Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I’ll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It’s not.
Ok, I’ll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It’s not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it’s been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I’m praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it’s some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying “nice work” when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there’s something going on with me that’s making it hard to cope with the demands of life but “atleast he’s trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude”.
That sounds ideal, honestly.
The stress really is the worst. I suspect most people who weren’t raised with their diagnosis by especially thoughtful people at some point turns to self imposed additional stress. It works at the beginning, but quickly stops and long term it’s an absolute killer.
I think you’re right that I need to start doing things, it’s just the guilt about not having already started with the work I have that’s holding me back. That’s unproductive at absolute best. Self flagellation is also a common strategy for executive dysfunction, that doesn’t work long term for most ADHDers, but… if it’s the only thing you try, it’s the only thing that works.
Stress from not doing a stressful task is stressing you out, but that stress is what’s stopping you, not the stressful task it’s self. #sorelatable