That’s a great way to put a positive spin on it, but be realistic. ADHD is not a super power, it’s not all sunshine and roses, it is a disorder. You can sometimes harness parts of it for positive outcomes but it has a lot of negative results too.
Another thing to remember: your ADHD is not everybody’s ADHD. Some people have less severe cases, others have more severe cases.
For every time you can hyperfocus on work, imagine every time you’ve hyperfocused on ants walking by, or a speck of dust, or literally anything other than what you actually need to do.
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.
- “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.”
Imagine how many things that you have to do that only exist because of ridiculous social expectations on what someone else thinks is important.
Being different in a way that would work if conformity was less important shouldn’t be a disability.
exist because of ridiculous social expectations
This is called “taking other people’s opinions into account”. That’s what a society is. If you want your opinions listened to and acted on by others, you have to reciprocate.
Do you think “neurotypical” people love dealing with random people’s opinions and needs? No, but they see the value in cooperating with others to get what they want. You are “expected” to wear clothes in public because I don’t know how often you bathe yourself. You are “expected” to not yell in public because if every rando yelled whenever they wanted, life would be more stressful.
Implying you can control or induce these hyperfixations in a productive way is disingenuous at best, measurably harmful at worst.
If you work in a job that can use use the chaos in a productive way that’s great, but I’m willing to bet you still face abnormally high difficulty with general life tasks, and consistently struggle to enforce a work/life balance.
You’re not helping people with ADHD by posting this. You’re establishing an unattainable standard for people that are already doing everything in their power just to get by.
Every parent should be gassing their kid up though. Most of our “successful” people are just normal kids that never hit a wall or had help getting around walls. Realistic expectations are what keeps people from jumping jobs for a raise; applying for positions they don’t fully qualify for; moving for better job market access; retraining for management roles; and so much more.
Note, I’m not talking about rags to riches, success can be a first generation college graduate getting a professional job; a homeless kid getting a steady job and pulling their family off the streets; a burnt out delivery guy getting a union warehouse job. The point is people with low expectations don’t look for new opportunities.
It’s so weird that we have a culture that treats teaching pride to children as a bad thing.
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/why-reactionaries-hate-pride-and-narcissists-938d39261f13
I agree to an extent, but also that the parents need to take time to understand how to “gas them up” appropriately. It’s not everyone’s case, but it became very apparent to me when I was young that my parents would cheer me on over anything, and never take any time to learn about the things they were cheering me on over, and that led to disbelieving pretty much any positive feedback from anyone long-term. The only feedback of substance growing up was the very rare negative feedback, because they would only pull it out when they understood it enough to know it needed improving. That, and emphasizing their efforts as the thing to cheer on, not just the end results.
I’ve learned to work through that, and maybe it goes without saying for most people, but being a genuine and substantive cheerleader is important.
This swerves way into “ADHD is a superpower” territory which is bullshit.
edit: For example, while I have a lot of these traits, I also can’t remember to put a new trash bag in the trash bin when I take the full bag out to the garage, which is a 1 minute task. Despite reminding myself AS I’m removing the full bag. Twice a week. For years now. Because I will see something in the garage or think of something while doing the mundane task that completely derails my train of thought.
I do similar things when a task has two physically separate locations like taking out the trash.
While walking out with the trash I will repeat constantly “put in new bag” all the way to the garbage and all the way back, otherwise the task doesn’t get completed.
I would be lying if I said I hadn’t done the same thing. “New bag new bag new bag new ba… hey why did I leave that camp chair over there. Man I miss camping. Well trash is done, back to the computer!”
Not saying this will work for you, but I’ve had some success with convincing my self conscious to do things without me thinking. Then I can shut down the thinking part of my brain for periods of time in between tasks. I’ve done this through meditation since I was a kid. It has helped me to “just know” what needs to be done and I do it.
if it’s immediately rewarding
Hell of a caveat there.
Thinking about it, a manager who knows how to trick adhd workers to hyper focus on stuff could make a killer department 🤔
Someone close to me has struggled forever with ADHD. A heroic effort got her through med school. They are an ER doc. Their life outside the ER would not work at all without an amazing partner, but at work, it’s kind of perfect. Fix it, it goes away. Everything is different all the time. Fix shiny thing, send it home, find next shiny thing.
It is a very unique situation though.
If anybody here is an engineer, I’d highly recommend applying for jobs at tech startups. It’s very chaotic and disorganized; you’ll be constantly putting out fires. But you know where you’re at when you’re putting out fires? Flow state.
