There’s always a voice in my head saying “no, this is all bullshit, you’re just like everybody else except you’re weak and pathetic.”

Yeah I got diagnosed with ADHD recently and I think the diagnostic helped but I still get that voice sometimes…

I don’t even think people say this necessarily out of disrespect, some of them legitimately want to help but don’t understand that I’ve tried all this stuff and none of it works for more than a couple days at best.

This is exactly my experience (the couple days thing). So far meds really help me to be able to stick to these kinds of things

because “I forget things all the time too, it’s normal.” I don’t even think people say this necessarily out of disrespect, some of them legitimately want to help but don’t understand that I’ve tried all this stuff and none of it works for more than a couple days at best.

Yeah, usually people are well-meaning but that well-meaning advice often falls completely flat unfortunately.

Society has a long way to go with its background radiation of ableism - people get still get treated poorly and looked down upon because of something like dyslexia. A lot of it comes down to less-visible disabilities (not going to go on a rant about so-called “invisible” disabilities rn…) because people assume that a person who looks “normal” has a brain that works the way a typical one would and so if you really struggle with reading or spelling then you’re just lazy or you’re not applying yourself.

Depending on who I am talking with, sometimes I will go at this very directly if I think it’s worth it. This requires a good relationship with the other person and doing it kinda leans on their goodwill but if someone just isn’t getting it, especially if they’re saying something dismissive or providing unhelpful advice, I will derail the conversation and start talking about a condition I know they have - asthma, migraines, a particular phobia. That sort of thing. I’ll inquire about it and then I’ll give them a similar sort of dismissive “Oh everyone gets headaches sometimes” response and I’ll tell them that I just take some paracetamol, stretch my neck, have a snack and a glass of water, and maybe take a little nap and 95% of the time it fixes the problem. Y’know, basically turning the tables on them except not in a malicious way.

Obviously you need to be delicate about it and you really have to make sure that you’re not being vindictive at all if you choose to do something like this because it’s a bit dicey.

But ultimately with this you want to create an opportunity for them to really connect with your experience through a deep, experiential empathy and sometimes you can do it this way. This isn’t something I do very often because it requires a lot of tact and it’s a pretty big investment of energy to navigate it so I typically don’t do it unless it’s someone I’m close to.

Once it clicks for them, that “I forget things all the time” is wildly different to “I am so forgetful that I used to wonder if I had OCD because I will return to a door two, three, sometimes even more times to check that I have locked it because I can be so forgetful that I get distracted while I’m literally checking to see if I locked the door then I’ll walk off only to stop dead in my tracks and ask myself if I actually checked that the door was locked just now because I genuinely can’t remember what I was doing 5 seconds ago” then usually it can be the starting point for much deeper mutual understanding.

“you’re just weak and pathetic”

It me.

This is a big one that deserves to be unpacked with someone who is skilled in this stuff, especially a therapist who specialises in working with neurodivergent clients or who is neurodivergent themselves.

But a lot of work can be done by recognising how much effort you put into things and how strong you are to have managed living life on hard-mode for so long and that sort of thing.

There’s stuff in there about internalised ableism with regards to “taking the easy option” and “using excuses” too - neurodivergent people and people with disability get a lot of messages about how they need to do things the hard way all the time. This is especially toxic for ADHDers and I could go on about this forever but to try and be brief about it, ADHDers have a very short battery life with regards to stuff like attention and focus and remembering things (i.e. executive function). Yes, you absolutely can devote a good chunk of brain power towards remembering when to leave the house on time and you’ll probably do well at this mostly if you really do apply yourself. But, unironically, at what cost?

If you’re blasting through all of your brain power by whiteknuckling through your day, you’re going to suffer from a serious amount of executive dysfunction and, in the longer term, you risk burnout or deepening/prolonging it when it happens.

And for what? To prove to someone who doesn’t get it that you can remember to do things without writing them down or setting alarms? Or to prove this to the unhelpful voice in your head?

Almost anyone can walk to their job, if we remove practical concerns for argument’s sake. But just because that’s something that is possible doesn’t mean that it’s practical, let alone sustainable or beneficial. Thing is, though, an allistic person doesn’t use transport to get to their job and then berate themselves for being a weak, pathetic little baby who always takes the easy option - they just do what they need to do without entertaining these thoughts at all.

I’m rambling again but I guess what I’ve been working on in myself is shifting the framing from being about “the easy option” or “a cop-out” and towards what it is that I need and what enables me to live a life that suits me better. I’ve done a lot of prior work on breaking down the conceptual distinction we have between so-called “accessibility” devices and design (which is usually just code for “disabled-person thing”) because when you really sit down and consider it, what is a remote control but an accessibility device? What is a lamp but an accessibility device? What is a car? Or a knife? and so on. Learning about the curb cut effect and identifying it in design choices has also been useful and an extension of this same sort of personal work. I think doing this has been helpful for me as a foundation for undoing my own internalised ableism.