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.
Is that shitty ability to concatenate bad situations a symptom? Because damn… I don’t know how can I defy luck so much.
I mean I wouldn’t call it a super power. but I’m working as a AV tech guy and the more stressful an event gets and there’s hundreds of things going on at the same time, the more I’m becoming calm and tackle it waaay better than all of my colleagues. so I made (at least in this regard) peace with it, to know that I choose the perfect job for it/ me.
Why does this happen? I feel like the stupidest person in the world 90% of the time. Log into work and our PostgreSQL server is about to fall over. I don’t know PostgreSQL, I didn’t setup the server and I generally don’t have anyone on to help me, but I manage to execute a complicated fix before it implodes. Then I go back to forgetting where I put my phone down every thirty seconds.
I just got diagnosed a year and a half ago or so. Reading other peoples stories has really helped me reflect on the past and put every thing in context.
I think part of the challenge we face is a larger hurdle to get engaged with a task. So we either need something very interesting or stressful enough to capture our attention. But once it has our attention, it tends to have our full attention. Also we so frequently have to solve problems in a rush because we put it off until the last minute we are familiar with that mode of operation.
ADHD is thought to be caused in part by a deficiency of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. Dopamine is often thought of as the “feel good” neurotransmitter but it is actually a lot more important for motivation. Norepinephrine is responsible for fight or flight responses to stress/danger. Which is likely why anything that increases those two neurotransmitters helps us with ADHD to feel more neurotypical. eg. stressfull situations (norepinephrine) and fun/engaging activities (dopamine)
I think it stems from mistranslation.
Even before I knew I had ADHD, I tried to focus on the things I was good (less terrible) at, and when I got in the zone, things came together for me. If I were to explain hyperfocus to a normy as an increased focus and clarity, they will imagine it from THEIR normal amount of focus, but in reality, hyperfocus probably isn’t superhuman, it’s just catching up to everyone else.
I saw a great response to that on this community (or on Reddit, can’t remember). Sure, ADHD is like a superpower. It’s like being able to fly, except you can’t choose when you start flying, how fast you fly, which direction you fly in, or when you stop flying.
