#i may also self rb my old work for them tomorrow | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chibisquirt · 4 years

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You don't have to answer, but if you wouldn't mind. What are some things you've learned about ADHD from Tumblr that are applicable to you, or others you may now? I've been reading more on it and how it manifests in girls/women and was curious when I read your rb on that post about Grammarly

I don’t mind at all! Fair warning: this is gonna be LONG.

I’m going to start by repeating something I mentioned in that post: I was diagnosed in third grade, which was over two decades ago. I had my diagnosis halfway through elementary school, much less high school and two rounds of college. So a lot of the old information about ADHD I learned as a young person, and those things are worth exploring, too.

Example: It’s not that I’m not listening, Mrs. Nock, it’s just that if I try to keep my hands still, then the only thing I will retain from the lesson will be keep your hands still and not the things you trying to teach, which are supposedly important!

(Mrs. Nock was the one who said to me, “I believe you believe you’re paying attention.” Yes, it’s been fifteen years. Yes, I’m still mad. If you can’t have basic respect for your students, don’t teach.)

I figured out half on my own, half because of the counselling that if I had a fidget tool that didn’t require words I would pay better attention than if I tried to sit still. (I still remember being mocked by my dad for fidgeting well after making that discovery, though. Apparently diagnoses should only inform compassion when they’re his.) On the same lines, I also figured out that music in the background wouldn’t work for me if it had words, and television is too distracting for me to use at all. (I have a friend, though, whose ADHD works the opposite way: he has difficulty focusing if there isn’t a television in the background. Yes, both are valid.)

So, the Classics:

I always had trouble with organization and cleaning, had trouble with schedules and calendars and managing my time. Those are the things they’ll warn you about, the things they’ll tell you in counselling are natural and normal things for people with ADHD to have trouble with. Trouble paying attention, sure. Trouble sitting still. Procrastination. Got it.

But if you turn those traits around and re-frame them, they become a new set of symptoms. Adaptations for these new symptoms are more personal and universally applicable in my life, and therefore, to my mind, more useful.

Take Procrastination. (No really: please take it.) That just means “putting it off until tomorrow,” and there are lots of reasons to do it: “don’t have the tool I need” is one of the biggies, “want to conserve steps” trips me up a lot, “I still have time to get to it” is HUGE for me... But a lot of times, these are just superficial reasons. The re-framed symptom is, Trouble making yourself do things you don’t want to do.

ADHD is an executive function disorder. That’s a phrase I first learned on Tumblr, by the way; it may have been mentioned by one of my earlier counsellors, but it definitely wasn’t taught.

This is why soooo many of us have struggled with the perception (including self-perception) that we’re lazy! But no one tells the kid in the wheelchair he’s just lazy for not playing basketball. (Okay, they totally do. People are terrible. Ignore that, stick to the point.) I reframe this the way I do because acknowledging this as a symptom, taking the blame out of it, makes it easier to find adaptation.

Now, this is a personal post. YMMV. But I have an easier time managing my conduct if, instead of calling myself lazy a procrastinator, I say, “I keep not doing that --> oh it’s because I Don’t Wanna --> how can I con myself into doing it?” (Strategies include bargaining, making it easier, powering through but then allowing yourself to stop afterwards, just acknowledging that I Don’t Wanna and allowing that to be valid...) Procrastination is an action, but “executive function disorder” is a disease and “I Don’t Wanna” is its trigger, just as much as an allergy and a clump of ragweed are. “Procrastination” is a powerful sphynx against which I’m helpless, but “I Don’t Wanna Disease” lets me start cultivating my metaphorical catnip and researching the answers to common riddles.

And while we’re talking about procrastination--and trouble with deadlines, and schedules in general--let’s talk about Time Insensitivity. Missed deadlines and perpetual lateness (perpetual) are external actions, just like procrastination, and they can have all sorts of explanations.

(Shoutout to Mrs. Pollack, who looked around a classroom containing thirteen-year-old me, and, knowing full well that I was chronically tardy, declared that “anybody who’s always running late, deep down, they just doesn’t care about anybody else’s time.” Great job with calling the thirteen-year-old a heartless bitch, Mrs. Pollack! As you can tell, I definitely forgot it very quickly, and didn’t at all have a self-critical breakdown about it, periodically revisiting the question of my own inherent selfishness for years!!!)

But ignoring the external actions, let’s take a compassionate look inside the head again. Executive function includes regulation of, and awareness of the passing of, time. Again: you can’t play the basketball with no legs. We literally do not realize what time is doing. Sometimes we do--if we devote enough of our attention to it, which may be a large amount for some, a small amount for others, or a variable amount for the same person. But our brains literally don’t process it the same way.

But hold on a minute--let’s go back to that analogy. Because actually, people with no legs can play basketball! It’s just that you have to use the adaptation of wheelchairs to do it--and that’s an adaptation for the game and for the players.

I use alarms. I’ve recently seen a post about audio memos as alarms. There are people who just slap clocks everywhere. When I was forced to work in a kitchen with no clocks, I used the multi-setting timer and set it for like four hours so I would know if I was keeping on schedule. I also chose a job environment where much of my shift is the same as itself, and rigid punctuality isn’t enforced--that’s adapting my environment, instead of myself. There’s all kinds of adaptations. But you have to know you have the condition before you can compensate for it.

Here’s a fun little story: when I was... oh, eleven? Twelve? My Quaker Meeting’s youth group (#7 whitest phrase I’ve ever written) went to the museum together. One of the stops was in the children’s section, there was a... a pegboard, I think? With some kind of problem on it. A puzzle. Me and a couple others sat down at it, and it took me a while, but eventually I solved it, and I looked up.

I blinked. “Where is everybody?” I said.

“They left,” said my mom. “Half an hour ago.”

I was stunned. “Half an hour ago?! But I couldn’t’ve spent more than ten minutes on this!”

“I promise you, it was half an hour.”

“Why didn’t you call me?? Why didn’t you say my name?”

“We did. Several times.”

To this day, I will swear myself blind that I never heard a thing.

Hyperfocusing. They’ll tell you about the problems focusing; oh yes. They’ll tell you allll about that one. But they won’t tell you about the flip side of it. They won’t tell you about the times when the rest of the world falls away, and the only two things in the world are you and whatever problem you’re trying to solve.

D’y’know what, I bet that’s the reason I test well. I just realized this now, phrasing it like that, but--I’ve always tested well, even when my actual practical applications of things are mediocre I do well with the classroom testing on it. I scored a 39 on the MCAT, back when it was out of 45 and not whatever it is now. (To those with the plain good sense not to want to be doctors: that’s pretty good.) And I just bet it’s because, once I get focused on solving the problems, the other problems--nerves, intrusive thoughts, anxiety--just don’t have room to get in. Hyperfocusing can be a superpower, if you can harness it.

But it can also blind you to everything else. And it works in smaller ways, too: once I think I understand something, it is very difficult for me to perceive information that contradicts that understanding. I still get the map of the Elflands backwards every time I read The Goblin Emperor, just because I pictured it one way, and every indication in the text that it was the other way just fell on deaf ears.

And this one leads right into the next, which is Rejection Sensitivity Disorder. RSD is hyperfocus, but it’s hyperfocus on how everyone must hate you. It’s delightful! I’ve been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, as well, and I do have both of those things, but for my money, I think that this one symptom of ADHD--which no doctor has ever even mentioned to me--has hurt me more than both of those conditions combined.

The last one I’m going to bring up is Auditory Processing Disorder. Now, I’ve gone and gotten re-diagnosed twice in my life, and the last time was just a few years ago, so they actually used this one in the test. The psychologist told me about it, she just didn’t use the phrase Auditory Processing Disorder, and she didn’t tell me that it was its own symptom--she just used it for the test.

What she did was, she gave me two hearing tests, one to test whether or not I could hear, and then the other a list of words that all sounded alike, and I had to mark which one I was hearing. The second part of that was very long, and very boring, and despite scoring perfectly on the first test, I got several wrong on the second. I was actually surprised by that; I at no point suspected I had heard any of them wrong. When she gave me the test, told me this was proof by contradiction, that we were ruling out hearing loss as an alternative explanation for my difficulties. It was only after the test was done that she explained that the pattern I showed was actually part of the diagnosis of ADHD; that we get bored, and stop really paying attention, and that we don’t even know we’re doing it.

...Okay, but you couldn’t have mentioned the part where I also do that every day in real life, lady?!?! It’s not just when we’re bored, it’s not just for long processes. I do this all the time. I actually tell people now that “I actually have a neurological condition that makes it hard for me to hear; I can tell that you’re speaking, but I can’t tell what you’re saying.”

This is 100% true. It is a neurological condition.

We label this a condition, but as a society, we don’t treat it that way. Society treats it as yet another excuse. It’s not. You’re not lazy, stupid or crazy. Neither am I.

I have a condition. Acknowledging that is the first step of treatment. Not five thousand sticky notes, not binders or filing systems or even taking all the doors off the cupboards (although I definitely plan to do that one as soon as I possibly can). Not counselling sessions with so many different people I can’t even name them all, for the love of god please understand that you can’t just fix it with pills.

(Although mad props to the people who thought Concerta would magically solve me at the age of nine! Spoiler alert: it did not do that! But it did mean that my parents felt comfortable blaming me for all my failures again, so it did at least some of what it was designed for, I guess. :) )

I have spent the last few years re-understanding my ADHD it as is: a neurological condition, a disability, and a simple fact of life. A starting place, instead of yet more proof of my own inherent insufficiency. And you know what? When you take the blame and self-hatred out of the diagnosis--when you stop cursing it as the cause of all your problems and start trying to work with it, instead--it gets a lot easier to manage.

#laexploradoraaa

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ncetosyd · 7 years

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Australia – UK – France – UK – France… UK (Helen)

I currently frequent British Airways and EasyJet flights between Nice and London so often that I could draw you a blueprint of the terminals.

I have nailed the ‘seasoned traveller’ air at departures; long gone is the fumbling mess trying to find her boarding pass and passport in the bottom of a badly packed (usually oversized) bag.

It’s been a crazy couple of months, and I realised whilst in Sydney visiting Liz that I haven’t written a single blogpost this year! I’ve been up to my ears in applications for summer internships, swinging between ‘I can absolutely do this!’ and ‘why am I even attempting this?’ But the hard work – swotting up on business terminology, the psychometric testing, telephone interviews, flying back to the UK for an assessment centre with four days’ notice and a very unhappy class teacher – has finally paid off with an offer to spend ten weeks working for RBS within Analysis and Business Solutions. I nervously waited for the first half of this week, refreshing my emails and doubting the figures I’d used in my case study, then realised that I’d given them my UK number as my contact number. ‘Absolute wally’ is an understatement when describing how I felt realising that an offer had been waiting for me in a voicemail since Monday. Big shout out to my lovely best friend Phee, who not only had me to stay for the night in London, but also insisted on giving up her bed so that I got a good night’s sleep before, bought me crème eggs, provided top support and motivation, and made me the best cup of tea I’ve had in weeks. If you’re reading – thank you my angel, and a shout out to your fab flatmates! And to one of my super friendly interviewers who warned me before even starting ‘if my phone goes, my wife has gone into labour!’

The job offer has been a welcome relief given that France hasn’t been particularly easy since returning from Christmas break. Without going into it too much, I feel quite worn down with a difficult colleague, who is supposed to be in the position of supporting me and ensuring that I feel settled here. There have been numerous occasions when I have felt deliberately ‘tripped up’, and under credited, and ended up sat in tears in the headmaster’s office last Friday - always a highly embarrassing experience because the hierarchy is much more evident in schools in France - when I learnt that said colleague had shared information around the staff room and with the other language assistant that I had told her in confidence. If nothing else, I haven’t been short of examples for that age old ‘tell me about a time when you encountered a difficult work situation’ question in interviews! The experience has also brought me closer to certain colleagues, who have been nothing but supportive, and I am so, so grateful for that. (Delphine, thank you for letting me unattractively cry into your lovely jumper, and for inviting me to your dance/Tao class on Saturday – even if the instructor did start talking about ‘ze power of ze perineum’, in complete French I might add, and the importance of ‘sexual energy’.)

I’m determined not to let one person, and one element of my year abroad, affect my experience in general. Whilst it hasn’t been the year that I’ve expected – being located somewhere quite remote where the buses stop by 9pm latest doesn’t allow for the wild year off that might spring to mind for most when you say ‘I live in the South of France’ – I found myself questioning the other day whether I would ever ‘un-do’ my experience given the chance. The answer is a resounding no. As cliché as it feels to type, I am so much stronger than when I moved to France, my language has improved tenfold, and I feel a lot more confident and self-assured after six months of battling French bureaucracy and standing in front of a group of 16 year olds every day, trying to capture their attention in another language and stop them from firing swearwords that they think I won’t pick up on. Teaching has never been what I want to go into, but I’m so thankful for the experience, and will genuinely miss some of my classes. It warms my heart when students – many of whom gave up long ago, and have no interest in school – get excited when they walk into the classroom and realise that I’m teaching that day, or when they email me in their own free time to check their work or ask me about something that they’ve seen in English. On Monday I had one of my most rewarding moments – a teacher telling me that a previously unengaged student had requested to work with me for the following week, because our lesson together was ‘the best hour of English learning of his life’. Moments like that make the job completely worth it. Spending the year working, and living at school for a tiny amount each night, has also allowed me to travel to Sydney to see Liz, to plan for Thailand in May/June, and to have change left over! It’s a really rewarding feeling to be able to stand properly on my own two feet and not need to depend on my parents (at least not financially!) for this year.

Talking of Sydney – I MISS IT SO MUCH. It was wonderful to see Liz, and to get to share a bit of her year abroad and see all of her favourite places/meet the people important to her ‘down under’. I’ll leave all the details to the vlogs that Liz will be uploading on here over the next few weeks, or I’d be here all night, but I’ll be posting lots of photos. I have honestly never fallen so in love with a city in such a short space of time – the way of life, the people, the layout of the city itself. Oh, and lots of iced coffee and sunshine. I would give anything to go back and do it all again, and I will 100% be heading back in the future to see other bits of Australia. I cried a lot when leaving, and I haven’t cried about leaving somewhere since I was nine years old and leaving Disney World, so there’s your proof that it’s a very special place. I feel so very lucky to have had the opportunity to spend time in a country that some can only dream of visiting one day, and I’m so thankful to Liz for having me for two of the best weeks of my life.

I’m heading home tomorrow night for a weekend of early 21st celebrations, and I-got-a-summer-internship disbelief, with my biggest supporters, so I’m off to pack! I’ve also just booked flights to Paris for two weeks’ time to spend the weekend with Kat, which is super exciting!

Love and bisous as always,

Hels x

#helen

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