It took me ages to realise this. People with ADHD are always portrayed as lazy but they don’t struggle with hard work, they struggle with boring work. Before I knew I had ADHD I always found I was getting in trouble for not finishing boring work so I always used to prioritise tasks by how much fun they were and start with the most boring. I just ended up getting nothing done.
Then they also get mad when you find an easier way to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time or even automating it.
“Why didn’t you show your work, so I can see how you think?”
Because I did it in my head and got the right answer. This isn’t about you.
The “show your work” is about checking if you understand the logic in getting the answer. We had lots of questions out of 5. Right answer was only worth 1 mark, the other 4 were the steps and reasoning. This type of setup punishes those that skip right to the answer, or have memorized answers. But rewards those that show they know the concepts
Ok but forcing me to show my work was one of those things I hated until I was extremely grateful for it. I didn’t need to show my work to prove my answer was correct in elementary school, but it was a slow drift from “I can do it in my head with ease” to “I need to document my steps so I can check where the error occurred”. Also “it’s not enough to be correct, you need to be correct with evidence” is the reality for people who do math for a living
It’s funny, because in high school, I remember getting poor marks on proofs - and HATING them - because I was like “this is so fucking obvious jesus tap dancing christ” and just… skipped lots of steps.
Fast forward to college and logic theory: that ended up being one of my favorite classes, because machine theory and problem reduction is a fascinating domain, and FAR more interesting than “prove this shape is the shape we say it is” or whatever vapid bullshit they had us doing in high school.
Lol I hated this too, I really did. But like a lot of answers here, I can appreciate it somewhat now. Especially when trying to learn to code.
I think learning to break down problems might even be MORE valuable to people like us with ADHD, even if we hate it, because we tend to intuit our way through things by the seat of our pants.
Also sometimes I got really lucky and arrived at the correct answer in a bizarre and inconsistent way.
In the end, it’s very valuable to be able to communicate your process to others. Even if it’s irritating and awful to get through.
I also wonder if those like myself, who really REALLY hated math until my brain started to appreciate it in my adult years, just gnash our teeth at these memories because it made us feel stupid when we struggled to keep up with that slow, methodical raw-logic stuff…
EDIT: I can see you were the polar opposite of myself, ridiculously GOOD at math but found it a waste of time showing how you got there. That makes sense. I have zero idea what that’s like lol.
This reminds me of a punishment homework thing I was given in my youth, I had to write out something a bunch of times, which was a shit punishment to begin with and only happened once in like, grade 3 or something. Maybe even grade 1 when we were learning to write, idk. Maybe it wasn’t a punishment (it felt like one).
Instead of writing the letter “i” at the start of every line like I was supposed to, I just put a long line down the page to be that letter on every line.
The only part of this that I remember to this day is that I got it back with that line circled in red and the word “lazy!” Written next to it, with points off of the assignment for it.
That’s literally the only thing I recall about it, that finding an “easy” way to write the same letter across multiple lines was lazy, therefore I’m lazy and worthless. I don’t even remember if I passed or failed it, because that was less important to my young mind than being called lazy for simply trying to optimize my working time.
I dunno, but at this point I kind feel like that teacher was a bit of an asshole.
You gotta try to make a perfectly spaced dashed line down the page, as fast as you can. It’s a bit of a challenge and get all the I’s out of the way. Then the teacher can’t say boo.
This applies so hard to programmers, as well. I love making things automated, but I never have the time to make them properly.
Come join us on the QA side! I’m an automation developer, so it’s my job to make things automated :)
I feel fucking seen by this post
It rings right to my core
Keep it up with these posts, if I share enough of them with my clearly very painfully obviously super adhd girlfriend I might eventually convince her to go see a therapist and seek a diagnosis someday
Call her doctor, make an appointment, save it in her calendar, remind her in the lead up, drive her there, get the referral. Walk her to the post box to send it off, sit next to her to phone the intake office to confirm they got the referral, set appointments on her phone for every 6 months to sit with her and call to check the cancellation list until you get an appointment. Drive her to that appointment.
If she has ADHD, the steps involved in getting a diagnosis are bigger than Mt Everest, she will need a neurotypical Sherpa.
Call her doctor
Agh, they usually say “The patient needs to be the one to make the appointment.” >:(
But, yeah OP, if you are right there with her every step of the way, she can do it, and I bet that would be very helpful, like bowling with guard rails! She can feel the empowerment of doing the work, but you’re there to bump away the possibility of falling off into failure. :)
Call her doctor
I should have been more specific. Find a time when she’s not doing anything urgent, tell her it’s time to call the doctor, pick up her phone and dial the doctor, put them on speaker and put the phone down next to you while you body double your partner as they gone through the motions of locking in the appointment.
While on the phone your partner can also give third party authorisation. It’s the first thing I do when I meet a new provider, I give third party authorisation to my partner and mother so they can make appointments on my behalf (they can’t get results for me, but they can schedule things for me)
I hope she does. I don’t think I’m ADHD but my partner was just diagnosed a few months ago. Now that we think about it it’s not a surprise at all lol
It feels really nice to have more understanding and more context for both of us.
I think it will help too. She resists by saying “well what will it really change?” but it can and will change quite a lot if she understands how her brain works and can build some support structures to help with it. She really doesn’t want to be medicated either which I totally get.
My ADHD doctor told me:
“Medication tends to be Plan Z. We do everything we can with working with your lifestyle, your habits, your thought patterns, and then consider the lowest effective dose if we need to.” I liked that approach.
I guess just make sure you’re seeing a psychologist first, because psychiatrists are basically all ’ bout 'dem pills lol.
Add the extra layer of my mother not appreciating my interests and thinking what I now do for a living was a waste of time… And a dash of expecting me to somehow just be able to perfectly do chores they never taught me how to do when I was young. Yes, this is the first time I’ve ever mopped a floor at 17 years old. How the fuck is that my fault?
As a child of Baby Boomers, they really never wanted an answer - they just wanted to complain about something. And they probably never wanted to be parents in the first place.
God, it sucks to be a child of parents that never wanted children
Like I get that it was the social expectation but c’mon, what the hell, you brought me into existence, and for what?
My mom aborted my brother because she didn’t want a son. I think it was for the best. She was a manipulative abusive pos to my sister and I. I hate to think how she would have treated him.
Shit, sounds a lot like my mom. She always complained I never helped with chores, but she never asked or told me to do any. Worse, whenever I did anything, like washing the dishes, instead of saying “thanks”, she would tell me to stop because she’d do it.
I remember this progress as a kid. Nothing was taught until after I did something wrong. It ended up discouraging me from trying, because every time I did something that I thought was “right,” my mom complained about it.
At first the rule was “put dirty dishes in the sink.”
Then when I put dishes in the sink, the complaint became, “Why did you put dishes in the sink without washing them?”
So then I learned to wash dishes, and set them in the drying rack. To which my mom would complain, “Why are there dishes in the drying rack? You should put them away.”
Okay, so I washed and put dishes in the cabinets. “Why are the dishes all wet?”
…
How about teaching kids each step beforehand, instead of complaining that they don’t magically know/do everything?
It’s actually the normies who can’t even do laundry without a little neurotransmitter bottle from mommy frontal cortex. We fight demons every day.
"Your home is tidy because you anticipate getting a little dopamine reward for a job well done. (How cute)
My home is tidy through determination, anger, sheer force of will, to do the thing despite every fiber of my being desperately trying to pull me away from it. Knowing that it simply must be done has to suffice as its own reward.
