Learning how to manage my adhd symptoms without relying on anxiety has been so difficult even with medication actually but I think I’ve figured out that like. You’ve gotta let yourself be slow sometimes. Sprinting isn’t really a sustainable way to go through life.
It’s easier to start earlier on something when you give yourself permission to not finish it all at once and to let yourself do things in the order that makes sense for you.
Combining adhd with anxiety and a societal desire for efficiency can make you put things off because you don’t wanna do that all at once but you also wanna get it done Right Now
But it’s like. Let yourself work for 20 minutes and then take a nap and a little walk and then return to it after dinner. A little bit of slow living is fine, actually. You won’t die if you don’t finish the whole thing in one sitting.
Living with adhd doesn’t mean making yourself more like people without adhd. It means working with yourself. Letting yourself shake your hands and vibrate your knee. Looking out the window with your coffee and breathing slowly even when you have work to do. Working in the middle of the night. Putting things where you’ll remember them and not where it’s most “logical” to put them. Getting in both your overstimulation listening to ten pieces of media at once time and your blankly staring at the wall time. Learning how to account for your bad memory and planning ahead for it.
You can’t brute force your way into being neurotypical. You can’t run in a river. It’s never gonna happen. Neurotypicals are running on a gravel road. You’re not. You never will be. You can’t run. You can however build a boat and not listen to the little voice in your head that says you should be running.
I used to think that too. However it turned out that what was stopping me from coming back to it later was the stress. The evil wall that stopped me from coming back to the thing turned out to be made of stress and societal expectations. Allowing yourself time to rest and get other things done can make it easier to do things in small pieces.
And I mean actual rest. Not putting it off while stressing out the entire time about how you’re not doing it. Which is hard to achieve. I know from experience. It is possible though. You need to learn how to work with yourself and actually rest. Not sit there stressing about how much you’re not doing.
