Yeah, like I dunno, I think a lot of things I do by accident with my ADHD are super cool. But it definitely hurts more than it helps, and I don’t think that’s just because “we live in a society”. This post feels like huffing a suffocating dose of copium.
“Oh, sorry, I heard literally every word of what you just said, but my brain encoded nothing.”
“My sleep schedule is casually off by like five hours because I lost track of time hyperfocusing on learning about competitive Jenga until 4 AM.”
“I know I could have been doing things, but I had this thing I needed to be at in 8 hours, so I just couldn’t focus on them.”
“I either lose everything or create an intricate, tedious framework for where I keep everything at all times.”
“I struggle immensely to cope with stress in a healthy way and have issues with my temper.”
“If I can focus at all, it will be on exactly one thing, either for unhealthily long periods of time to the detriment of everything else or for so briefly that I accomplish nothing before moving on to the next dopamine rush.”
“I have a much higher risk of substance abuse because my body is starving for dopamine.”
“I have trouble keeping promises I’ve made to other people because they vanish out of my mind.”
“I constantly miss small details and need to quintuple check everything I do.”
“My priorities are constantly fucked, and I consistently put off everything until the last minute.”
“It often feels physically painful for me to focus when it’s not on the first thing my brain decides it wants to do.”
I think I can relate to literally all of them. Not competitive Jenga, but some other niche topic that I will be hyper interested for a consecutive 4 hours after midnight. I spent a whole night one time learning about roller derby and watching replays of the women’s final for the past few years. I had never watched it before in my life and went all in. The men’s version is not as good. They are too fast and strong, so it’s more boring and less nuanced.
“I constantly miss small details and need to quintuple check everything do.”
This one is the opposite for me. I’m great at detail work. The stuff I miss is the glaringly obvious giant thing right in front of me.
I went to a wedding this weekend, and bought four drinks from the bar before I noticed half of the bartop was covered in two liter pop bottles I could have been pouring drinks from for free the whole time…
I think we’re describing the same tendency lol. I have a knack for recognizing problems i expect to see. There was this one job where i was like rain man, scanning qnd noting imperfections that needed to be fixed before the next process could start.
But i also can have a very hard time with complicated interlocking processes.
Many times i end up overthinking the problems i do see to the detriment of something simple.
To extend the metaphor of this brain i(we?) inhabit, i am exceptional at finding things in difficult places but have the hardest time finding something right in front of me
It’s SUPER hard to parse the different flavors of logical problem solving challenges. Some I can see the pattern almost immediately, others not so much. Thanks to Adderall though, I can now at least recognize this problem and begin to analyze what characteristics of the situation or problem in particular are causing my brain fog response.
I’ve had a similar experience too. One time I couldn’t find my phone, so I start looking high and low. Not in my bedroom, not in the bathroom, the kitchen… At this point, I’m turning over every stone, looking through cabinets and drawers, running out to my car to see if it’s in there. Come back in and decide that it must’ve fallen under my bed and I just didn’t hear it. Can’t see under there really well, so I pull out the flashlight on my phone. Start looking under there, still not turning up. The panic is really starting to kick in.
An embarrassing amount of time passes before I realize that I’m holding and using the thing I’m looking for.
Hyperfocus is an amazing tool, unfortunately we have no fucking control over it.
Yeah, like I dunno, I think a lot of things I do by accident with my ADHD are super cool. But it definitely hurts more than it helps, and I don’t think that’s just because “we live in a society”. This post feels like huffing a suffocating dose of copium.
An awful lot of those bullets hit me
I think I can relate to literally all of them. Not competitive Jenga, but some other niche topic that I will be hyper interested for a consecutive 4 hours after midnight. I spent a whole night one time learning about roller derby and watching replays of the women’s final for the past few years. I had never watched it before in my life and went all in. The men’s version is not as good. They are too fast and strong, so it’s more boring and less nuanced.
I have a coworker on my team who does roller derby! We should talk about this in depth for several hours.
/s
This one is the opposite for me. I’m great at detail work. The stuff I miss is the glaringly obvious giant thing right in front of me.
I went to a wedding this weekend, and bought four drinks from the bar before I noticed half of the bartop was covered in two liter pop bottles I could have been pouring drinks from for free the whole time…
I think we’re describing the same tendency lol. I have a knack for recognizing problems i expect to see. There was this one job where i was like rain man, scanning qnd noting imperfections that needed to be fixed before the next process could start.
But i also can have a very hard time with complicated interlocking processes. Many times i end up overthinking the problems i do see to the detriment of something simple.
To extend the metaphor of this brain i(we?) inhabit, i am exceptional at finding things in difficult places but have the hardest time finding something right in front of me
It’s SUPER hard to parse the different flavors of logical problem solving challenges. Some I can see the pattern almost immediately, others not so much. Thanks to Adderall though, I can now at least recognize this problem and begin to analyze what characteristics of the situation or problem in particular are causing my brain fog response.
I’ve had a similar experience too. One time I couldn’t find my phone, so I start looking high and low. Not in my bedroom, not in the bathroom, the kitchen… At this point, I’m turning over every stone, looking through cabinets and drawers, running out to my car to see if it’s in there. Come back in and decide that it must’ve fallen under my bed and I just didn’t hear it. Can’t see under there really well, so I pull out the flashlight on my phone. Start looking under there, still not turning up. The panic is really starting to kick in.
An embarrassing amount of time passes before I realize that I’m holding and using the thing I’m looking for.
The Apple Watch ability to instantly ping my phone has been a godsend. Wish I had gotten one sooner.
That’s me with KDE Connect on my desktop and laptop. It’s sooooo nice.
Crap, now I need to know about competitive Jenga …
Yeeeeeep
Like watching into mirror
ffs literally every single bullet point applies to me (not that this is news)
Yep it sucks ass
I know this is in response to a post saying your ADHD is not other people’s ADHD, but I’m pretty sure your ADHD is my ADHD.
Are…are you me?