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How fucking hard it is to remember daily and recurring tasks. Taking meds, brushing teeth, checking email, cleaning up, cooking, laundry, on top of stuff related to work.
Another one is that we are blind. Unless I expect to see it, I cannot see it. I literally dont see clutter. Only when I force myself to think about what I'm staring at do I realize there is a bunch of crap on a table. Its really easy for my room to get messy because of this. Because it hardly exists for me.
Hey, it's me! Have you tried one of those weekly medicine pill dividers? I did. I think I filled it once, then went back to my daily routine of forgetting my meds. ADHD fucking blows.
Anxiety over missing my meds keeps me (mostly) on track, I do however forget to request refills until the last bloody moment though, love how the process for ADHD treatment is so anti ADHD...
It's really tiring to just exist inside your own head.
I've described it before as a box filled with a bunch of bouncy balls just bouncing off on every direction, off the walls, ceiling and floor, all the time. Every one of those balls is a thought, it's really hard to hold onto just one, it's hard to keep one once you've caught it.
When I'm resting usually I just put in some youtube video/TV show/audio book and play some mindless game for a while. On the outside it looks like it just played solitaire for 3 hours straight, but on the inside I'm just trying to follow one line of thought while keeping the rest of my brain occupied and quiet for a second.
It doesnβt manifest exactly the same in everyone with ADHD
We have excess focus just no control over its direction.
A reverse question is actually quite interesting as well:
People without ADHD, but who know others with ADHD: what are the common misconceptions about "being normal"?
I'll begin to get a conversation going
Note: ADHD is very real and very hard on people who have it.
I know two people with diagnosed ADHD, and as with many disorders, it is common that people expect others without it to be completely lacking, or, this case, have only mild experiences of a similar kind.
Regular people absolutely get most of the common experiences of an ADHD individual: they can quickly get overwhelmed, struggle with motivation to do some basic everyday things and then get hyperfocused on something and forget the rest completely, can have impulses they don't control. They, too, manage to develop a lot of tricks for maintaining motivation and going through the everyday issues.
What matters for diagnosis is the severity of these events and how often they occur. With ADHD, all those events happen so often that it gets impossible or strikingly hard to pursue what you need without using techniques/medication to manage your behavior.
This is why many regular people may not understand or not accept ADHD as something valid and why it may not help to list to them the kind of limitations you have - they have all the same experiences, it's just that they are less common and severe, and so they manage to force through them while you may get overwhelmed.
A more helpful approach could probably be to come from the fact it's a real diagnosis, and outlining just what it means exactly to have ADHD, to talk about the severity of the episodes and how they are not only experienced by you personally, but also described in the medical literature. This still probably won't change the mind of some bigots, but it might help other people to understand it better.
Hope there is some insight in here.
The amount of misinformation that's out there about it.
Around 50% of TikToks about ADHD are misleading. I feel like we can expect similar results in other social media.
Sorry what were you saying? I was busy thinking of what I would do if gravity reversed.
That they have it