My diagnosis actually said mine is low level, which i dont trust and im pretty sure I just am good at faking the test and its much worse than it looks.
My friend kind of thinks everyone just has adhd but they dont understand the level at which i have it. Like they can focus for a 16 hour workday- there’s no fucking way I could do that, I can barely do 9 and most of it is not real work either.
Like they can focus for a 16 hour workday- there’s no fucking way I could do that, I can barely do 9 and most of it is not real work either.
You’ll be able to hyperfocus far longer than that, once it’s something worthwhile that you’re interested in and inspires you. ADHD super powers yet to be experienced and discovered.
That’s my kind. If I am enjoying myself I tune out the world and will forget to eat or sleep. I’ve gone more than 24h without realizing it, though the autism exacerbates it. Many years ago I started setting an egg timer to help “bring me back” but these days I can use phone apps for that. I recommend that for fellow hyperfocus neurospicies.
There’s nothing quite like that moment when you realise that you’re about to pee your pants because body signals didn’t register. But then you also go, I’ll try to hold out so I can just do this, one, thing…
The problem as with most of us, the thing that lds my focus has 0 bearing on anything useful in life haha!
Change how you define “useful in life” then. If the time spent brought you enjoyment, isn’t that still useful in a way?
Well sure but no one gives a shit about old tape machines or 90s computers xD id be much better off learning to code in python or learning carpentry but I just dont have the interest.
Isn’t it bad enough without making it into a competition?
Dont make ADHD part of your identity, it’s unhealthy.
Yeah. The same goes for the friend, as for OP: Masking and how automatic it becomes makes it hard to really approximate how bad anyone has it. Add to that the fact that OP almost definitely doesn’t see the friend 24/7, but only on social occasions, which would usually mean they haven’t seen much else other than the mask. So of course they’d think they don’t have it as bad as them, because we can only ever live inside our own skin.
I feel like gatekeeping like this is a net negative. I don’t even know why one would care about how others have it. It sure feels like OP has an unhealthy need to be the worst off, and while the reason for that is very likely completely understandable and human, it’s still harmful behavior and an unproductive mindset to have. For everyone involved, OP too.
However, there’s one thing there that is just annoying. The “everyone has adhd” line just serves to undermine adhd and its effects on any individual, it makes it seem like nothing. Which is also not the case, and actively harmful to the treatment and management of it.
I think a lot of the attributes relevant to adhd are a scale, and we all have them in varying amounts, but the same goes for the amount of tumors in our body and the microbiome in our gut. The fact that it is a scale does not take away the fact that some people are, necessarily, if we agree it’s a scale and not a binary, at the higher end of that scale and will have problems living with that. And that’s I think what’s the most important part: whether or not it negatively affects one’s life. Especially day-to-day life. There are benign tumors in everyone’s body pretty much. But for some, the tumors are either of a dangerous type or too big, or there are too many of them… we respect that and don’t go saying “well everyone has them” when someone has cancer. The same should go for adhd I think. So in that aspect I do get OP’s frustration.
However, I wouldn’t go ahead and gatekeep “true” adhd from them just because they happen to have a bad take on this specific thing.
I do have some friends that want to call every errant behavior some neurodivergance, and it does irk me a little, but also, in the case of ADHD (and others), the masking often makes it really hard to diagnose or even understand what’s going on under the hood for someone sometimes, so I try to give behavior like that a lot of leeway. And also always encourage people to get evaluated. I’m also also just starting to come to terms with I’m pretty sure my mother has ADHD and is really good at masking.
I have ADHD. I can usually hold my shit together at work, and I work 16 hour shifts. Some days my coworkers will notice enough to ask me if I’ve taken my meds, but most days I appear pretty chill. I’ll bet if you asked the majority of my coworkers they’d tell you I’m not ADHD.
What they don’t see is me going home and sobbing on the floor from the sheer effort and desperation of trying holding my shit together and not fuck up in ways that I can’t fix. I’m terrified every fucking day that today will be the day I fuck up enough that I can’t hide how bad my brain actually is anymore and I’ll make a critical error and I’ll lose my job. I don’t have a backup plan or someone to catch me if I fail, I’ll just be homeless at the end of the month when I can’t make rent.
I’m unmedicated (working on it) and work is brutal. It doesn’t help that I disagree at a deep philosophical level with a lot of the people I work with, and I’m trans sill working the job and with the people I actively transitioned around. Every day is a fucking marathon. Only saving grace is that for half my day I’m able to wear headphones and am doing something that is both very physical and somewhat creative. That alone makes me want to keep the job even though the pay is shit (the reason I’m not medicated).
Oof, I’m so sorry. It’s so hard to work around people you deeply disagree with on a philosophical or moral level, and I won’t even pretend to understand your struggles as a trans person in this world. Good luck to you, and I hope you can find access to the medications or treatments you need.
Thanks for the kind words! Good luck to you too! I’m white, so honestly my day to day as a trans person is pretty neutral (not for long probably), it’s just odd being around people that I know struggle with actually seeing people as they want to be seen, especially when they knew the “old” you.
This is me. I have made some very expensive fuck-ups at work and lost my job several times because of my forgetfulness or missing details. Thankfully I’m medicated now, but the fear and anxiety is still deeply ingrained in me. I am the livelihood of my family. I pay our bills, the mortgage, car payments and insurance. Any mistake could mean my family and I will need to start hunting for the nicest bridge to live under.
or have it at a much lower level than you?
it ain’t a competition, bud.
Yes it is!
Haha no I know its not its just annoying having others downplay it because they seemingly have it too, but you have it far worse and they dont get it.
So… you’re basically it IS a competition, even right after agreeing that it isn’t?
It’s not competing to acknowledge it affects everyone who has it to different extents. It hugely impacts my life, so it is annoying for others to downplay it or call it a “super power” because it doesn’t impact them as much. I can acknowledge their struggle, it’s not unfair to expect the same in return.
🪞
Yes, I too compare my internal experience to what other people seem on the outside.
Nah if anything, I’m the one going “Girl you’re on your 7th coffee, go get checked for adhd” to my coworkers. Nothing wrong in getting help for something that can be helped, no matter how “easy” the struggle might seem.
ADHD and other neurodivergencies are neither binary nor a simple scale + we have different personalities and circumstances, so there are people that qualify as having ADHD yet manage it very well or have lives that mesh really well with their brand of ADHD by pure chance.
Some of these people think since it’s easy for them to manage it must be easy for everyone, and some sympathize and understand they have it (compared to us) easy.
It’s frustrating to have a genuine disability and not be believed because it’s not visible and obvious, and doubly so when it’s someone you think should get it.
I’ve met one person I didn’t believe had ADHD yet he thought for sure he did. He kept asking me and my other ADHD friend why we didn’t simply do this or that whenever we mentioned we struggled with something. He did later turn out to have another neurodivergency which made much more sense to me, but it’s also important to note that not all symptoms are gonna be in the part of someones life that you are witness to.
That is because the characteristics that make up ADHD are normal human features. Having ADHD just means your settings are far enough outside what most people have that it interferes with your ability to function inside the cultural expectations that work for most people.
I’m not diagnosed. I work somewhere with an unusually high number of people with ADHD, autism and anxiety disorders. With the autistic ones it tends to be the most obvious. With ADHDers it is harder to tell sometimes.
If someone who appears to have their shit together tells me that they think they have ADHD or that they have it, I believe them. If they’d turn out to have lied to me, I don’t really care. I’d probably just find their behavior to be a bit weird.
The only time I get pissed off about people with ADHD is when I meet those who thinks it is everybody elses’ job to fix them. Luckily I have only met two of those. Everybody else I have met have been good people with their flaws and their struggles that may or may not get better ever, but at the very least they own their disability and don’t think it is the whole world’s responsibility to baby them. I knew one guy who expected me to call him in the morning to wake him up for work. He was in his 30s at the time. I was also supposed to do a bunch of other things that I have since forgotten. He had made a list like I was his mother. People like that, I genuinely despise.
As for myself, as I said, not diagnosed. I have a lot of symptoms and I appear at first glance to be a functioning member of society. I go to work everyday and deliver to various degrees, but I always deliver and I always meet my deadlines. Nobody, other than the ones working with me, knows all the acrobatics I do behind the scenes to make things look normal on the surface. I strive for extreme structure, yet I can barely set it up myself, and maintaining it is almost impossible. I start so many things that never get finished. I have constant racing thoughts and when I don’t have that I have racing emotions where I can go through every emotion known to man within minutes and repeat them in a loop for hours with no pause button. I have so many different challenges I struggle with in my personal life that don’t get to take over my life entirely because I’m super lucky to have good people around me whose abilities to create and maintain structures is something I lean on in my daily life. Every day I do my best to be productive and deliver. I have days where I just spin in my chair and water the plants at work or watch youtube videos. I have those days. I also have days where I am super productive and get a lot of things done and catch up on lost time. I always make it work, but I also know how fragile my structure is for me. Not too many things can go wrong before I crumble into a useless mess.
I suspect there are many people out there who are like me, who don’t have a diagnosis, who don’t appear to have it or who don’t have it enough, who only appear that way because the systems they have in place for them and the people they have around them helps them to appear normal.
I can tell you that the only reason I haven’t seen a psychiatrist yet is because the entire process of getting a diagnosis is so overwhelming and long that I just can’t do it. I got a referral at one point and was supposed to find myself a psychiatrist on my own and I just couldn’t do it. I have no idea how people who are worse off than me are able to get to the stage of seeing a psychiatrist in the first place. It is a complete mystery to me.
Managing to focus on your work for 16h straight sounds like hyper focus which is a trait that many adhd people exhibit (or so they say)
Anyways, adhd is a wide spectrum, both in symptoms and intensity.
