Mine made me capable of surviving almost anything. Which is terrible. But you can spin that, for your resume.

Nice, but rather than “self-reflected,” maybe this: “I’m capable of profound reflection and critical analysis.”

“I’m good at following the footsteps of former presidents”

Edit: lolshit wall of text about ADHD of all things. Sorry!

Attention DEFICIT is a misleading term. It’s more an issue of not being able to willingly direct your attention.

That’s why ADHD brains hyperfixate on something and we’re are unable to switch to something else, even though we KNOW we should/want to/have to do the other thing - we can’t direct our attention away from the thing our brains are hyperfixating on.

What sometimes looks like rapid “task switching” is again the inability to direct our attention so it flips around uncontrolled.

This also often leads to a weird state of paralysis where we’re doing absolutely fuck all because we can’t activate our attention properly but we’re yelling at ourselves on the inside to DO THE FUCKING THING YOU FUCKING LAZY SHIT.

For ADHD brains to be able to consciously, actively direct attention, there needs to be some immediate reward. It can’t be some vague reward that might come in the future, like “you won’t have back pain when your old (so exercise!)”. That doesn’t work.

For me (and others, I hear), it’s often the thought that others are depending on me doing The Thing. That’s why I was absolutely insanely good at organising shit in my last job - my coworkers depended on me having prepared all kinds of data. Without this reward, I am completely useless at organising stuff.

Unless it’s interesting, of course, which is again an immediate reward.

Does this sound in any way like you?

Edit: and did you have trouble directing your attention to get through this text? :D

I felt this way too before I saw a doctor. I would see posts online about it and relate to them, but I knew social media posts can be inaccurate. I knew that that type of thing targets very generic symptoms to attract more interactions.

I thought everyone was tired and stressed like I can be. I spent a lot of time thinking I was lazy or not good enough because I couldn’t get stuff done that seemed easy for other people.

It wasn’t until my partner suggested I talk to my doctor about it because he saw signs.

Honestly, the best thing you can do is talk to a doctor if you feel like symptoms are disrupting your ability to function. If you’re doing fine, you might not need it! But the best thing I ever did was talk to my doctor about this, anxiety, and a potential sleep related disorder (I’m still working on the latter).

Just keep in mind each person is impacted differently. Symptoms aren’t one size fits all, and even NTs get some relatable symptoms occasionally.

It’s because ADHD despite it’s name is not a deficit of attention, but the inability to control it. That may be that you change focus all the time but also that you can’t take your focus from something even if you should.

“Won’t someone think of the people that are destroying our society?”

Not all mental illnesses are high-functioning autism-style quirkiness, things that need help, many of which makes people more of victims of violence than the perpetrators of them. Sure, you can say that e.g. the Cybertruck bomber was abused by the MAGA cult, but that won’t change the facts. All this does is downplay the abuse these people can do if they’re at the wrong place.

We can call out the abuses of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, without taking away their mental health card. They were very close to two pedophile rings, and pedophilia is among the few paraphilias that psychology tries its best to correct due to the harm these people can cause to real children. They’re also narcissists, and likely also psychopaths.

Tgis is what gets called out, and not equating disabilities with illness?

You treat an illness. It’s something you try to eliminate. A disability isn’t something that has a cure, and often needs accomodations rather than treatment.

Americans like to pretend the only country that matters is them

Hear! Hear!

(from NZ)

If the word ‘Republican’ were omitted, that comment could be applicable in most countries on the planet.

It’s kind of nitpicking anyway, don’t you think? Almost as nitpicky as pointing out when the country of the United States is referred to by the name of the continent it shares with other nations.