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Rant about "having ADHD is not an excuse for everything"
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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ADHD
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I'm in my mid 30s, and I have been dealing with ADHD my whole life. I have some important, but hard advice. If you aren't up for that, just don't read the rest of my comment.
I get the frustration of having people not struggling telling you to just struggle harder, and people you would expect sympathy from (friends, family) not supporting or sympathizing with you.
That said, and this is a bitter pill to swallow, the world at large does not care about your personal conditions. Whether you are a reliable friend, teammate, worker, spouse, etc matters far more than your ever present inner turmoil.
Work with medical professionals to get your symptoms under control so you don't beat yourself up at every turn for fucking up in ways that you are predisposed to. Learn to work with and around your own shortcomings and limitations instead of beating your head against the same damn wall every time. Build proper internal responses and coping skills to these events.
You clearly are aware of some of your own behavioral and thinking patterns that are not good or helpful, like overanalyzation after a fuck up. You already have your targets for things about yourself to work on.
This is not a nice thing to hear or to have to do, but it is essential if you want to survive as a grown ass adult in this world. You don't need to be perfect, but you will need to keep trying to do better, forever.
You can blame the condition that you are just going to have to live the rest of your life with, or you can take ownership that you fucked up again and work to not do it going forward. The fact that you are already beating yourself up about your mistake does not invalidate the right of other people to be frustrated at what happened.
No one has the right to make their internal turmoil everyone else's problem, even if it may be particularly burdensome. The world should be far more sympathetic and empathetic, but at some point you have to take responsibility for you. That means more than "I feel so bad", it also means "What can I do to prevent repeats, that I can actually follow through on rather than just have as magical thinking?"
Don't make plans dependent on getting your shit together. Make plans that will still work even if you keep fucking up in the same ways you did before.
It all gets easier with time, as long as you keep trying.
I mostly agree, but (what else ^^):
IMO you do take responsibility when you tell others about your boundaries and how they can work around them. If they don't want to because it also costs them a little bit of energy and disrupts their typical workflows they have (again: IMO) no right to blame it all on you. If I tell them "I can't do X" or something and they again and again expect me to do X, it's also on them.
Simple example: I tell colleagues, family, whatever to please remind me again if they feel I missed something they expected of me. If they do, all is good. If they later are pissed that I missed something and immediately blame me ... sorry my friend, I warned you. (If I had the ability to set a reminder, sure that's on me for not doing that. But it doesn't always work that way.)
There are times in our lives when people will need to rely on us. Whether or not you tell them that you are unreliable, or ask that they remind you; it is reasonable for them to be upset if you wind up letting them down. You are not immune from blame. It doesn't suddenly become their fault for relying on you when you mess up. It is still you who messed up.
If you tell them you can't do what they rely on you to do, then no, you haven't fucked up, they have fucked up. They should not have relied on you. When you promise someone to do something and you don't, yeah, then you fucked up, but if you don't do that, then it's 100% their fault.
You can't shed all responsibilities or obligations, but most of them you can. In the end, it only depends on what your goals are. Do you want healthy, happy children? Then you'll probably have to do something for that. If not though? Then you don't. You can get by with a lot of "what if I just don't?"
In the case of children i would say that having them in the first place(in majority of cases) is a promise that they can rely on you so it is kind of a bad example
Exactly. I was talking about just not having children if you know you can't properly take care of them. Result is no responsibility/obligations. It must've been known beforehand that one is unreliable, and thus this needs to be taken into account for the decision to have kids.
i had this freind, very good friend that i kinda dropped because he wasnt such a good friend after all:
he didnt believe in adhd, altough he pretty much had adhd. he drank alcohol, i took ritalin. he said i should drink instead, since i was funnier when i did. but i stopped.
to make a long story short: he said adhd is made up, ritalin is no good, what i described as mind changing is just a drug effect, and by the way, can you please stop being so goddamn unreliable?
he didnt get it till the end. adhd was like "hey squirrel" and i wasnt like that. but i was unreliable .... it is just like, my charakter. no specific reason.
he would always complain about this third friend, who also has some issues - he and the third friend would work together, and the third friend would frequently have anger fits, like, illogical ones. like, losing his pen while working, and then having hour long anger issues with everybbody, while hey tried to reason with him.
I tried to explain to him that it ist about the pen at all, but about the social situation and the stress involved, and that he shouldnt always put our mutual friend in these situations when he 100% fears that our friend will have a melt down.
afterwards, he would bitch about it, like talk bad about our mutual friend.
He full on knew that our mutual friend couldnt handle a stressfull work enviroment, and put him into it regardless.
well, 3 months ago i called it quits and put a stop to all of that. walked away frome a wohle friend group.
Boy, that reply really got away from you huh?
i dont quite grasp what you are implying, and which reply we are talking about. but no, i am always like this. my explanation but not excuse is that i am an autistic dude with adhd. i am always on a crusade, its quite the curse. very stressfull.
I feel ya man and to be honest I understand what you are getting at more than I understand what others are trying to say, so I just wanted to point that out.
If we let others know of our limitations and they expect us to magically overcome those limitations that’s on them.
Example: I forget things ALL the time. I can’t control what I forget. I try to ensure that I do things to help me remember. But I will forget things. If I’ve explained that to someone and they still get angry with me over forgetting something, that’s their problem. My forgetfulness is far more stressful to me than it is to them and I’m not taking on any extra guilt for their unreasonable expectations of me. I’ll apologize and move on.
Sometimes this is what it requires. There are good people out there, I hope you make contact with more of those instead :)
thanks. it was the first time i did that, ever. i saw that there is a power and freedom in thast decision. i said no multiple times, that was not accepted, and i walked away to show that i am not that kind of guy. it was hurtfull to learn that i was never taken serious in a "friend friend" capacity. it is true. for them, i am just a wierd sometimes obnoxious guy that talks a lot of crazy shit. i decided that i dont need to change their perception they have about me. i also realized that it is utterly pointless to discuss it with my former friend; he thinks he is morally right to abuse our friendship, he has always had very thought out buisness arguments when it came to take advantage of sourrounding people.
like, "if they dont know i overcharge them, its ok for me and them."
keep in mind that we are talking about friends and favours.
well *uck it.
i can live without them.
yeah, but "I have ADHD, so I'll never be on time" is a very shitty excuse. You waste other people's time.
"I have ADHD, so I hate queuing, so I'm not going with you to that famous museum" is boundaries.
don't confuse boundaries with expecting everyone around you to put up with your symptoms all the time.
There’s also a big difference between “I’ll never be on time” and “there will be times I’m late because I have adhd”. But seriously if someone can’t handle my adhd symptoms I don’t expect them to, but they should also not expect me to care that they can’t deal with them. Because I don’t.
Why the fuck is that not a valid excuse? It can be impossible to find sufficient support and adjustments to enable yourself to reliably arrive on time, saying shit like this is a great way to make people who are already struggling feel even more worthless, jesus christ.
Yeah sure, you can't expect people to literally always be able to accomodate every struggle everyone may have, but to just summarily say "deal with it" is so heartless..
You can always, always, plan things in a way that you're an hour ahead of schedule. And you'll be on time. Or like 30 min too early.
It's your struggle and you can deal with it in a way that's costly to you or to everyone around you.
And the trend this days seems to completely utterly ignore your symptoms, develop zero coping mechanisms, and then rant on lemmy about the cruel society.
But ... that was the point. "Telling them your boundaries" implies not accepting something you are not up to. My managers know that I am not a good manager myself. I have a lot of qualities, at being a driving force in a project is not among them. So they don't utilize me for that. Which is good.
Yes, it would be on me if I constantly tell them "sure, just let me handle it" and then not handle it. But that would be the opposite of what I wrote above.
I think this may be a misunderstanding of what they are saying.
If you think I’ve forgotten a task you asked me to do, then I probably have. Say something. Don’t sit there stewing like I forgot it on purpose.
It’s not about them constantly checking up and reminding, it’s about reacting with anger to something we have no control over.
Yes and no; you left out part of my quote. Stuff that can be put in a reminder is up to me (especially if I tell them "I'll handle it"). But if for whatever reason that's not possible and I tell them "you might have to remind me again next week" and they are fine with that, then they shouldn't be pissed if I indeed needed a reminder. That's what I meant with "I warned them".
Exactly. No idea why people have downvoted you.
Our happiness relies on being able to accept the limitations we have. If others can’t accept them that’s on them. And honestly it’s not that big a deal. I am successful and have been in the same profession for over 20 years. Everyone I work with knows about it and works with me. I also work around their limitations. That’s just part of being on a team.
Goddamn I needed to hear this
thats what i mean. this doesnt help. ritalin helps. because when i take ritalin, i can like understand what you are saying.
its not about KNOWING things, we all know what we shuould do.
Its about executing things.