do and that I have, and will always have it. Hardest thing was realising just his much of my personality is influenced by it. Medication is helpful but it's not perfect, but with therapy, it's helped address some of the maladaptive coping mechanisms I developed.
If you have access to therapy and aren't already, it helped me immensely. Depending where you live there may be resources you can access through your health authority. We're here if you want, even just venting can be helpful.
Go get professional help. This is incredibly disordered thinking.
Not a healthy outlook.
In therapy and on meds, which is why I'm still limping along instead of giving up 👍
Intellectually I don't think there's much point to continuing existence, but working on that in therapy and thanks to medication I'm emotionally disconnected from the depressive Bad Thoughts ™️, so I'm still just going until I can't. The depression can get better but the ADHD can't really.
So, I might not really want to exist, but I feel apathetic about it generally! 🎉
That's exhausting? All I hear is fucking excuses. /s
As someone who was long term emotionally abused by someone “because of their adhd” and then later diagnosed with adhd myself, I think a lot of the confusion and messiness around this topic comes from genuinely bad-intentioned (or very young/ immature) people misusing medical language to stymie fair communication in relationships. Many people need accomodations, different communication styles, certain boundaries or conditions to function but they know how to meet their own needs without hurting people and apologize when they need to apologize. But, assholes who want to blame or harm or use others have adopted the exact same terminology as the nice people who just are trying to get their needs met in good faith. I think this is where a lot of the frustration about neurodivergence as an “excuse” comes from. It can be hard to tell which sort of person you’re talking to and unfortunately citing adhd or another condition is sometimes used to shut down someone else’s legitimate hurt feelings about something disappointing or genuinely fucked up that occurred.
it also takes time and maturity and healthcare to figure out what you need for accommodations, how to manage one’s emotions, how to have healthy conflict, etc. No one is perfect or born knowing these things, and not everyone communicating badly or unfairly is doing it on purpose or old enough to know better. People DO need to get the help they need in order to stop, though. If you do have adhd, it can also be messy and hard to discern honest important feedback vs bad faith or unrealistic expectations from others. Recommend therapy for sorting through that.
Edit: just wanna be extra clear that i am NOT saying the above is what you were doing!! Just offering a possible explanation for why OTHER people may be acting and feeling the way they do, and what I think some people actually mean when they say this. Tldr it may not have to do with you at all, lots of jerks are muddying the waters.
That’s why at some point you lose the ability to feel terrible. Name more iconic duo
The way i think about this is that it is an excuse, but it's not an excuse to not try to work around it.
We all do our best, and for some that really isn't a lot and that's FINE! But there are also probably ways you and others can find that enable you to do a whole lot more, which benefits everyone.As a really really concrete example: I simply do not have the mental energy to constantly take proper care of my teeth, so i don't try to hold myself to that standard since it would eat away at me and make me fucking miserable.
However i also don't just give up, instead i do my best to brush when i have the energy for it, i take flouride pills to strengthen the teeth, i try to avoid sweets and stuff that harms dental health, and i literally just swish some water around my mouth every time i drink (this dislodges the food scraps and adds a little bit more flouride to the teeth).Yeah it's not as good as properly brushing my teeth regularly with toothpaste, but it's the best way i've found to take care of my teeth while still being mentally sustainable, and that's all you can ask.
There are several studies that show neurotypicals react 30% more negatively to neurodivergent speech EVEN IF THEY ONLY GET A TRANSCRIPT!
They are programmed by evolution to ostracize us. And no one takes it seriously.
Imagine starting every interview, every job, every class, and having a 30% disadvantage in social interactions with EVERYONE, AND the inevitable meltdowns when that disadvantage becomes to difficult to bear.
They really don't give a fuck.
This thread has successfully convinced me that this community is not of people who have ADHD or for supporting same, but of people who hate anyone who does whether that's self-hate from internalized abusive BS or just plain ableism.
Am interested in finding one that's isn't awful, if there's one hidden away somewhere. Will be blocking this pit.
or it is about people learning who they are, accepting themselves, and figuring out how to stand up for their own well being.
I got diagnosed with ADHD and you will never hear me reference it for any excuse for anything ever. It's the worst crutch to excuse lack of self improvement.
All a person can do is deal with themselves and grow.
I regret society ever learning about it, it is so abused as an excuse to forgive a lack of personal awareness and growth.
I just roll my eyes at the shit people say claiming they have ADHD. Pathetic really.
I think it should be relative to the person's abilities. 8 hours of work, laundry, 50 minutes focussed studying, healthy dinner, remembering aunt's birthday and bedtime at 10 might seem reasonable to most. Some with ADHD might also pull it off. For others, their best is to do one of those things after work.
Different people, good and bad days. Absolute measure & judgement for everybody is the problem.
Lol, I never try to remember birthdays. I think days that are meant to make people feel special (aside from children) are inherently unhealthy. Valentine's , birthdays, mother's Day, father's day.... all days with false expectations that can wreck havoc on a person's moral when it doesn't unfold as they selfishly desire.
I found this stance works particularly well once I let this view be known to those around me, and everyone is happier for it.
When I do special things for people it's because I want to, and they know it, making it infinitely more special and intimate.
All a person can do is deal with themselves and grow
Then why are you projecting your own view of ADHD onto it? Not really dealing with yourself if you're judging everyone else with ADHD based off your own difficulties.
Only thing I'm rolling my eyes at here is blatant hypocrisy. Pathetic really.
I agree, [email protected] sounds like an angry turd projecting their self hatred outwards.
You sound like a real asshole.