nothing more embarassing than when you develop personal beef with a piece of media thats entirely petty. like sorry no i cant talk about that show it. bit me.
this is by far the most fun Ive ever had reading tags on a post that blew up
Cosmic Funnies

JVL
AnasAbdin

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

Kiana Khansmith
NASA

Janaina Medeiros
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Today's Document
ojovivo
will byers stan first human second

Discoholic 🪩

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Claire Keane

titsay
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

Origami Around
Game of Thrones Daily
seen from Indonesia

seen from Spain
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Germany
seen from Canada

seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from Canada

seen from China

seen from United States
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seen from T1
@adhdtoomanycommas
nothing more embarassing than when you develop personal beef with a piece of media thats entirely petty. like sorry no i cant talk about that show it. bit me.
this is by far the most fun Ive ever had reading tags on a post that blew up
I made this post before there were polls on tumblr, so I figure why not remake it as a poll now?
People with ADHD, how were you diagnosed?
self diagnosis/not professionally diagnosed yet
Cognitive Psychologist Testing/Evaluation
Neurological Testing (e.g. EEG, PET, SPECT, MRI, NEBA, etc.)
Neuropsychological Assessment
Computerized Test (e.g. TOVA, MOXO CPT, Conners’ CPT 3rd Edition, IVA CPT, QbTes
Psychiatric Evaluation (e.g. DIVA)
multiple of these, it was a process
something else (add in tags?)
it happened when I was so young, I can't even guess what method was used, no ide
I don't have adhd, I'm just curious and can't resist pressing a button sorry
please feel free to add in the tags whether you think this was a good experience or not (i.e. would you recommend this method to someone who is pursuing a diagnosis? if you were diagnosed as a child, would you recommend that method to a parent who is seeking accommodations for their kid? if it was a bad experience- what would you recommend instead or what guidance might you offer?)
I'm actually not totally sure which ones, but it was definitely more than one. I skipped some steps and went straight to a specialist, and she had me do a bunch of test things and also talked to me while I was doing them, and I suspect observing me while I was doing them, and also she made copies of the crumpled "list of reasons I suspect I have ADHD" that I gave her that had clearly been in the bottom of my purse being added to for weeks. I don't remember which test things they were though. It was only one appointment, but it was a long one. And then she was like "yeah this is super obvious, no one noticed because you're a girl and also have pretty good coping mechanisms and also anxiety which can mask it."
seen a this edible aint shit but for adderall
sharing @mumblesplash 's tags:
reblogging to cast
Mine was I went up and addressed one of the "miscellaneous" doom boxes that had been with me unsorted for like four moves, and instead of spreading everything out and getting bogged down in it and winding up making more of a mess than I started with, I actually finished sorting it. And then sorted a second one, when even partly doing one would have been a full day project normally. And it wasn't even hard. I was so pissed afterwards realizing the extent to which I'd been playing life on hard mode my whole life.
ADHD, Gifted Programs, and Accidental Accommodations
So one big thing has been on my mind pretty consistently since I got diagnosed last year at the age of 30—why did it take so long to figure this out? At no point in my K-12 education or my 4 year bachelor’s degree schooling did any teacher or counselor question or suggest I may have ADHD, despite the fact that I check nearly every single box on every diagnostic criteria (both inattentive and hyperactive!)
One obvious reason is sexism. Pretty early in my reading on the subject, I learned that ADHD is dramatically under-diagnosed in girls and women. Partly this is because of different presentations, but a lot of it is just that the stereotype people have in their heads of what an ADHD kid looks like is always a boy.
But the other big reason, and the one I want to talk about today, is the fact that one of the few ADHD diagnostic boxes that I didn’t check was “bad grades.” So really, the question is, why weren’t my grades bad?
That’s not to say I was especially good at school work. My backpacks, desks, and binders were always a complete mess, and I NEVER did the homework. I would do the big projects (at the last possible second, of course) but daily homework just straight up didn’t happen. If there was time left at the end of class I would sometimes quickly do the homework for the next day, and occasionally jot down some approximation of it in the minute or two before class started, but when I was actually at home, I never touched it.
But here’s the thing with ADHD brains: We can focus on things with no problem, as long as we find them interesting. And I’ve always read quickly enough that doing the reading for class was usually interesting. And for the most part, the class content itself usually seemed interesting enough. But probably most importantly, I consider tests interesting. There’s always been enough of a challenge racing-the-clock game-like aspect to them to me that I would stay engaged on the tests, and even if didn’t completely know the material, I was good at using logic to get a pretty good guess (like using all those tricks they teach for standardized tests—narrowing down the options on a multiple choice question, looking for answers in the other questions, etc.)
So even in the classes where turning in the daily homework counted for part of the grade (math and language classes mostly) I was usually able to scrape a B with only the occasional C thrown in, and everything else was A’s.
But part of my saving grace was the “gifted” classes. I was very lucky that, despite not knowing about her own (probable) ADHD, my mom knew enough about how she worked as a student to know that me (and my brother) really needed to be engaged and challenged in order to thrive. Because of this, she advocated for us hard—she insisted we be allowed in my elementary school’s “gifted” program in kindergarten (based on our test scores of course) even though the “gifted” program officially wasn’t even available until first grade. And when we moved to a different state, she advocated for us again and got us included even though the “gifted” class was “full.” She knew that nothing would make us fail faster than being bored in class, so she made sure that there was at least one day a week when we would be challenged and actually get to engage with material we found interesting.
Aside, despite how essential they were for me to thrive in school, the entire concept of “gifted” programs and “gifted” kids is problematic as hell. Half of the screening is basically just looking for class signifiers and seeing whose parents had enough free time to give them a head start (or whose parents have the time to advocate for their kids the way my mom did for me). Not to mention there’s likely a massive racial bias. So in all this discussion of why I did ok despite my ADHD, it’s important to note that there’s a lot of privilege at play here determining who gets access to these types of programs.
This is also why I keep putting “gifted” in quotes-- I don’t think there is anything inherent about academic ability. Also, academic ability, reading ability, testing aptitude, etc. are definitely not indicative of intelligence. Plus the entire concept of the measurability of intelligence is based on eugenics ideas, so clearly one should take the whole thing with a huge grain of salt.
Nowadays the term all the parenting blogs like to use for kids like me, with ADHD (or dyslexia, or autism, or whatever else) who also test well enough to be flagged as “gifted,” is “Twice Exceptional” which is a term that makes me immediately want to punch whoever uses it. Seriously, it makes me gag. Like, it doubles down on the “special” euphemism and seems entirely designed to make parents feel better about their kid without any consideration to how the kid feels. No kid wants to be singled out, especially one who’s already probably pretty socially isolated (which I could digress about but that’ll be another essay for another day), and being Twice singled out certainly doesn’t help anything.
But ultimately the teaching in the “gifted” class itself wound up being really good accommodations for ADHD. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they were better than the accommodations in the separate classes actually intended for kids with ADHD and other learning issues, though since I wasn’t diagnosed as I kid I can’t actually speak to that as I don’t have any experience there. But in the gifted classes, firstly, we were given more specific subjects as opposed to the overviews we got in regular classes. And it’s way easier to be engaged on specific subjects like ice age mammals, or the wreck of the Titanic, than it is to be engaged with a broad list of dates or categories. We did logic problems that were presented as games, but that were indirectly teaching us the basics for higher level math. In 6th grade, we did research projects and got to pick our own subjects completely, so we could write about whatever we were hyperfixating on at the moment (mine was on medieval warfare as depicted in the Bayeux tapestry). And if we happened to get excited and blurt out an interesting fact vaguely related to whatever was being discussed, that was likely encouraged instead of reprimanded like it would be in the normal classroom. This continued into high school, as honors and AP level classes tended to be a lot more discussion based rather than the top-down approach at other levels, as well as affording more opportunity to choose one’s own subjects.
The story you’ll hear from (or about) a lot of ADHD kids (especially undiagnosed) flagged as “gifted” is of hitting a wall at some point, academically speaking. That did happen to me briefly, in middle school. We started being assigned a lot more long-term projects, and there was a bit of a learning curve while I figured out how to put things off Until the last minute and not Past the last minute. But thanks to some patient teachers who believed in me (which I might not have had outside of honors classes), I managed to pull out of it and improve my grades (with the exception of the only report-card F of my entire academic career, from a sadistic gym teacher who seemed to think that enough berating would cure asthma).
Even more stories I’ve read and heard from people who were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult say they hit that wall academically when they started college—the first time they were really self-guided in their studies. But again, there, I was saved by an honors program. In this case, it was the Honors Tutorial College, a truly strange program at Ohio University. I was tracked into HTC by one particular professor who very much wanted HTC to expand into the art program and decided that because I had both strong test scores and a strong art portfolio (and probably, lets be real, because I was the daughter of one of the other professors) that I was the perfect person to be the first student in the new program.
OU’s website describes HTC as “flexible curriculum and one-on-one tutorials with renowned faculty that allow your curiosity to take the lead in your education.” It’s rigorous, but comes with a lot of perks, like waiving certain gen-ed classes, being able to take classes without first taking the required prerequisites, and designing one’s own independent study classes individually with instructors. And those perks are (as far as I know entirely accidentally) the perfect accommodations for an ADHD student (and probably pretty good for Autistic ones as well, based on some of my peers in the program).
A lot of the gen-ed classes I waived were ones I probably would have been bored in and thusly not done well. Being able to skip pre-reqs meant that, for instance, for my English requirements I was able to take far more interesting classes like Shakespeare’s Comedies, YA Lit, and Playwriting instead of English 101, 102 etc. If I wanted to learn about something in particular, I had help finding a professor willing to help me in an independent study/tutorial class. Being the pilot of the program meant I was able to shape it so that I could get an art degree without ever having to choose one medium (which as far as I know is still an option for anyone pursuing an HTC Studio Art degree). And at the end of the program, when we were required to complete a massive thesis project and paper (at basically graduate level), not only could I choose my subject to meet my hyperfixations, but I had individual help from a professor keeping me on task on the less-fun parts at every step of the way.
HTC students are required to keep their GPAs above a high threshold. At one point one of my grades (in Latin class) was low enough to hurt my average, and I was called into HTC headquarters for a check-in meeting. I was asked why my grade had fallen, and I explained that the class wasn’t that interesting (at that level it was mostly grammar) but that it was getting better as we were moving up into translating more actual historical material. That explanation was entirely accepted. Imagine if “it’s not interesting enough” was considered a valid excuse for grades slipping for everyone, how much less stressful school would be for ADHD kids!
So ultimately it’s pretty much been having the luck and privilege to get myself flagged for “gifted” classes that kept my grades up throughout my school years. Accidental accommodations have continued into my adult life as well. At my most recent office job, for instance (which I lost due to covid layoffs), I had a pretty hands-off boss who just didn’t care if I doodled, got up to stretch my legs every once in a while, and listened to audiobooks at my desk all day as long as the work got done.
I didn’t need a diagnosis to get these accommodations, because they were given freely, which meant I was able to succeed even without knowing about my own ADHD. If I had been diagnosed, and had had to ask for accommodations, I wonder if I would have done as well as bias against people with ADHD means people wouldn’t have expected as much from me.
So if you’ve made it this far, I’ll ask for the same for others that I got for myself. If you are a teacher (or a manager in an office setting), I strongly encourage you to consider how to make your classroom, office, etc. more accessible in general, without someone having to disclose a diagnosis or be singled out for accommodations. The biggest easiest one you can do is to allow (or even encourage) doodling in lecture settings. Even for neurotypicals, there have been plenty of studies proving people retain information better when doodling, so everyone should know by now that someone doodling doesn’t mean they’re not listening. If at all possible, encourage discussion and contribution. Give everyone breaks to stretch and move around. And give as much freedom as possible on what to learn about. You might be surprised what people are capable of when these reasonable steps are taken to give everyone room to thrive.
That’s all for now, hopefully you got something out of this unwieldy ramble. I’d be curious to hear if you’ve run into any accidental accommodations in your life and how they’ve helped. Until next time!
Emotional Disregulation, Privilege, and White Girl Tears
Hello all, it has been a few months since my last ADHD essay, and what a few months it has been. In case you’re reading this in the future (since tumblr has no date stamps), I am writing this in June 2020 when in the midst of a global pandemic, police are responding to massive protests against police violence with even more police violence, and a lot of white people are thinking more than ever about the privilege we have experienced. I have been thinking about writing about my (cis white female) experience with privilege where neurodivergence, race, and gender intersect for a while, and have hit the point where these ideas have been bouncing around in my head long enough I need to write them down.
Small disclaimer: Right now I'm not sure if I should be writing anything about anything since we all ought to be listening and amplifying black voices --I'm there are much better resources out there about race and neurodivergance especially, and I have no intention of talking over anyone, especially given my limited experience. But given that the audience for my last essay here was in the single digits, I doubt I need to worry too much about talking over people at the moment. Please know that I am writing this now primarily for myself, and if it ever gets an audience later, forgive me for writing it now when there are so many more important things going on and more important people to listen to.
I will do my best to stay in my lane here, so I'm just going to talk about how my privilege has affected the perception of one of my ADHD symptoms If you don't want to read some rambling white/cis anecdotes about how white privilege and gender norms affect the perception of ADHD, by all means skip it. If you're still here, maybe it can be the start of a conversation as I would love to hear some other perspectives and experiences here. And maybe, just maybe by the end of it I will learn to spell privilege right on the first try (I really want there to be an A in there, or maybe a D. Privaledge? Sounds about right.)
As I mentioned in my previous ramble, I’m a cryer. I cry a lot, not just when I’m sad but sometimes when I’m happy, when I feel guilty or ashamed, and especially when I’m angry, or frustrated, or overwhelmed. I learned recently, as I was seeking my diagnosis, that emotional disregulation is a hallmark of ADHD. We feel things strongly, and uncontrollably and have trouble restraining ourselves from expressing those feelings. This is experienced by almost everyone, if not everyone, with ADHD and it’s only not part of the diagnostic criteria because it’s hard to quantify—there are a lot of good general resources out there to learn more about this, I’m not an expert, I’m just here to share my own experience.
Story time. When I was in fourth grade, I punched another girl in the stomach. For what felt like the millionth time, when the teacher told everyone to find a partner for some activity, everyone partnered up and I looked around to find that I was the left-over. I was an outcast for a lot of reasons at that age. I told myself for a long time it was solely because I was the lone atheist (actually agnostic but I didn’t know the term at the time) in a deep south bible-belt school, but with the benefit of hindsight I have also realized that (partially probably due to the ADHD) I was also pretty weird, and probably very annoying. But whatever the reason for my ostracism, it was already weighing heavily on me when the teacher assigned this girl to work with me, and she gave me the biggest exasperated sigh and eyeroll like she would rather do anything else. So I punched her.
I now realize that this is probably a pretty normal response for a kid with untreated ADHD—the combination of emotional disregulation and poor impulse control means we often lash out. But with none of the adults in my life knowing that at the time, surely I was disciplined for my seemingly-random violent action, yes? No. I cried, and I got away with it.
That’s not the whole story, I did get several weeks of sessions with the school counselor, and I was made to write a very thorough apology letter (and made to rewrite it repeatedly as the teacher thought of more things I should add and repeatedly declared my handwriting not good enough, to such an extent the exercise definitely felt more punitive than reconsiliatory), but I ultimately I didn’t get expelled, I didn’t get suspended, I didn’t even get detention.
The girl I punched was black. This wouldn’t be relevant to the story at all, except that in retrospect I have to wonder if the consequences would have been the same if our roles were reversed. If a black girl (even a neurodivergent, ostracized, and frequently bullied one) had lashed out the way I did and punched a white girl, I expect there would have been a lot more consequences for that, even if she cried afterwards. And if a black boy had done the same, he wouldn’t have been perceived as troubled and in need of help, he would have been perceived as dangerous. And as we all (hopefully) know by now, that perception can have life or death consequences.
I’m sure that was neither the first nor the last time that crying, and people’s perception of me crying (as a cute little white girl with freckles and big brown eyes) has gotten me out of trouble, or gotten me what I wanted one way or another, but it is the most dramatic example I can think of. I want to emphasize that I have never cried to get what I wanted on purpose—I have spent way more time trying not to cry than trying to cry, the only time I’ve ever cried on purpose has been in theater exercises. But I’m sure a lot of white girls in the same position I was in (with or without the undiagnosed ADHD and emotional disregulation) have realized the way they could use peoples responses to their tears to their advantage. They probably grow up to be Karens who use their tears to get out of traffic tickets, get free stuff from store managers, and to sic violent police on black people who inconvenience them. (Aside, the only time I have been pulled over as an adult, I was trying so hard not to cry that the cop thought I was acting suspicious and asked a bunch of extra questions. I still got the ticket.
I tell myself that those people use their emotions on purpose to manipulate people, that I'm different, I would never do that. But I have to wonder if some of those same women tell themselves the same thing after the fact. I don't think it's enough to avoid intentional manipulation and intentional harm-- not anymore. We as white women need to do be conscious enough of how our emotions are perceived and prioritized to act proactively to avoid unintentional harm as well. For those of us with ADHD, this may be harder than for neurotypicals, but that makes it all the more important for us to think actively about this. I'm not sure yet what this means for me personally, besides removing myself from a shared space if my emotions threaten to become the focus where they shouldn't be, but I would welcome input on this.
I want to talk about gender more generally here as well. ADHD is dramatically underdiagnosed in women, and I have to wonder if some part of this is because emotional disregulation lines up so nicely with the stereotypes of women’s emotions in the first place. Oh, you cry a lot? Of course you do, you’re a woman. One can only wonder how many oldey-timey diagnoses of “hysteria” were actually ADHD. Even now women with ADHD are usually misdiagnosed several times with things like depression or bipolar disorder before we are tested and diagnosed properly. This wasn’t my experience, but after basically doing a bunch of research and self-diagnosing I was able (thanks to a great deal of economic privilege) to pay to go directly to an ADHD specialist. I also walked into that office with an extremely thorough bullet-point list I had compiled of reasons I suspected I had ADHD—it was probably the easiest diagnosis the doctor ever did. So obviously having ADHD while female isn’t the best combination, but when it comes specifically to crying easily that being treated as relatively normal definitely meant I had an easier time with it than my brother did.
My brother (who is nonbinary and uses a variety of pronouns—I’ll probably alternate between they/them and he/him here because it is important to the story that they were perceived as male at the time) cries just as easily as I do, and just as often. When we were little kids, this didn’t make too much of a difference. They’re a couple years younger than me, and little kids are expected to cry more. They haven’t been diagnosed with ADHD, but they and I both strongly suspect for a variety of reasons, this included, that they have it too—I believe they were flagged for it in school, probably for frequently talking out of turn, but I don’t think they were ever tested formally. He got in trouble in school a lot more than I did, for similar outbursts, and while he got quite a few of those same counseling sessions (white privilege at work again), he got more actual discipline as well. But the perception of our tears landed differently, especially as we got older.
For the most part, the scorn leveled at my brother’s tears didn’t come from our parents. My mom, (who, while also not officially diagnosed, I can almost guarantee is where we got the ADHD genes from) cries as easily as they and I do, so she understands it. My dad would certainly prefer to think of himself as an enlightened modern man who would say it’s ok to cry, but he has his share of ingrained toxic masculinity despite himself. I don’t think I ever saw him tell my brother directly to “suck it up” or “act like a man,” but I do think after puberty or so he started responding to my brother’s tears with a sort of exasperation that he never directed at me.
The real difference was in how we were treated by our peers. By the time we got to high school, if I would cry at school, my peers (even ones who weren’t necessarily my friends) would probably ask what was wrong and try to help or provide comfort, or at least would leave me alone and give me time to pull myself together. When my brother cried at school, he was mocked. Relentlessly. Once bullies figured out that he cried easily, he was targeted and goaded specifically for it. They would find any little thing they could to get under his skin (right down to the most childish with rhyming nicknames) and troll him for fun. I wish I could say that I stood up for him, but I never did. I can tell myself this was because I didn’t see it happen in person, being two grades ahead, but I could have made an effort. Although, since he was almost certainly targeted at least in part for perceived failure to live up to masculine gender norms, I’m not sure if having an older sister try to come to the rescue would have helped or made things worse. At this point it’s years past, so I suppose speculation on what I could have or should have done is pretty moot at this point. Suffice it to say, this particular symptom which rarely did me any harm made my brother’s life a lot harder.
I may talk more about different perceptions of my brother’s and my ADHD symptoms in a later essay/ramble/entry/whatever, in particular how it affected out academic performances, but that’s for another time.
Again, I’m not sure if there are any greater conclusions here. There are a lot of ways emotional disregulation can present, and I really only addressed this one small aspect of excessive crying, but it is a good example of how even lesser-known ADHD symptoms can affect our lives in cascading ways, and the way people perceive those symptoms (due to various more visible identity factors) affects us as well. If you read all of this, thanks, and if you have any experiences you’d like to share with how your emotional disregulation has been perceived by others, I’d love to hear them. Until next time!
Emotional Abuse and ADHD
Ok, first real post on the ADHD sideblog, so lets dive straight into the heavy stuff. TW/CW for emotional abuse, gaslighting, and probably some other things too (please feel free to let me know if I should add additional tags).
I had trouble sleeping last night because my brain kept insisting I needed to start this blog, like immediately, despite it being clearly not an opportune time to do anything of the sort. Or at least, it insisted, I needed to jot down all the essay/ramble/whatever topic ideas I had complicated thoughts on so I could start the blog today. I managed to resist doing both of those things, and get to sleep eventually, but here I am. The first topic that brought this on was wanting to talk about my experience in an emotionally abusive relationship and how many aspects of that were exacerbated by various symptoms of my (then undiagnosed) ADHD.
I’m going to assume a certain amount of baseline familiarity with some terminology and whatnot here, if you’re confused by any of the ADHD terms I use here I recommend heading over to theadhdmanual.com and reading their very helpful “three pillars” articles which do a great job of explaining Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and emotional hyperarrousal (also elsewhere called emotional disregulation, I’ll be using both terms interchangably but won’t be abbreviating the latter for hopefully obvious reasons). On the emotional abuse terminology front, there’s a couple great articles on gaslighting on everydayfeminism.com that I recommend seeking out.
It is possible I am slightly stalling here by providing all this context.
At this point damn near ten years ago, for most of my senior year of college and for a good few months afterwards (I don’t remember how long exactly since adhd brains suck at timelines and I don’t feel like logicing it out right now) I was in what I later realized (with help from the aforementioned everydayfeminism articles) was an emotionally abusive relationship. My then-boyfriend, who I will call Al, was insecure and jealous. I had more sexual experience than him going into the relationship, and he used that as an excuse to guilt-trip, manipulate, and ultimately control me. I realize now, that the primary weapon he would use against me was my own RSD.
Whenever I did something that upset Al, (typical infractions included things like accidentally mentioning one of my exes, correcting him about something, “flirting with” --read: talking to-- any of my friends who were more my friend than his, or singing along to music) he would generally make his displeasure known by ignoring me--withdrawing all physical affection, coupled with the silent treatment. If you’re familiar with RSD, you can already guess how effective this was. If you’re not, then for comparison you should know that ADHD people can spiral very quickly into completely irrational “they hate me, don’t they?” thought spiral from something as small as a delayed text. Al would almost never tell me what I did to upset him, and in my guilt-spiral I would usually tearfully beg forgiveness for everything I could think of until I guessed correctly and/or he arbitrarily decided I’d had enough.
As an aside, he would often do this silent treatment toward me in public while being perfectly cheerful and whatnot with our other friends, often making it seem to others like he was just joking or messing with me. On one memorable occasion he refused to say anything to me but the word “spoon” with varying inflections for the better part of a day--a pretty skillful gaslight because to everyone else around this just seemed like goofy ol’ Al being his silly self, but from context I knew this was part of a punishment, and I couldn’t express any kind of being upset about this, even annoyance, without looking like I was overreacting to a dumb joke.
Ultimately much of what he actually did (or didn’t do) in public didn’t look like much to an outside observer, but he knew my (RSD fueled) insecurity would make it hurt, especially when I wouldn’t be able to address anything with him until we were in private later.
Also (and I intend to write a whole different post about this later) my particular brand of emotional disregulation takes the form of crying extremely easily. I cry when I’m sad, when I’m tired, when I’m happy, when I see something too cute to handle, and (most importantly, in this instance) when I’m angry. Because of this, every time I tried to address some relationship concern I had with him, whenever I tried to call out some of his shitty behavior or bring attention to my own emotional needs, it was extremely difficult--nigh impossible--to do so without crying. This gave him a massive amount of gaslighting ammunition--it made it very easy for him to say I was overreacting, overemotional, irrational, trying to manipulate him, et cetera. And it was hard to defend myself against that, even to myself. After all, lacking the ADHD diagnosis and resources about emotional disregulation that I have now, I had pretty much internalized the idea that I’m just “oversensitive” when it comes to crying, so I rationalized that I was also being oversensitive about whatever concern I started with in the first place. So every time a conversation started with me telling him he hurt me some way, it inevitably ended with me apologizing to him instead of the other way around.
Just to add to the already nasty cycle, Al also considered crying over something he didn’t deem worth crying over a punishable offense, so it often triggered the previously discussed silent treatment.
A third aspect of ADHD I haven’t discussed yet also played a major part in how I was abused--Memory. I don’t have a good resource to link on this one (I’m pretty sure there are some good howtoadhd videos on it on youtube but I’m not going to go dig for them right now), but ADHD people, on the whole, have terrible memories, especially short term/working memory. Mine in particular might be even worse for some kinds of things for unrelated reasons (aphantasia, which I might write about later but this is already really long and it’s not actually that relevant here).
Al was perpetually convinced that I was cheating on him, and any time we were apart he would quiz me afterwards on where exactly I was, what I did, for how long, and in what order. Any inconsistency in my account, or any “I don’t remember”s would mean he would accuse me of lying about the whole thing. I am pretty sure I have in common with most ADHD people that between time blindness and bad working memories, giving a consistent and accurate account like that is basically impossible, so this rarely went well for me. Just to further complicate matters, being accused of lying when I’m not is practically guaranteed to make me cry, and trying to keep from crying (to avoid angering him further) means I swallow a lot, and somewhere Al had heard that excessive swallowing is a sign that someone is lying, so again these various ADHD symptoms would combine to just make everything worse.
I eventually got out of that relationship, and not too long afterwards got together with my now-husband, who is wonderful, so that’s a happy ending. Getting diagnosed with ADHD a few months ago, learning about these symptoms, and figuring all this out has made this make much more sense to me than before. But in addition to my ADHD symptoms making me more vulnerable to these emotional abuse tactics, I’m pretty sure the leftover baggage from the emotional abuse may have made those very same ADHD symptoms worse, and while my new meds seem to help immensely with the executive disfunction aspects of ADHD, they don’t do a damn thing about RSD spirals or emotional disregulation. Healing and processing it all is slow going, but it has gotten a lot better over the years, and knowing now that even another aspect of this isn’t my fault helps too. And taking my meds today did help me motivate myself to write all this out, so maybe that will help as well.
I’m not sure what the takeaway is here, other than I strongly suggest everyone learn what gaslighting and emotional abuse in general looks like, but especially if you have ADHD or suspect you might have ADHD because we might be more vulnerable to being on the receiving end of it than most people. If anything I talked about here sounds a little too familiar, I strongly recommend reading up on gaslighting, and consider getting the heck away from anyone who sounds too much like Al. Maybe us ADHDers will inevitably get into some nasty thought-spirals or bad emotional places sometimes, maybe we’ll cry over nothing or worry too much that something we said will make everyone hate us, but if anyone tries to use any of that against you, uses it to get you to do what they want, or intentionally makes you feel worse, they’re not someone worth being around, and I promise you deserve better.
Not sure if anyone will read this, much less any fellow ADHDers because yeah, it’s a big ol’ wall of text and I get that can be hard, but if you made it this far, thanks for listening and I’ll try to go not quite so heavy with my next post, (assuming, of course, that I have a next post and this blog doesn’t become yet another started-and-abandoned project).
That’s all for now.
Jello! I’m feeling a bit lonely and could use some ADHD Artist representation!
Hello! I just got diagnosed with ADHD literally yesterday. It's partially thanks to @adhd-alien and the Tumblr ADHD community at large that I learned more about it and realized I should probably get tested, so thanks everyone!
I've been an artist my whole life, but have never been able to pick a medium, so I combine all kinds of things that all add up to one big cabinet of curiosities themed body of work. Right now I'm on a relief print kick, that's one of the mediums that I keep coming back to and consistently combine with everything else.
I don't talk about myself on here much (I pretty much just post my art) but I'm 30, I live in Ohio, and I have a boring office job that lets me listen to audiobooks all day (so I go through a ton of those, Overdrive/Libby rules, thanks public library!). Besides visual art, I also play d&d, play the ukulele (poorly), and occasionally get really into a videogame for like a few weeks and then forget all about it.
So, yeah, hi! Feel free to send asks or messages about my art, getting diagnosed at 30, or whatever. Looking forward to meeting some fellow artists and learning more about our brains together!
Hello all, I figured I’d start by reblogging the ADHD intro I already wrote on my main, KatarinaNavane. I’m starting this sideblog because I basically only post my artwork there, and I wanted to have somewhere to write up some of my experiences getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. There have been a lot of things about myself that have become clear since diagnosis, and I figured at least some of it might be worth writing down, and might even be interesting to other people who might be in a similar boat. I haven’t done much writing since college, and have every intention of writing informally, so you can expect some rambling, run-on sentences, featuring excessive parentheses, em-dashes, and yes, (per the name) too many commas.