Neuroblursed

A blog devoted to writing metaphors about the experiences of being neurodivergent and mentally ill.

[devizakura]

Let's talk about ADHD executive dysfunction

because many people compare it to the mental block you get trying to tell yourself to touch a hot stove and I never quite liked that analogy. It gets the main point across but ignores that touching a stove brings no benefit and not touching it is simply the survival instinct doing its job.

Let me propose a better one: it's like having to do a self-injection as a person who's horribly afraid of needles. You need to do it, you WANT to get it done because you know you'll be better off afterwards, but your body locks up and you try to convince yourself to just do it but the more you're stalling, the worse you feel and the more stressed you are about doing it, which wouldn't have become such a problem in the first place if you just did it right away. And when it's finally done, it's either because things got so bad you couldn't physically stand it or because some kind soul did it for you.

At least that's how I've experienced it, anyway.

[neuroblursed]

I want my blog to be all about neurodiversity/mental illness analogies, and this right here is a beautiful one

[neuroblursed]

About a year ago, I spent some time in a psych hospital. Around the same time, a fact I've been contemplating for a while was confirmed: I have bipolar disorder.

Ever since then, it feels like mental health providers are more cautious with me. A little more attentive. They are less likely to let me struggle through things and suffer. More likely to email me and check in. Less likely to overlook when I miss an appointment and instead call me repeatedly until they know I'm okay. More likely to change/increase my meds at the first sign of trouble.

At first, it felt like I was fragile. I was a teacup that had already been dropped, cracked, and repaired once. If they weren't careful, I'd crack again and worse.

But now I realize that I am a forest fire -- a raging inferno. I am burning, barely under control. If they take their eyes off my for a minute, I could jump the firebreak and go on a rampage, indiscriminately hurting everyone around me, not to mention myself. They have to be cautious because they know they are the firefighters protecting everyone in my orbit. They can never put the fire out completely, but if they stay vigilant enough, they can keep people safe.

[neuroblursed]

People with complex mental health profiles know that medication management is a game of Jenga. Every time you have to make a change, it's like pulling out a brick hoping it doesn't send the whole tower tumbling over. And the more meds you end up on, the riskier it becomes to make any changes. Sometimes you start making a change, but right away you can feel, "Uh oh, that brick is load bearing. Put it back put it back put it back." Other times you start poking at a brick and you're like, "Oh that ones actually kind of loose, I guess this change will be easy." And sometimes you think it's going to be okay, but you give it one last push to get it free and everything comes toppling down and you have to start from what feels like scratch.

[neuroblursed]

There's a really interesting difference between going to sleep and being sedated with anesthesia. When you sleep overnight, you still have some sense that time is passing. Even if you never wake up during the night, you have an intrinsic sense that it's been a while since you were last awake when you come to consciousness. Anesthesia is not like that. You're just out and then you're awake. It feels like no time has passed at all.

I think this is similar to the difference between regular focus and hyperfocus. When I'm just focusing on something, time is passing and I feel it passing. I can at least tell within, idk, a factor of 3? how much time has passed. But when I'm hyperfocused, it literally does not feel like time is passing at all. I blink my eyes, and I've done 6 hours of work. This also has interesting impacts on my perception of my own productivity. Sure I did 6 hours of work, but it didn't feel like much work at all, so I better do more work. As if to evaluate my productivity, I must evaluate how much I suffered.

[neuroblursed]

I'm on a medication right now (hopefully temporarily) that egregiously lowers the efficacy of my stimulants, and it's really rough trying to keep up with grad school.

Imagine that for a neurotypical person, trying to do a homework assignment is like riding a bike. It takes a little bit of effort to get going, but once you're moving you can coast for a little while. And then you start to lose momentum a little bit, but it's not too hard to get the pedals going and build it back up (certainly not as hard as when you first started) and then you can coast again.

Now take an ADHD person without their meds. The sprockets of my bike is rusty and the bearings are dented. This means that it takes a LOT more time to actually build up any speed. Oh and once I get going, I try to stop pedaling and coast for a bit and those dented bearings just kill my speed immediately. I can take exceedingly short breaks, but it's a lot of effort to get back up to speed once I do. There's no coasting time. And if I try to take reasonably sized break, the bike just stops altogether, and I have to restart from scratch.

[neuroblursed]

Okay I have concluded that I am definitely not the one driving this flesh vessel today. It's definitely the squirrel that lives in my brain that's driving.

[neuroblursed]

Sometimes taking classes as an autistic person is like the teacher presenting you with a LEGO sculpture, except you can't tell what it is because they put it together all wrong, so then you have to disassemble the whole thing and reassemble it correctly without any instructions to help you or even a clear idea of what it's meant to look like in the end and when you finally get it put together, you realize that it was actually just upside down and everyone else could see that, so they just turned it over and used it, but you had to go through all the work of rebuilding it yourself.