I tried to explain a well-known but little-understood experience of adhd/add. What do you think causes this?
Reddit Topic posted in MildlyInfuriating:
"Roommate throws away dishes so he won’t have to do them (I bought all our dishes and silverware)"
I think I can give you some insight here.
They've already been "talked to" about their failure to properly WASH the dishes, and they know they are doing a bad job at keeping up with washing them again, and they probably feel like a worthless piece of shit and a failure, and sure as much as they WANT to just do the dishes to do well and not make the roommates even more angry with them, they ALREADY feel like a complete failure to their roommates, and maybe they are completely avoiding any interaction with them at this point.
So when the roommates are home, obviously they can't do the dishes then, because it will leave them exposed and vulnerable to be seen and talked to by the roommates, which is very exhausting and they do not want to have to deal with any interaction with the roommates.
So they hide away until their chance to sneak out to the kitchen to get something to eat, but they didn't get around to returning the dish once they were done with it. Either because they put it off too long, or someone came home before they could.
It takes a lot of energy to build up the motivation to wash even the one dish, especially when someone could come home at any minute and you'd be completely vulnerable and wide-out in the open for them to see you. (Some people try to make themselves as unseen, unheard, and unthought of as possible so as to not attract any anger or difficult conversations/interactions from their house mates.)
At this point, they've collected like 4 different dishes and now the odds of them getting around to washing them ALL is like 0 to none because there's just WAYYYY too many, now, and it will obviously take about 7 hours to wash them and that's just way too much for the person to try to attempt. (That's how it feels to the person.)
So whilst wrestling with the guilt, the shame, the self-loathing, and the self-disappointment, they figure "fuck it," it's a huge mountain that they have little hope of correcting, so it's best just to get the "problem" (the unwashed dishes in their room) out of sight. So they decide to just "hide them for now until they have more energy to properly deal with them, but make sure that if someone were to come into or near the room, that they wouldn't see the unwashed dishes," so they put them in dresser drawers where they think no roommate would be looking in, or under the bed, or shoved in closets.
Out of sight, out of mind, right? Their unwashed dishes problem is non-existent now, and they're no longer constantly being wracked with shame and guilt every time they glance and see their failures, the unwashed dishes.
---- Only problem is... they forget about them. They overlook them all the time throughout their day-to-day ongoings and they forget about them.
But the bugs don't. The bugs are all over the place now. It's so fucking disgusting, and they're noticing roaches and flies almost nonstop now in their room.
But that's just another problem for them, another failure to do their responsibilities and failure to be a good roommate, so they just live on with the disgusting bugs as long as they can, and do their best to ignore it. Because now they have compounded the original problem, and if they just weren't so "fucking lazy" and just washed the stupid dishes as soon as they finished with them, they would literally not be having all these problems.
But it's not that easy. If it were as easy as just doing it, they would've. It all circles back to the real root of the problem, which isn't laziness. And isn't maliciousness. It could be any number of things. Depression definitely has a huge hand in such things.
For people with ADHD and people with Aspergers, it's often a cause of Executive Function Disorder. So while they know full well that all they have to do is take the one dish out to the kitchen and take literally about 46 seconds to clean it and put it aside, they will instead sit there staring at it and contemplating it and stressing over it for hours at a time, unable to move. And though their head is screaming at them GET UP! I'm UNCOMFORTABLE IN THIS POSITION! We've BEEN IN THIS POSITION FOR 53 MINUTES, just MOVE!, they still can't physically make themselves move. Let alone do allllllllll of the extremely intensive, exhausting, and demanding steps that it would take to simply pick up the dish and bring it to the kitchen.
--- Just my thoughts on your comment. I hope it helps.
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