adhd is so embarrassing ur basically like “I have to have fun right the fuck now or I’m throwing myself off the roof” 90% of the time and you also have very little control over this
This was the single most important thing for me to start understanding re: my undiagnosed ADHD, and it’s the thing no one tells you except other ADHD sufferers. My brain’s reward system is so broken that boredom rapidly becomes indistinguishable from a depressive episode. There’s no healthy, normal ability to experience something as simply being a little dull–as soon as my brain isn’t getting regular hits of stimulation, I start clawing at the walls. This is what makes working in a structured environment and initiating tasks so difficult for me, not malice or other character flaws.
What makes it worse is that, if you’re like me, when you were growing up, the only way your authority figures knew how to perceive this was “they’re just goofing off,” and therefore, would deprive you of anything remotely stimulating until you’d done your work, thinking that – if it worked like it would with an NT kid, you’d do your work faster so you could get back to having fun.
Instead, they just pulled the plug on any tiny bit of power you had running to your necessary brainwaves and put you into longterm shutdown mode.
But then….you grew up…with only that method for coping ingrained into you. So no matter how much you may know logically, now, that you have to have the “fun/interesting/challenging” cord plugged in for your brain to have any juice at all, you feel guilty for having to plug that in FIRST instead of as a reward for doing Adulting. So you just sit there, unplugged, not getting anything done.
Or maybe that’s just me.
even the most supportive and well meaning people in my life struggle to understand how painful lack of stimulation is, how immobilizing executive dysfunction is, and how i cannot feel satisfaction the way they do. the number of times i’ve been told “won’t it feel so nice to accomplish it and have it off your plate?” and having to explain that i don’t feel relief or pride when i finish a task, just exhaustion, and that’s part of why it’s so hard to even start it
if it worked like it would with an NT kid
(As with so many things, this isn’t actually best practices with an NT kid either, you just get more leeway for getting AWAY with un-best practices there.)
(This is really the litany: while yes NT kids and ND kids of all stripes do often need DIFFERENT things, if it’s an actively BAD idea to do it with a child with neurodivergence it’s probably suboptimal for the NT kid too, you can just get away with it with the NT kid whereas with the ND kid it will blow up in your face. But if you stop and do the thing you HAVE to with the ND kid - that is, “what does this child actually need in this moment/what is ACTUALLY going on?” - and figure that out first, with the NT kid, things will also work out better there too.)
(via blysse-and-blunder)
