It gets more fun when you get older and you realise you’re mostly just a tired person.
People without ADHD apparently only have a “few” interests, like for example are just into politics and rugby, as opposed to the rest of us who are into politics, rugby, needlepointing, jet skiing, bread baking, Formula 1 racing, ska, tubas, and Sailor Moon until we pick up learning Thai next week and discover modular synths. tbh I found this quite shocking. I cannot even imagine what that is like. No wonder they have so much time to do their laundry.
What
How do they live like that
Oh my god is this why so many immortality plots in fiction have the absolutely nonsense moral of “be glad you’re mortal because you’d otherwise run out of things to do” like try me
I often say I’ll never be bored on my own. I cannot relate to people who complained about having nothing to do during the pandemic. Being holed up at home? Yes please, suited me fine.
It does make it suck more when I have so many interests I’d like to do, but go through a big dip in motivation.
“With your abilities and interest you have so much potential. Why are you sabotaging yourself like this?”
I look at different people and think “how do they do so much, all these different things”.
Then I take a step back and realise that each person often only does one thing, and they put so much time and effort into it.
Constantly. And then when I’m not good at something (even if I might enjoy it), I dread doing it again
I don’t know if it might be due to ADHD (or something related) since I’m still waiting to get tested but I feel the same.
The moment I notice I’m not good/best among my peers at something I don’t want to touch it even again.
On the other hand this might be just me acting like a five year old I don’t known. I just related hard.
I feel you. What helped me was learning about growth mindset and fixed mindset. It doesn’t magically cure it, but it does help to know why you feel that way and how untrue that reason is.
I didn’t read the whole book of course, but there’s tons of exec summaries and short talks on it that can help to understand it.
It’s the lack of flow.
When I’m good at something, I can switch my brain off (even for mental tasks like programming; it’s weird how ADHD works) and happily do it for hours.
When I’m working on something I’m not good at or am new to, I need to stop every few minutes to think or research and that gives my ADHD brain an opportunity to attack.
When I’m medicated, I can maintain that flow state with nearly any task - just with zero control over which task gets priority.