Here’s a story for the ‘kids with #adhd tend to have social struggles due to NOT paying attention to social cues’ file (@AuthorCarolineM you’re going to love this one).
In the early 90s I was invited to my friend Gillian’s birthday. We were 9, maybe 10.
My mom took me to the mall to get her a gift. At the time I thought my big brother was just about the coolest guy in the world (he’s 7 years older than me) and that everything he liked was the best, and at that time he was really into rap and hip hop.
I had seen this @SnoopDogg cassette tape he had, and it had a little cartoon comic inside, so naturally that is what I got her. I guess my mom just… didn’t check or look at it? Because this was the comic:
(I especially remember thinking that the part with dog farting was really funny)
So anyway there I am giving my gift to my friend and I remember being like “there’s a comic inside too!” And proudly showing this group of 9 year old girls from Burns Lake, BC this snoop doggy comic with a lot of swearing and sex and drug references 😂
I actually remember that a lot of kid’s parents said I couldn’t come over, like I wasn’t allowed at the houses of SEVERAL other kids and I lived in a tiny community and now I’m going to wonder forever if this is part of why 😂😂😂😂
But also like how cool was I actually? What other 9 year olds in Burns Lake in the pre-internet-is-common age knew about Snoop Dogg? I was just ahead of the curve, I think!
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Good morning! Here’s your Mon morning #ADHD basics thread:
ADHD causes an inability to “feel” time. It is said that people with ADHD have a short “time horizon”; that we can’t see very far into the future. Since we struggle both to measure time (as in, how long something takes)
And to feel the future, it can complicate a lot of things. Some examples:
- chronic lateness due to not knowing how long things actually take (like getting ready, driving somewhere etc)
- overbooking /busying oneself due to not being able to accurately judge how much time things will take up in the schedule
- not being able to work consistently toward a goal because it feels too far away and it’s in the “not-now”
I think one thing people forget about #ADHD is that it creates a variable capacity. People don't understand how someone can be so high-performing and then the next time, forget something completely basic and important or make a really careless mistake.
This also has ramifications for the person WITH ADHD... imagine thinking "i've got this! I've done this before!" and then goofing up big time in a way that is frankly embarrassing and just... not being able to explain how that happened 🤷♀️
In a sense you know; you can look back and realize, "I was distracted", "I wasn't paying attention" etc... but it seems infathomable. To have a variable capacity costs us our relationship with ourselves because adults with ADHD come to mistrust their own capacity.
this is an important thread and also can we use it as a jumping off point to compile a list of accessible resources/tools for people who face financial barriers?
Focusmate - offers up to 3 free body doubling sessions a month and then is only $5/month membership afterwards. Body doubling is, IMHO the *GOLD STANDARD* of productivity support for the Thing I Can't Make Myself Sit Down And Do
so I see a lot of people talking about struggling with exercise with #ADHD and I just wanted to talk a little bit about what has worked for me in cultivating a habit around physical movement:
keep in mind that all ADHDers are different so what works for me may not work for you, but I definitely was a person who, for many years, struggled to find ways of moving my body and getting exercise that felt enjoyable and sustainable and not like TOTAL DEATH
the first thing I had to acknowledge was that I was in a neverending cycle of body shame or guilt> frantically decide to start a new habit of being "fit" > immediately try to do too much (like working out 5 days or working out for an hour) >
to add another layer; tiktok is a fucked up platform where A LOT of ppl are presenting themselves as educators or speaking like experts when they're just people. Anybody's tiktok can go viral and it's a heady feeling.
so on the one hand you've got these discussions around self-diagnosis being a valid thing, which it is. But on the other hand you've got people self-diagnosing as autistic now speaking on TikTok, wanting to educate others about autism when they themselves are quite new to it
and that can be really frustrating for the more ... how do I say this? 'established' autistic creators? Again; not to undermine the importance of self-diagnosis - its really important to recognize the systemic barriers that prevent people, esp women and BIPOC folks from accessing