ADHD and Other Letters: Wait Your Turn

“Can I come over to your house?”

My mum gave an embarrassed laugh, and explained to her seven year old daughter that it wasn’t polite for me to invite myself over to my friend’s house (friend and friend’s mum were right there).

I blinked. “But why?”

I don’t recall that my mum gave an explanation. I think she simply said “it’s bad manners”, and that was the end of the matter. I was simultaneously frustrated and mortified:

…the former because I still didn’t understand “manners” or how to figure them out from first principles, and how the fuck¹ did everyone else seem to know this shit?

…the latter because oh god I have made The Big Faux Pas again.²

To be fair, I don’t recall that my friend – also seven – was particularly offended by my request.

And to be even more fair, I think explaining to a seven year old that hosting a visitor is actually a bit of work, and sometimes requires people to arrange their house and their plans on your behalf, and that inviting yourself over to their house is basically asking them to do you a favour, and you may not have given them a polite way to say no, because we’ve built a culture where refusing a visit without some sort of socially acceptable excuse is in itself considered rude, because that could lead to hurt feelings-

Look, all that shit is a minefield. I don’t claim to understand it properly even now, and I’ve made quite the informal study of these puzzling social mores.

I absolutely understand the part about hurt feelings, because while I’m extremely blunt on one hand and have a personality like a sledgehammer, I am also very sensitive and can be deeply fragile, because of a combination of emotional dysregulation, rejection sensitivity, and a whole buncha trauma.

Eventually, Mum said, “You have to wait to be asked.”

Oh. But what if they don’t ask?

…the rest is silence, I suppose.

ADHD and Other Letters: Time, the Suitcase

As a person with ADHD, I do not perceive time passing.

Apparently there is a part of the brain that manages this in neurotypical people, to varying degrees, but for me, that just doesn’t exist. Time exists in one of two states: now and not now.

When I first tripped over this phrasing, it was in the comments section of the Captain Awkward blog, and I think my brain screeched to a damn halt when I read that. Read it again. And again. Holy shit. Holy shit.

That’s how I first began to truly suspect I might have ADHD. That was my lightning bolt moment.

See, the thing is, just the week before, I’d explained – with self-deprecating humour and apology and embarrassment, because I am always fucking late – that I had this weird thing where time only seemed to exist when I looked at a clock. “It was twenty past ten,” I said, “and I knew I had to get moving at ten thirty, so I figured I had ten minutes to read! The only problem is that, while I was reading, in my brain it was still twenty past ten, and it stayed that time until I looked up.”

At which point, time doing that thing that it does – i.e., being in continuous forward motion without stopping, like a complete bastard – I discovered that it was not twenty past ten. It was closer to eleven. I had now missed one train and was well on the way to missing the next one.

But… everyone knows what’s it like to look up at the clock and be genuinely shocked, right?

Well, yeah, but here’s the thing: most people don’t need a series of incremental alarms to make sure they get to their appointments in the morning.

_{My phone, she cast the shade.}

Frameworks: Valid vs Fair

Thinking about Feeling

We do it every day, but I think we don’t always understand how difficult it is to navigate the emotions that come with our own humanity. Animals very clearly have feelings – we recognise emotional responses in those that are most similar to us, and probably we misinterpret them, so keen to anthropomorphise; but humanity has an extra problem, and that’s the advanced cognitive response.

We have these sizable brains that are constantly reconfiguring themselves, processing and responding, analysing and calculating, and we have the thoughts and the reasons and sometimes the emotions crash into them so hard that you feel bruised on all sides.

We do it every day. It’s hard.

Give yourself a pat on the back for being human, for making it this far.

ADHD and Other Letters: Neurodivergence on the Road

There’s work for me in Perth; for funding reasons, it needs to be done by the end of June. I haven’t earned more than a couple hundred bucks in about 18 months, and before last Sunday, I hadn’t been on a plane since September 2019. We’ve been waiting for the state borders to open, hovering on the verge of booking flights, and then finally it all seemed to fall into place.

I’ve been here a week, now. I’ve got another week to go – possibly another week after that, but we need to have a look at the workload and the budget. It’s not cheap to get me here, or put me up, or to pay me.

So here I am, two hours behind and not quite 3,500 kilometres from home.

I find it interesting how travel like this interacts with my ADHD and autistic coping mechanisms, so that’s where I go today.

Just under 3,500 kms, which is somewhere in the vicinity of 2,150 miles.
Though as we can see, I can save the extra 38 kms by taking the coast road when passing from South Australia into Victoria.

I’ve travelled this route for fieldwork. Flying is easier.

The Bridge

Imagine that you are traversing the lip of a great ravine – there’s nothing particularly interesting on either side, so use whatever background you prefer – and then you look up and you see someone on the opposite side.

It’s someone you love.

Of course you want to reach them, but the ravine is way too hard to climb (plus I have it on good authority that the floor is lava, so keep that in mind). You can’t fly, and you don’t have access to any sort of special communication technology.

So you’re going to build a bridge.

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ADHD and other letters: Threshold Effectiveness

This post and the previous post were originally one post, so if you read that when it was a single many-limbed beast, this isn’t going to tell you anything new. I tend to make things long and verbose (see the blog title), and it’s an issue for me. In the end I decided that I’d take a pass at editing posts, but if I worried too much about length, I’d just get in my own way and never publish anything. So this is a “sit down with a cup of tea” blog.

That said, there was a really obvious break point here when I took another look at it, and what the heck, look at this shit, now we have two readily digestible parts!

In the first part, I talked about how – in spite of being convinced that I’m terrible at dealing with flexible goals and fluid workouts – I’ve managed to cobble together a relatively functional approach, so that when I look at averages and trends, I can see that I get things done. I shuffle things around. And my “five days of seven” rule serves me very well on that time scale.

But what about individual days? I’ll be honest, I have a real trouble with getting to the end of the day and feeling okay about it.

ADHD and other letters: Five of Seven

(note: this post and the following post were originally one single gargantuan post, but then it turned out there was a really obvious break point, so I split it)

I try to have at least one intervening blog post between my commitment to monthly ADHD posts, and that fell down a bit this time, but in my defense, it’s November, which means NaNoWriMo – and I’m proud to be one of three Municipal Liaisons for Melbourne, working with a fantastic team to support and encourage a wonderful, warm-hearted community – so I’m simultaneously trying to write a giant chunk of novel draft, stay on top of the social media hype (I feel like I’ve finally made my peace with the dreaded Hoot!Daemon. Erm, that’s how I refer to Hootsuite) and host an endless number of Zoom events which are replacing in-person events for 2020.

Maybe I should have posted a chunk of my draft instead of a blog post.

(ha. no.)

This leads pretty well into this month’s ADHD post.

Last month, I wrote about how incredibly difficult it is to develop flexible goals for myself, and how I used a bunch of weird ad hoc strategies to ensure there were hard boundaries to keep me on track.

In fact, NaNoWriMo is an excellent example: the official goal is to write 50,000 words over the 30 days of November. I have participated eight times, and I have never yet failed to meet that goal. Last year I’d hit it by the 18^th of November. I am badass at NaNoWriMo.

In April and July, the good people at NaNoWriMo HQ run a program called “Camp NaNoWriMo”, where you sign up and you set your own goal for the month, which you can change at any time.

I suck at Camp NaNo. Some part of me just knows that goal is flexible, and no matter how much I care about that project, I let the rest of my life get in the way, and I keep lowering my target. I never know whether to decide that I’ve “won” at Camp or not, because I’ve often slashed my goal by the end of the month, and my brain isn’t sure that it counts (I have succeeded once, where my goal was to do a bunch of redrafting and editing on a manuscript. That was excellent).

External structure and hard boundaries are vital for people with ADHD and other forms of executive dysfunction, and I explained that last month.

But.

During the course of the following weeks, I realised that I have figured out ways to set flexible goals, and I’ve been doing that for a long time. It’s just that I had to find a way to do that within the limits of my own brain.

So I’m writing about that today.

ADHD and other letters: The Trouble With Flexibility

As an ADHDer, I’m well-acquainted with the fact that I am a terrible boss of myself.

I’ve spent my academic and professional career working my arse off, burning the midnight oil, procrastinating projects I actually want to do, and castigating myself for being unable to parcel out my workload in any organised fashion.

It’s a strange contradiction, to be a person whose entire functionality is constructed from sheer bloody-mindedness and to also have executive dysfunction.

I have a will of iron.

Sometimes I can’t make myself do things.

Both of these things are absolutely true.

I don’t blame anyone for finding that confusing. I often look at all this and think, “No, really, what the fuck?”

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ADHD and other letters: The Hyperfocus Daemon or “Out! Out, damned weed!”

1. Names have power and this one is just kind of shit

It’s true that “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is an extraordinarily ineffective name for the condition.

Firstly, plenty of people internalise their hyperactivity and thus appear to be “inattentive” (I have opinions on this, but we’ll go with that for now).

Secondly, we do not have a deficit of attention. We have a profound difficulty focusing that attention. We pay attention to things – to lots of things! – but just not the things we might choose. This is where you end up with frustrated parents snapping “You can’t focus on your homework for ten minutes but you can spend five hours playing a video game!” because, well, look, probably it is frustrating. It seems as if surely you could focus on the homework.

Except it’s really not that straightforward at all.

ADHD and Other Letters: This Is Hard – It’s Not Just You

I scribbled out a mad rushing stream of consciousness in my journal, somewhere around the 25^th of June. That was the bare bones of a blog post I wanted to write, one that I was looking forward to writing, about different ways of explaining and visualising and understanding information, and I thought it belonged under the umbrella of neurodiversity posts.

Instead, I wrote a post about COVID-19, because there was so much awful misinformation (there still is. That hasn’t changed), and I had specific things to clarify on the process of testing for SARS-CoV-2 and on viral taxonomy.

It was exhausting. I had the usual ADHD rush of ideas and I had to cut a bunch of stuff I personally thought was very cool and funny just to fit in the important information (which was less cool and less funny).

“That’s okay,” I told myself. “When my ADHD blog post is due, I’ll get to write that post about learning.”

Here we are. I’m part of the WeAreADHD blog network, and all I have to do in order to be associated with those wonderful people is write one post a month on ADHD.

I have a lot to say, and a lot to say about ADHD, so in theory this isn’t a challenge. In fact, I appreciate the structure. I honestly look forward to the week where my post is due, because that galvanises me and I look forward to the writing and the thrill of it.

So.

This isn’t that post.