Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I’ll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It’s not.
Ok, I’ll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It’s not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it’s been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I’m praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it’s some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying “nice work” when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there’s something going on with me that’s making it hard to cope with the demands of life but “atleast he’s trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude”.
My therapist recommended a book about how ADHD can be a “superpower,” but as I read the book I noticed that nearly every single example they gave of some famous person that “leveraged their ADHD into success” was rich to start with.
Like, it obviously wasn’t ADHD that made them successful, it was generational wealth - classic “pull yourself by your bootstraps” BS. I couldn’t even finish the book, because it was just making me angry.
The ADHD Advantage
Disclaimer: I only made it like 2 chapters in, so it might not be fair of me to discredit the book.
There are only a few symptoms of ADHD that Id consider useful:
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Novelty seeking. If you are able to explore and experiment i.e you are financially secure and/or well connected, this can make someone a great scientist/artist etc. But as other people noted, a lot of this is the result of having the freedom to do more things. If you cant explore or experiment, it’ll just make you feel trapped.
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Greater capacity for creativity. Creativity comes from allowing your mind to wander and jump from one thing to another and thats basically pure ADHD.
That said, ADHD is classified as a disorder for a reason. It can theoretically have positive traits but no one jumps through the hoops to get diagnosed, goes through therapy and takes medication to treat it because things are going better for them because of it. ADHD can be, and often is, debilitating. It can cripple your social life and cause you to either jump from job to job because you are bored to the point of physical suffering or be fired if it isnt controlled. And because emotional dysregulation is common, you are probably going to be emotionally exhausted or even outright traumatized. And of course, school is going to be harder for you than everyone else at some point.
The one thing that is super handy for me about ADHD is that I tend to fall into fits of hyper focus, and I like learning, so contrary to what many people have said, ADHD makes me potentially a better student.
I don’t have another me without ADHD to cross compare it with but the fact that I can easily sit down and read a 400 page textbook from cover to cover in a couple of hours and retain the majority of what I’ve read has been incredibly helpful.
I’ve always thought I don’t have ADHD because I love learning new things and didn’t have problems in school. I was lucky enough to like most subjects. For the few I didn’t like, such as geography and economics, I got OK grades if I just briefly skimmed the textbook before the exam. More recently, the fact that sticking with a topic is hard, that I simply could not concentrate at all on a live video instruction that I was supposed to do with my colleagues (it just went too slowly) and that I keep “overtalking” even when I know people are not interested, started to add up. Also household chores. Really realy difficult, much worse than actually difficult problems such as physics or debugging.
I feel like to be the way you are, there must have been something that conditioned you to feel like reading and knowledge acquisition is fun.
I enjoy learning and getting a full understanding of things, but I can only really do it by videos or projects. Reading is super difficult for me
I can read, but the comprehension from what I’ve just read is nearly impossible due to racing thoughts. Like read a paragraph 5 times and still be thinking about whether the neighbor has mowed yet and not remember what was read so I do it again. Wash, rinse, repeat when it comes to reading comprehension.
ADHD makes you work 2-3x as hard all the time about everything you care about so when compared to a regular person we are fucking superstars at working our asses off just to get along.
Unfortunately nothing is measured in effort and caring alone. So until you also get good at whatever it is you’re doing, you don’t get any notice. So we appear from the outside to go from okay to amazing at things pretty quickly and faster than other people, but it’s really because we’re either working 200% or not at all.
Don’t sweat the grade. You’ve now burned into your memory this failure and you will have an easier time remembering to stop and check your files for that kind of error before submitting. I’ve been in the workplace 20 years now and I have 1000 past disasters whispering in my ear every time I do something so my work is exemplary compared to my coworkers and I look like I have a superpower. I just have a lot of experience failing first.
hahaha superpower.
more like monkeys paw wish.
I wish I could understand many complex things. Granted, but you don’t get to choose them, and their relevance is rare.
I wish I could notice small details no one else could. Granted, but you can’t analyze them, and each thing triggers your anxiety, hundreds of times a day.
I wish I could specialize in something. Granted, at least until the dopamine kick ends.
I wish I had motivation to do things. Granted, but it’s anything other than what you need to do.
I wish I had super hearing? Granted, but the doctors will grow concerned because your ADHD meds can cause psychosis.
I wish I had great memory. Granted, but you only recall images and never a conversation or video.
This is beautiful and just a perfect description. Even though this sucks day to day I will say very rarely but sometimes, this can spin to our benefit. I recently had an electrical contractor fuck up some work I needed done…well, that’s an understatement my entire home needed to be rewired, and I wanted wiring so I didn’t have to keep charging my doorbell camera.
Now my mind goes thought everything as it normally would, I pay large amounts of money and I’m told everything is done. Well my doorbell camera isn’t charging. Out of the entire house that’s all I can focus on. I have an endless list of stuff that needs to get done but I want my doorbell camera to have power. The guy adds the wire for the doorbell and I’m happy. Until I see it isn’t charging. Trace the wire and it isn’t connected to anything, talk to the guy and he gives me some excuse, it’ll be done soon. Wait when I followed the wire for the doorbell I didn’t see anything connected to my roof above my bathroom. Okay they also didn’t install the exhaust fan correctly.
Now my house still needs 80% of a total renovation but he didn’t fix the doorbell and I just don’t want to keep charging it. So I’m scared of messing with any electricity, which is why I paid someone to do my electrical work. But maybe I can just hook up a doorbell. Well a weekend of researching and I still am not sure how to do it, but I found a copy of the national electric code because I think the exhaust fan is supposed to be going up through my roof.
Long story short the guy didn’t do half the work I paid for. I now have a log of every wire that was run, every junction box that was placed, every switch, every outlet, everything, including if it is up the code of the exact code that it is violating. Along with a note about the expected electrical load, that should be on each circuit, how much is can candle and how much more I can add to still be within code for continuous load. I also have the manufacture date of every wire that was placed and found a bit of damage to an exterior and a door wall that wasn’t there and found it caused by the contractor that are both is areas I said do not touch.
So now, I have all this information and if I am successful in suing him I will have gotten a great deal on having the house rewired considering I now know how to rewire an entire house and have improved a few circuits in my house, but I’m not an electrician so I can’t actually do anything with this information. But here I am on lemmy writing about this instead of doing what I planned on doing today with no idea how to actually sue someone and an existential dread of trying to figure out how to or if I should hire an attorney.
It’s great. I mean awful… well actually both, but also neither.
There’s this movement nowadays that tries to spin every bad thing into a good thing, to the point where people are proud of having ADHD, autism or mental illness. I mean it’s great that you accept yourself, but to be PROUD of having a mental health issue us just weird
I can kinda understand Autism, to an extent. Certain forms of high-functioning autism - like the one I have - are more akin to mild learning disorders. Deliberate practice and effort can mitigate a great deal of the issues.
On the other side, I’ve seen people with more extreme forms of the condition and I can’t imagine having to deal with that. I know I can be difficult to deal with and I work really hard to try to mitigate my shortcomings with others - especially people who don’t know me well - but I pale in comparison to the difficulty of people with more extreme forms of Autism.
In this way, I think ADHD and Autism are probably similar - there’s a spectrum of impact the condition has. The milder forms of the condition may actually feel like a superpower to those that shape themselves to utilize their quirks in their favor. The problem arises when all forms of the condition are considered beneficial when they are demonstrably not.
Hell, even I have problems that no amount of learning can ever overcome. You can’t exactly teach yourself how to pick up on the subconscious body language queues that most people just know inherently. I’m totally blind to that stuff and it makes intense conversations incredibly difficult and a little terrifying.
It’s nice that there’s a community of people out there who suffer from the same things you’re suffering from but it’s annoying. You shouldn’t be proud of having any mental disability. It’s just that, a disability, and most of us would be far better off if we didn’t have this curse. It’s nice that I can hyperfocus when I really need to. I can study for exams & certifications last minute and still pass, but its not a sustainable strategy. People with ADHD are significantly more likely to live drastically worse lives than neurotypicals.
