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Unfortunately, ADHD being a spectrum, not all of us get blessed with the crisis focus superpower.
I’m only worth anything in a crisis.
It’s why my last relationship worked for so long. Girl was a living crisis.
Former paramedic here. Chaos is so calming.
… unless I’m the cause of the crisis, then I’m a mess
Me in normal circumstances: “Don’t perceive me, I am not here, attention is pain, under the radar is my happy place”
Me running tech for live events: “Something is fucky on stage mid-song, and I am here to fix it. Fuck your attention, I am unborking a thing here.”
Ah interesting, this explains why I have always been really good at giving presentations. People always compliment me after the fact and ask how I stay so calm. The truth is that I’m extremely anxious during the whole thing and I just won’t stop talking when that happens
If the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Sounds like someone read that Discordian quotes page in the early days of the internet
That’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote.
I know now, but a lot of us knew the quote long before we’d read that one.
Me!!
When my boyfriend and i were short in time to get them a residents permit, without them having a job, i read law and planned finance so quickly and good that even the bureaucracy worker didnt know the forms i brought with me.
It all worked out great
Found this applies nicely to my career. Routineish work? Drag my feet and fight myself to do anything. Fixing problems (bigger the better)? Everybody stand back, I got it.
Whole damn system failed due to a database failure that propagated to our secondary host too. Hacked our backup to usable in a day (meeting most requirements, including transition requirements) with a path forward for total system recovery on the main system.
Documentation on any of that though, that was a … struggle.
That resonates so well with me. Attending all the meetings, discussing feature requests and evaluating their feasibility is so exhausting. But working overtime for a few days to find and fix the bug that completly halted production? No problem!
ADHD brain is built for sprints, not marathons
The problem is that management picked up on that and now everything is a “sprint.” A never-ending marathon of sprints.
Same here. Daily business I have to push me to get through the work. Major outage and everyone runs around like headless chicken? I’m the one keeping it cool and organising that everything comes back.
Turns out we have different neuro types because we need people who are good at dealing with different circumstances. Who knew ?
People knew. Then everything started being “i need people to work in my factory/office doing the same thing again and again” and everyone had to be the same.
Edit: Think of all the advancement in science from people that were not “normal”, now they’d have just failed basic school and never had any chances to do academia. I think Einstein failed history and other subjects in a college entrance but excelled in physics and math.
Marx wrote a lot about this as a criticism of capitalism. Specifically in how he defines alienation and product fetishism (seeing the economy as a relationship between products and not between people).
The “capitalism is human nature” is complete horse shit, because even if that was true, less than one percent of the population have enough capital to actually be able to make decisions in a way that would even apply.
There is no “human nature” in working a wage labor job. The rest of us are just doing completely alienated forms of labor with only freedom to choose which shit company to work for for a shit wage.
I think my ADHD has really made me extremely anti capitalist since I graduated from college 10 years ago. Ive lasted long enough in a well paying position to have some savings. But im getting older. I can’t hyperfocus a months worth of work in a day like I use to. And I really just don’t have the motivation to either. I know my career is gonna fall apart at some point in the next decade. Just hoping I can find something else to support myself. I just can’t work on a computer anymore. My body literally can’t take it. I can’t think anymore. Brain keeps telling me to get up and go for a walk or something. And it’s not even all physical. I can sit and work on one of my personal projects still. I just give absolutely zero fuck about writing some code for a company that is literally just making the world worse every day. (Microsoft if anyone’s curious).
Einstein only failed those because it was at a school being taught in a language he wasn’t familiar with if I am right.
If the crisis is imminent, visual, and physical yes. If the crisis is more abstract with letters and bureaucracy, it’s not the same.
This right here. If I can do something right now with my body to fix the problem, I’m locked in. If I have to call a bunch of people that I don’t like and work patiently on things, not so much.
I moments of crisis, I will just start crying, but I can do that very fast.
It may not be marketable, but it is a skill. 🤝
“My life has been an ongoing series of crises. Move over, you weak-ass bitch, I’ve got the coping mechanisms for this.”
*Then procedes to be not less and no more helpless than in normal circumptences*
I hate this mentality. I know plenty of ADHD folks for whom this isn’t true. I see this repeated often. If you’re able to respond well in a crisis, how do you know it’s because of your ADHD? I see no reason to think that it’s because of a disability. It just bothers me when people make my very real and very debilitating disability sound like something fun and quirky.
It is because a crisis often has the right level of stimuli. It is also why ADHD folks tend to wait until the last minute and then pull out all the stops to get things done.
Not everyone with ADHD is good in a crisis, but it is a very common theme for us.
I do my absolutely best work a couple of hours before the big project is due.
I might have had a few weeks to do it, but nooooo. I don’t even really get started until the night before.
I do think it’s the added “element of danger” that kicks my brain into overdrive.
The rest of the time, I’m in a quasi-befogged state. Perhaps during that boring time, I’m saving up energy to handle the “danger” before going back into my little trance.
I’ve been weirdly extremely successful once I figured out how to work with this tendency, instead of fighting it.
I do tend to think things through without acting on it until the last minute, then knock it out successfully on the first try. Some coworkers will start the work and then fail, redo the work, etc. which were the same things I was thinking would fail as I thought through it, and it took us roughly the same amount of time to work through.
They show continuous effort, and I look like I breezed through it, but we just had different ways of getting to the same end goal.
it’s a disability yes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the parts of it that make us simply differently abled. We can’t be “normal” so might as well love the way we’re “weird”. i’m not going through life feeling sorry for myself
I’m not going through life feeling sorry for myself either. I just see this repeated often and don’t see any evidence to believe it’s true. Best case it’s just true for some people, worst case I see it as actively harmful. I hate the idea that someone unsure about whether they have ADHD and shuts down in a crisis would believe they don’t have ADHD and not seek treatment because of posts like this.
for a long, long, while i dismissed the idea that i have adhd because i didn’t think the description of adhd fit me. i was reading medical documents and official diagnostic criteria that just listed symptoms with no exploration as to how those symptoms present in actual life. and even more crucially - i couldn’t even find mentions of how adhd presents in people who never had trouble at school (they never ask you if you studied at school, just if your grades were fine, didn’t study and still got good grades? looks normal to me go away now). if anything is discouraging folks from seeking treatment it’s that - lists of symptoms that cite no actual experiences someone might relate to
and it’s not just me who had trouble relating the names of symptoms to my real life issues. i went to two psychiatrists, both listened a bit and then gave me tests, all but the self assessment were within the “norm” so they tried to give me meds for depression and wrote off my self assessment (and hours of talking) as drug seeking behaviour or being a hypochondriac (this one i even have on paper). finally, a friend of mine recommended me a doctor who also has adhd, and only the guy who actually lives with the thing was capable of noticing that i don’t exactly behave like a neurotypical person. i was ready to give up after the second psychiatrist, if not for that friend of mine i would just not seek treatment. why would i keep spending money for doctors to tell me that i’m not trying hard enough at life or that i’m depressed?
someone who has adhd isn’t going to fully dismiss their suspicions because they didn’t relate to one meme. what could make someone dismiss their suspicion are medical documents devoid of daily life context, or doctors who only care about a checklist of symptoms they can test for while ignoring their patients’ struggles in life
and though anecdotal, i can confirm that i preform much better in crisis situations than in normal life. washing dishes? not until i have literally no plates to eat from + a few days because takeaway is a thing. but being stuck in the middle of the pandemic at night in Birmingham with all hotels closed? i wasn’t even stressed, despite the fact i came pretty close to people that looked like they wanted to mug me, twice
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