ADHD is a serious dysfunction of aspects of the brain that are invisible and taken for granted when they're working properly, and it brings out people's ignorance.
Normal people quite literally cannot possibly fathom the dysfunction, because not only is it as foreign to many as the concept of only breathing manually, to acknowledge it completely clinically as an actual incapacity to do certain things (not a specific activity, but things the brain does such as task-sequencing) shatters the ego for everyone involved. It's humbling.
It would mean (it DOES mean) that the things people take for granted, such as "just doing it", managing time, long-term planning, the coherence between their intent and action, handling social responsibilities, hygiene, sensory processing, and a myriad other things the brain develops to do automatically, are actually something their brain is carrying them through without their input and are liable to fail. They're not an inherent part of their experience, and there is no morality assigned to it. It's not a personal accomplishment, simply having functional enough areas of the brain responsible for those things.
They would have to ask themselves what it really means to function as a person, what the extent of their will is, and what parts of their experience are something they did not have guaranteed in the same way it's not guaranteed to be born with all your limbs or faculties. They would no longer be able to take pride in simply being able to "plan ahead", or "motivating themselves", because it's far more fragile than they think, and in a world that already loves to glorify pushing that to extremes for no reason other than to prove your worth, that's a dangerous thing.
And from the people with the condition, it can actually so demoralizing to live that you can end up believing them against all odds. You can end up in protective denial about its impact because it feels like you should be able to do something if you understand the impairment. It feels cruel to live side by side the ruins of your own mind; that goes for all serious mental disorders. You're capable of understanding it theoretically. But that is not how the brain works. We know that. Knowledge is not execution.
But it's a pill you practically have to swallow with your medication (if you take it) at some point.
In my case, I pretty much cannot deal with normal interfaces as designed, not even icons, because my ability to navigate file explorer and even retrieve what task corresponds to what program or where, is impaired. This drives me up the wall sometimes if I stop to think about it for one second. Why? Why is it like that? I understand it. I can, with trouble and energy costs, peel the tasks enough to understand each component. But together? It doesn't happen. I get it. I know what that icon is, in theory, I know what this relates to, in theory, but no matter how much I try, it's like feeling sparks fly the moment my attention tries to center itself, the moment I actually try to make an effort to use that information, it's like everything disappears.
I can't even study very well. Unmedicated, barely at all. Studying requires a lot of complex operations and connections between thoughts and ideas that I don't have. It's far too cognitively demanding. I also can brute force some logic, but frequently have issues and make errors in basic arithmetic operations because my brain can barely retain the numbers consistently enough (sometimes, it even seems to fail at understanding the problem and I will add when I'm supposed to be subtracting)
The worst part is that I'm severely disabled in a way that runs the risk of seeming exaggerated, because of the disparity between aspects of my functionality. People think that if your brain is gifted in certain areas, it must translate into performance. My verbal intellect and meta-cognition juxtaposed against the reality of my condition make me look like a really bad joke.
(I love many puzzle games, for instance, because there is no rush. There is no demand to finish on time, and nothing to "do". The only win condition is eventually breaking through the logic, no matter how long it takes, or how many hours total you sit there staring at the screen, it's even the point. I also enjoy games with abnormal controls, because, crazy as it sounds, I feel compelled to obsess over them when I can, and my many years sporadically painting have given me some finesse there. Nothing comes particularly automatic for me in real life, so struggling through bizarre controls feels normal. I often compare my unmedicated baseline to Manual Samuel, in terms of how it feels.)
It is so bad that people who first come across my supports first think that I am crazy, that I am over-complicating my existence, because they truly don't understand. They think that if I am intelligent enough to come up with this, I should be able to do without it. That the years and effort I've spent coming up with specific aids for my dysfunctional brain, the way I've practically built a functional layer over my PC to avoid using my stuff like a normal person, the numerous alarms and little tricks over tricks are just being fastidious. They don't understand that I quite literally cannot live without these things without collapse.
You pull on a thread, unravel it, and you immediately realize what it was for. Messages are guaranteed to never go answered, friends will be forgotten, hygiene will fail, I won't eat well enough, I will literally wet myself on numerous occasions, I will forget what I was just doing, and tasks being completed, in the grand scheme of things, is practically the least of my problems. Forget about "long-term goals", which for me can mean this week at best, and a year, as a nebulous abstract concept. I can barely find energy for my hobbies unmedicated, with what cognitive battery am I supposed to plan that far ahead?
Even medicated, my ability to function is "lower" than average because a lot of my most complex and cognitively demanding brain function is being used to perform calculations such as "What's the best and least exhausting route to complete my grand total of less than ten tasks today?" But it's the only thing in my entirely life that has made me able to work on projects and also play videogames the same day. It's the only thing that gives me an actually satisfying quality of life. The only relief. Unmedicated, I many times can't even have the videogames.
But of course, tell me to drop my systems. Tell me I'm just messing around.
You can't afford to mess around when the stakes are your entire life.
They don't understand that the bars I built are the only thing that gives me freedom. I can never do without them. I can never in my life do without certain kinds of serious external support because my brain is incapable of doing these things internally and there's no cure for that. Maybe it's also uncomfortable to see, like a normal person seeing a heart beat outside a chest because they were born without one/a deficient one.
I intentionally put my restroom alarms on display. I intend to feel no shame. I fully intend on that, on individual courage, on acceptance.
But I will not deny, that for all my resilience, there are some days where I look at everything I've built and I cry. Where I just want to take it all off and throw it away and pretend for one moment I'm going to be okay without it, like I've tried before, over and over, impulsively, with negative consequences. Just one day where I could trust my brain completely on the fly.
I desperately wish I got one day where I didn't have to think about everything. Because even without a project to work on, even without "focus" tasks or "work", my life is already dominated by my disorder from the moment I wake up to the time I finally manage to shut my eyes, nothing is ever a habit or routine, and it would be fun not to need alarms for basic animal needs and a task list that didn't have descriptions for every single detail, including where it takes place, because the mere act of retrieving where it takes place is hard, and it's also vital to my energy that I don't constantly go back and forth between rooms and places and get tired even faster.
It's funny. I do like organization, but I'd love to know what it feels like to have a messy PC desktop and somehow get by. What it's like to read the words "check email" and everything just coming together, the program, the action, the exact set of instructions.
Why do all Vox ship names start with static? Who made it official? It gets boring. It's useful for recognition's sake but it's really boring. That's the thing, I recognize the effort! I know it's good for fandom's sake, you can usually tell at a glance what's what, but I am a creature of novelty!
Anyway my name for Sera x Vox is technophim or sharkphim. phim being the latter half of seraphim but also meaning film which is delightfully redundant, and the second one almost sounds like shark fin, though it almost sounds like i'm shipping sera with shok.wav which is hilarious. I could also go for Serox if we're using the mish mash method.
...what, who's gonna stop me? who else is out here in the trenches shippin' this? like one other person?
i'm still probably going to steal staticseraph from someone else just in case tho. for recognition's sake. for the b r a n d. I refuse to use... staticbird. get that out of here i'm sorry I do think seraph is a good and straightforward "code" to use for Sera. Too many bird characters.
I think one of the most subtle ways women in fiction are actually made less interesting and less varied is by having them almost always be the "uptight"/"reasonable"/"level headed one", or by having the person in the group who is like this always be a woman. Doubly worse if multiple women in the group are like this. Katara from ATLA at the very least is eventually counterbalanced by the existence of Toph, who is unapologetically NOT this (besides the show just having good writing in general of course, it still is an example)
I call it subtle because sometimes it reads like a "good thing". It's like "haha! Isn't it so wonderful that women are so cool and adult, unlike men?" (Which is also subtly offensive towards men, BUT also absolves them of responsibility and makes the women in the group carry the load because it's just how women & men are, and if she's not like this she's deviant and bad because she's supposed to be the one who knows better or doesn't let go).
It's especially frustrating in the classic "two men, one woman" ensemble. Women are pretty much ALWAYS the "sane" one. The Vees from Hazbin are this trope and it makes me kind of tired, even though I do like Velvette, sorry.
I want trios where two women are actually loud or messy or irreverent or obstinate and the one who is worrying about them not getting them all killed over a stupid rivalry is a man. I just want to see more female characters who are NOT reasonable, or brave, or particularly "brainy", or blah, blah, blah. I want more women who are allowed to have fun. More women who join in on the jokes or don't roll their eyes at them. More women who climb trees and fall stupidly. Damn, you know?
pov: instead of enjoying and being happy at watching arthur, dutch & hosea loudly singing together on a fishing boat laughing away, you feel melancholy and dread instead.
this is the last time the three of them are going to be as they are, before everything begins to slowly fall apart.
It seriously hurts so much. They're all so downright domestic in that trip. The stories. The singing! The fact they of course talk about wanting to do it again, sometime. And the fact that even watching that scene for the first time, you just know they won't get to. That's just... So messed up.
Being a guitarist is pretty funny because you want one of your hands to look like Freddy Krueger's and the other one makes you want to surgically remove your fingernails every hour
sometimes i see posts that are like "having all your favorite characters be men doesnt hurt anyone but it says a lot about you" and while i understand the sentiment i do think the first half exists in a universe where people's actions exist in a vacuum. like, sure, one individual person having all male favs doesnt hurt anyone. but when society at large prefers male characters, that means directors are more likely to focus on scripts centering men, more likely to hire male actors, putting those male actors in higher demand which means they get paid more money than female actors. like. have you ever looked at the list of highest paid actors in hollywood? and how much they make compared to highest paid actresses?
agree but I also think that this is largely due to the fact that many people don't bother attempting to have well-written female characters. like I can't even count the amount of shows and movies i've seen that have great writing for male characters and then the female characters have the personality of a cardboard box. like it's so obvious that so many writers do not give a single fuck about female characters.
but alsooo it just makes it so much more important to really pay attention to and uplift well written female characters so that we can show these writers what we want to see more of. so there's also that
Listen I don’t dislike the Hazbin Hotel finale (S2) for using the power of friendship. I am pro power of friendship. The problem is that they didn’t handle it like an adult show. They didn’t show the work behind the friendship, the emotional struggles, etc. they just made all of these characters - even the ones who don’t like each other - come together magically and friend-ily to SAVE THE DAY!!!! WOOO!!!
like it feels like a kids show because they didn’t put in the work they just used the cheap tool of an uplifting song to do it for them.
Sometimes I need a reminder of why I don't use this app very much, and I think someone telling me "this is bad because it didn't do what I think it should have" will do just fine.
why is everything doing a "wrapped" now? why are you self admitting to storing my data and then presenting it back to me like we are having fun. discord and youtube and whatever else do not need a wrapped
I actually had a really good laugh when my Discord wrapped/whatever-it's-called abruptly stopped before it could start because I had disabled that kind of data collection. I know they're still collecting my data (other kinds), but still. So anticlimactic.
Do you have any idea how emotional the very concept of art itself makes me?
There is no explanation for it. None at all. But just like a drop of blood, every line you draw could only ever be yours. It doesn't matter how hard you try to replicate it. You cannot. You never will. You never will study someone's art enough to become them because you are not them. The experiences. The mind. The body. All of it combined. To make an experience that could only have come from a person.
An expression of a person's soul. Yes. Surely it couldn't be described any other way. But that's what it really means. You. You and only you...
Forget styles and techniques, color and lightning, line-art and composition, we cannot beat each other at imitating sinew and nerve. How do you grade that which cannot be graded? How do you even begin to fathom what process happens in between that makes you think what you think, feel what you feel?
Galleries and galleries of minds... I could look at art forever and never have seen it all. I'm meeting someone else, every time...
I think music is especially beautiful. We discovered how to take control of radio waves, effectively an entire hidden plane of the world, and the first thing we did with it is use it to play music.
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
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