Taking Charge of Adult ADHD by Dr Russel Barkley may be interesting for you. It has tests in it and talks about living with adhd as an adult. It’s also pretty adamant about getting tested by the pros since you, of course, can’t diagnose yourself, only test similarities with classic symptoms.

I’m undiagnosed myself btw, but have a lot of symptoms and have systematically ended up in communities where people are either adhd or autistic. Always thought it was a coincidence until a few years ago.

Really? You didn’t feel the push of the magnets? Weird. Or maybe I’m the weird one haha.

I hope that whatever you were in it for has been sorted and that you’re okay today, my friend 🤗

I read that as “two diagnosed insects” and now I’m disappointed.

It’s funny because while my boyfriend and I aren’t into gaming and neither of us are diagnosed officially, we have always enjoyed this phenomena of doing our own thing while being close to one another. When we were younger, our friends thought we were weird for being this way, but they didn’t mind it. They just didn’t get it because they liked doing activities with their partners. We do that too, a little bit, but we mostly prefer to be on our own in each other’s presence.

I don’t think he has anything, but we are both sure I have ADHD. He grew up in an ADHD family and while he has some of the traits - mainly all the fun ones - he’s lucky to have avoided all the negative traits of ADHD. I’m not as lucky, to say the least, but also not unfortunate enough that I can’t function. It’s like a grey zone. We manage, but we are a bit odd compared to the norm.

I used to have one of those!! Might get one again at some point because it’s so calming.

Also, I know this is a weird add on, so I apologize, but I was in an MRI scanner yesterday and it is by far one of the most calming things I’ve ever tried. Like a spa day at a rave party. The magnetism is so intense, btw, that it actually kinda feels like a massage or a weighted blanket that moves. I was terribly close to dosing off in there. 10/10. Granted, I can’t really recommend it since you’ll only end up in one of those if something is wrong with you, so I hope you never get to go into one. But if you do, take it from me that it pretty awesome.

More like we are being taken adavantage of by distractions on screens that pretend to help, but actually are designed to eat our time and attention. It is an absolute cancer to the human ability to focus, and it is even worse if you have a disorder that makes focusing hard in the first place. It’s almost like giving a blind person a picture book about blindness and then act shocked when the blind person can’t read/see it. Maybe a lame comparison, because at least a picture book isn’t preying on the blind person’s handicap like a focus app is preying on a person with ADHD.

It’s all an overcomplication of something that should be super simple. I remember when tasks became gamefied on this website that some of my friends tried out. I got into bullet journalling during that time and I remember some friends downloading a bunch of reminder apps that became more disruptive than helpful. I tried one, that set off an alarm every 20 minutes to remind you to drink water and it fucked up my flow completely.

Disclaimer: I don’t have an official diagnosis, just a lot of ADHD symptoms that are somewhat managable if I simplify my life as much as possible.

All these super duper cool apps and journals and websites and blah blah blah, became a chore to keep up with for myself and everybody else because they demand a level of organization skills that people who struggle with such can’t fucking do!

My biggest problem isn’t so much the ability to focus on tasks, I am relatively good at snapping into workmode if I successfully manipulate myself into believing it’s the most fun shit in the world to do.

Instead, my biggest problem often is that I don’t know how to prioritize anything. Every task that needs to be done has equal importance in my head. I literally cannot tell which one matters more. You can hold up two tasks and go “this one is due tomorrow and this one is due in two days” and my brain will still go: they are equally important.

That’s partially why bullet journalling crashed and burned for me, because I would add in absolutely everyting and fill up my days to the point that I’d have like ten to twenty tasks a day. I even tried to gameify my journal at some points by giving myself points for every task I did and the goal was to reach a 100 points every month. Didn’t work.

I never dabbled in these ADHD focus apps when they became popular, because I literally already went through it with both physical and digital planners and they always went well the first couple of weeks or months when it was new and fun and then at the latest, after three months I would stop doing it after a longer period of deteriation.

The only thing that works for me is that I have ONE goal everyday. ONE. Currently, I have a very specific assignment at work that I can do in increments over a period of time. I do the allotted increments every day - nothing more, nothing less. I avoid the things that tend to distract me too severely when I’m at work (other people. I’m a chatter. I can literally talk with you about anything for hours and never get tired) and I close myself off to the outside world further by listening to podcasts and only allowing myself to browse places like lemmy when I’m taking a lunch break.

It works for me, may not work for other people, though. But the more I can cut myself off from things I know for a fact will snap me out of the zone, the better I am at getting shit done.

Hearing about these apps does the same to my brain as social media. When I was still on facebook and instagram and still followed the news, it all became noise and distractions. It’s so much healthier to go to work and be like “okay, today my goal is to do X.” Doesn’t mean that extra assignments can’t pop in from nowhere and need immediate attention, but in my head, it’s nothing because my goal is still to do X thing before the day is over, and all these other little extra sidequests are quickly done before I can go back to X. Again, it probably doesn’t work like that for everybody and some people don’t have the type of job where they get to only have one thing at the time and some may not even thrive in such an environment. All I can say is that it works for me to eliminate “noise” around me and simplify my life as much as possible.

Currently haven’t slept for two days because my brain is obsessed with the new movie Obsession. How ironic.

Such juicy themes. Such amazing performances. Yadda yadda.

So every night I end up looking up interviews and fan discussions about the movie. Even makeup tutorials that imitate Nikki’s uncanny valley look.

And when I don’t do that, I just stare at the ceiling while my mind is thinking about the movie, and about stuff I need to do at work and so on. On my second night without sleep, anxiety started to creep in. Sure, the thought of Nikki standing in the corner of my room with her creepy face, going “I like watching you sleep” is kinda freaky, but that shit is nothing next to the unhinged anxiety of adult mundanity.

“What if I went bankrupt?”

“What if I have breast cancer?”

“What if my boyfriend dies?”

“What if everything I ever do, fails forever and I end up in the gutter?”

“What if I die prematurely because I have too many sleepless nights where I stress about money and health?”

Such stupid things to worry about when my life currently is in a really good and promising place.

I also have a burning need to talk to people about Obsession, but I genuinely don’t have anyone anywhere to talk to about it. Most people in my personal life don’t care about movies and those who do, don’t like horror so I’m literally like AAAAAAARGH

And Lemmy only cares about politics and I left Reddit and most other social media platforms a year ago and don’t care to go back so there is just no one to talk to about this fucking film. My boyfriend is like: it was a good movie. And then he has nothing else to say. HEEEEELP!

Trump’s mother just looks like Trump in drag.

Me working from home:

Or we could vacuum the entire house…

… and make the bed

… and eat lunch

… and count the lemons on my lemon tree

… and take a nap

… and re-organize the home office

… and finally sit down and do 20 minutes of work before scrolling the phone…

… then get up and walk around the house to check the closets for no reason I can remember.

Also stopping and staring into the garden for minutes before heading for the kitchen to eat a bit of tiramisu.

It’s 5 in the evening now and I got up at 7. A day well spent 🫠

Seriously, pigeons should be the national animal of ADHD-land.

They are also the messiest nest builders which isn’t really that point. It’s basically a domesticated animal that was discarded by humans when the modern mailing system was invented. How the hell are they supposed to know how to build a nest when it was literally bred out of them?

And yet, they try. Every single year, they try to build their fugly nests and they somehow keep their population alive despite picking the worst places to make nests and then sometimes a nest is two branches balancing on a drain pipe. They raise their five babies on that shit and somehow they all survive their childhoods or chickhood, if you will.

The way pigeons fly. Clumsy with the loudest wing sound ever. Alerting every predator to their presence because of something they can’t control. And yet, they are still surviving and there are so many of them out there.

I saw the only well made pigeon nest last year. Still looked like a ratty mess, but I could imagine a few chick’s hatch and grow up nicely in that nest.

Problem is, they built it too late in the season. It was like, August/September when I first saw them. The mom-pigeon lay on that nest until November when she finally gave up and left it. No eggs anywhere to be seen.

This spring, I saw her and her mate return to the nest and rebuilding it. I hope they have better luck this year and don’t push it until autumn before thinking about having babies, lol.

Pigeons, man. They are something else.

Here’s a couple of pics of the pigeon on the nest. I started taking pics and sending them to my boyfriend and my best friend at the end of October because I was starting to get worried, lol.

Which one?

Because frankly, I don’t trust either of them to be good with money :b

Comforting words to remember as well. Have taken a lot of hits lately, mostly things that are entirely out of my hands as well, so this was nice to read. 🥲

At least I’m lucky in love and friendship, so yay!

For me it’s kind of the opposite. I have always been extremely hard on myself in every area of my life and to some extent I still am. But realizing that some of the difficulties I’m dealing with may be due to me having undiagnosed ADHD, is such a relief. It doesn’t fix me. It doesn’t really change anything, but it gave me the ability to forgive myself for some of the things I’m not good at or fuck up.

Sometimes you do your best and it’s not really good enough, but it was the best you could do and that is okay. Life is a bit easier to live when you accept that you are a turtle and not a bird, so you don’t have to constantly try and learn how to fly.

It’s election night in my country so I’m currently a confusing mess of all three Marges. Too tired to think well, yet too absorbed by numbers on colored polls to fully relax and drift off.

My friend, the desktop on my work computer is the neatest fucking thing you’d ever see. It would make you tear up with how beautiful it is.

My irl desktop at work? Hiroshima.

Listen, Cinderella is the organized, productive power woman we should all aspire to be, but we are but mere mortals who can only do our best. And no, she would never judge you for being a messy bish.

I’m really sorry you lost your dad. I can’t imagine how painful that is 💔

I have journalled through grief, though my loss wasn’t due to a death, but at some point in my life I went through something really terrible that made me realize that my whole life was a lie and that everything I believed to be true wasn’t and that I was on my own with no real support. I guess the only one that died was the person I used to be and I had to start over.

I journalled a lot about the events that messed me up and the people I felt let down by. I also wrote about myself and what the point even was for me to stick around. I found many points even if I sometimes felt it wasn’t enough.

I journalled for years. Chaotic, ugly, nonlinear. Like you said: complete acceptance one day and furious anger the next. It was exhausting and maddening and I felt embarrassed that I just couldn’t get over it, but my entire life foundation have been destroyed and I was still not 20 so it was a bit much, you know?

Things for me calmed down over time. It took years. Things never were the same, but new things came from what had been ruined. Some of them were actually true blessings.

I stopped Journaling when I no longer felt the need to. I barely journal anymore, but I am glad I did while everything was fucked because I had no one to talk to, trust or rely on. I only had my pen and the paper I wrote things on to avoid going insane. I still have most of my writings from that time and I cannot read them today, but neither can I throw them away because they are evidence of what I went through and if I threw them away, there would be no proof it happened to me. I want it to be there as proof of something really hard I overcame for when life hits me with the next wave of hardships. I survived it once, I will survive it again, sort of mindset.

I won’t pretend like what I went through is in anyway on the level of losing a beloved parent. It’s so final in a way that my grief wasn’t. While I woke up to a reality where the friendship and family dynamics I thought I had weren’t real, I would still be able to talk to the people who were now strangers to me, wearing the faces of people I loved. So it’s not the same. You get over that shock in time and you get used the people they actually are and not who you thought they were. Relationships change, life moves on, even if your paths no longer cross and you’re better without them near you. For me, some of them may as well be dead.

But for you it is different because it is final so it is a completely different league of pain. I just wanted to affirm that yes, grief is chaos and nonlinear and writing it down is exhausting and painful and it doesn’t really feel like it’s helping because it still hurts inside. But if you don’t write it down and just carry it inside in silence, it will probably be way worse for you in the long run. It’s like a swelling in a limb where you cut a little hole to drain the blood and fluids to avoid infection and future amputation. Shit still hurts. It probably takes forever for the injury to heal and you will have to empty the swelling multiple times, but you get to keep your arm even if it’ll be a gnarly mess of scartissue afterwards. At least it will still be there to for you to use.

Again, I’m so sorry for your loss. I wish I could say something to comfort you, but I know words are kinda empty next to the pain you must feel. ❤️‍🩹

This is the way.

OP: If your friend is able to listen to you without becoming defensive and mean, but rather wants to fix what is wrong in your relationship, then she is a keeper, OP. I mean, if she’s a little defensive, but still open to listen and change, she’s a good egg just a bit insecure about criticism which is normal, especially in young people, which I am guessing you guys are.

But!!

If every attempt you make at talking about this concern you have, is used to attack you or deflect/distract from your points, you are dealing with someone who is at best too insecure and too immature to be a good friend at this moment or you are dealing with someone on the narcissistic spectrum. Hopefully it is the former, but either way, if she can’t take responsibility for how she affects you, she is not your friend and therefore not your problem.

Take it from an old goat who had to reach the age of 30 before the penny dropped and I realized that I constantly picked friends who were emotional vampires. Not all of them were what I would call narcissistic. I actually think the number was pretty low in that regard, but they were all immature and deeply insecure people who made me miserable and irritable and I was happier without them in my life. I wish them the best and hope they’ll have a lovely life, but I won’t be in it.

I hope you and your friend can find a good solution, and if not, well… plenty of platonic fish in the sea!

🤗

Haha yeah. I recently bought myself a super cute and spacious tote bag. I knew that if I put it inside my backpack, I’d forget it, so I have crammed it into one of the side pockets on my backpack, so I see it all the time. I hope it works this time.

Baker Street slaps.

and speaking of blowing instruments, I feel obligated to share this because it will never not be cool.