shadowlyss

[shadowlyss]

My favorite pirate joke is “why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet? Because they spend years at c” not because it’s THAT funny but because it’s a relatively simple joke that nobody ive told it to has ever correctly guessed the punchline for because they all think it’s gonna be a joke about arrrr

[shadowlyss]

this is your gentle reminder to stop fighting against your adhd and instead structure your life around it

buy a pack of chapsticks and put one in the pocket of all of your coats and jackets because you always forget to bring one and chapped lips is sensory hell

leave important things where you can see them. if they go in a box or a drawer you will forget they exist

put any appointments or deadlines in your phone calendar As Soon As you get them. set a reminder for a week before, a day before, an hour before, as many as you need as often as you need them.

when that little voice in your head says "i dont need to write that down, ill remember it" that is the devil talking!!! write it down anyway!!

plan for down time. have a few hours at the end of every day to just do fun stuff like engage in your hyperfixations. even if you didnt get all of your work done that day, have the rest anyway. you probably spent the whole day beating yourself up for not doing what you Should be doing, so you still need the break.

if you never eat vegetables because its too much effort to chop and cook them, get the frozen or canned shit. it doesnt go off for ages and you just have to microwave it. theres no point buying fresh vegetables if they just keep going off and being left to rot in the bottom of your fridge

if you struggle to decide what to have for dinner every day, take the decision out of it. choose a set of meals and eat those on rotation until you get sick of them, then choose some new ones and do it again.

its not stupid if it works! our brains literally have a chemical deficiency. you are allowed to accommodate yourself. go forth and stop making your life more difficult than it has to be because "this shouldn't be this hard". it is hard, so make it easier.

[shadowlyss]

You have to recognize your capacity for harm. You cannot omit the harm you've done to others to remain "good." Anybody can be a bigot. Anyone can be an abuser. Anyone can harm anyone at any time even those who have been harmed themselves. The world is not made up of victims and villains only, this is life, not a Saturday morning cartoon and you are a human being who can or maybe even has hurt others and you HAVE to acknowledge that to learn to be better.

[shadowlyss]

Virga, the phenomenon of rain not reaching the ground. Virga is produced when rain is falling from the base of the cloud but evaporates in dry air before reaching the ground surface.

[shadowlyss]

Sometimes when people on the Internet are like "ADULTS CAN NEVER INTERACT WITH MINORS IT'S CREEPY" I remember how, at 12, back in 1997, I was on the Witchvox forums with people ranging from me to people in at least their 50s, and no one there was ever a creep to me, no one ever made me feel uncomfortable or asked for my personal info, and when I finally broke down after a particularly brutal day of bullying at school and posted about it they were the first adults I'd ever met in my entire life who told me the bullies were the problem and it was okay to be angry about it.

Kids need to interact with adults who will listen to them.

[shadowlyss]

The person I reblogged this from deserves happiness and love

[shadowlyss]

"My childhood was so awesome. Kids today don't even know!"

Isn't a flex.

It's a lament.

More people should understand that.

[shadowlyss]

shadow the hedgehog is cool. gunblades are cool. vampires are cool. scythes are cool. white hair is cool. we need to stop lying about what is not cool

[shadowlyss]

It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!

[shadowlyss]

Fucked up how humanity discovered electricity and radiation and made machines and learned to make airplanes and cured diseases and our takeaway isnt that "Some Magic Is Real And Here's Why", but that magic is fake this is big boy science and it's totally not magical

[shadowlyss]

After I complained on here about my difficulty in getting ADHD meds, a friend referred me to her psychiatrist and other friends helped me actually get an appointment set up and I went to it and I got prescribed ADHD meds. A couple different kinds, so I can document how they affect me and figure out with the psychiatrist which ones work best.

I took them for the first time last Thursday. They’re supposed to last a fairly short time, four to six hours; I took one before I went to work and had a fine day at work, productive but not outrageously so, nothing to particularly write home about, and I had mostly forgotten that I was on ADHD meds by the time I got home.

There was a choir staging rehearsal, so I was watching the baby for the evening, and the dishwasher was broken so there was like a week of dishes in the sink, and I really wanted pasta with homemade tomato sauce so I started that on the stove and put the baby in his high chair with a spatula to chew on and sang him songs while I washed the dishes -

- and about halfway through this I realized that all of this was so profoundly out of character that my roommates, if they’d been home, might have suspected bodysnatching aliens.

I am too tired when I get home from work to cook dinner. Sometimes someone else cooks a thing I can eat, and sometimes I just drink an Ensure and go to bed. I hate doing dishes when the sink is full; I kind of hate doing dishes even when the sink is not full, and I’d done the dishes exactly once in the previous six months. I am not usually too tired to play with the baby, but only if he wants to come headbutt my pillows while I lie in bed.

Well, I thought, I guess ADHD meds actually do something! And I finished the dishes and finished the dinner and fed us both and did my laundry and cleaned my room and started putting the baby’s books on the bookshelves, which he objected to (he firmly believes that his books should be evenly dispersed through the house, so if he wants one it is always nearby), so I gave up and worked on a writing project I’m in the middle of.

If you knew two people, one of whom came home from work and cooked and cleaned and did childcare and then wrote fiction, and the other one who came home from work and crawled into bed and browsed Tumblr all evening, you would probably attribute other, underlying differences to them. The first one is motivated and driven; the second one is immature and not used to having to keep her own space clean and do her own chores. The first one is trustworthy and conscientious and gets things done; the second one, maybe not. The first one has more willpower; the first one works harder. 

It’s none of that. It’s brain chemistry.

I’m not saying that you can never accomplish anything through concerted effort - obviously you can, and effort matters a lot. I’m not saying that there’s no point in trying to expand the number of things you can do without changing your underlying brain chemistry; there is, and I do a lot of that, and it often works really well.

But I am saying that we attribute far, far too much of peoples’ behavior to virtue, to hardworkingness, to willpower, to passion, to values, when the actual underlying thing is none of those. And because of that, people hate themselves for being lazy, for being slow, for not trying hard enough. I wasn’t trying harder on drugs. I wasn’t trying at all. Cooking dinner on a normal night really is about willpower and effort and careful planning around my limitations and advance strategic decision making and triage. Cooking dinner on stimulants is just - the thing that happens when I walk into the kitchen and want to eat something. 

Drugs don’t work for everybody. (Honestly, they don’t totally work for me; I don’t like taking them two days in a row, and I wouldn’t want to take them if I had to get a specific thing done instead of Doing Things in general.) I think people who have a drug sometimes work for them are really lucky, in a lot of ways, because it’s hard to really believe that it’s not your priorities or personality, it’s your executive function, until you can observe how you behave with the same priorities and the same personality and vastly boosted executive function. But I also think this is true of people who never have a drug work for them. 

People vary, a lot, and one axis along which they vary is executive function, and it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like to be someone with way more executive function or way less executive function than you. At least for me, it doesn’t feel like trying harder or caring more. It feels like not needing to.

[shadowlyss]

"I cant draw" then do it bad who gives a fuck.....

[shadowlyss]

i think one of the most important things you learn about making connections with others is that a significant portion of the time people just do not know theyre doing what theyre doing

[shadowlyss]

There was a new LGBT+ acronym, and it was twig etc. (it had to be in lowercase for some reason). It stood for trans, Welsh, intersex, and gay. Everyone else was etc. It was very controversial.

[shadowlyss]

Gonna tell y’all what I can hear now that I got my hearing aids

[shadowlyss]

[shadowlyss]

Someone said "Are you really so stupid to think that Africa has the same technological advances as us? If they did they would probably have clean water and not live in houses made of sticks and mud. Get over yourself and stop being so ignorant."..... Below is a tiny collection of images of the Africa they refuse to show you..

ches

I’m sorry you’ve been made to believe that the whole of Africa is poor, I really am..