ADHD memes

I have ADHD. I can usually hold my shit together at work, and I work 16 hour shifts. Some days my coworkers will notice enough to ask me if I've taken my meds, but most days I appear pretty chill. I'll bet if you asked the majority of my coworkers they'd tell you I'm not ADHD.

What they don't see is me going home and sobbing on the floor from the sheer effort and desperation of trying holding my shit together and not fuck up in ways that I can't fix. I'm terrified every fucking day that today will be the day I fuck up enough that I can't hide how bad my brain actually is anymore and I'll make a critical error and I'll lose my job. I don't have a backup plan or someone to catch me if I fail, I'll just be homeless at the end of the month when I can't make rent.

Nah if anything, I'm the one going "Girl you're on your 7th coffee, go get checked for adhd" to my coworkers. Nothing wrong in getting help for something that can be helped, no matter how "easy" the struggle might seem.

Yes, I too compare my internal experience to what other people seem on the outside.

or have it at a much lower level than you?

it ain't a competition, bud.

ADHD and other neurodivergencies are neither binary nor a simple scale + we have different personalities and circumstances, so there are people that qualify as having ADHD yet manage it very well or have lives that mesh really well with their brand of ADHD by pure chance.

Some of these people think since it's easy for them to manage it must be easy for everyone, and some sympathize and understand they have it (compared to us) easy.

It's frustrating to have a genuine disability and not be believed because it's not visible and obvious, and doubly so when it's someone you think should get it.

I've met one person I didn't believe had ADHD yet he thought for sure he did. He kept asking me and my other ADHD friend why we didn't simply do this or that whenever we mentioned we struggled with something. He did later turn out to have another neurodivergency which made much more sense to me, but it's also important to note that not all symptoms are gonna be in the part of someones life that you are witness to.

That is because the characteristics that make up ADHD are normal human features. Having ADHD just means your settings are far enough outside what most people have that it interferes with your ability to function inside the cultural expectations that work for most people.

I'm not diagnosed. I work somewhere with an unusually high number of people with ADHD, autism and anxiety disorders. With the autistic ones it tends to be the most obvious. With ADHDers it is harder to tell sometimes.

If someone who appears to have their shit together tells me that they think they have ADHD or that they have it, I believe them. If they'd turn out to have lied to me, I don't really care. I'd probably just find their behavior to be a bit weird.

The only time I get pissed off about people with ADHD is when I meet those who thinks it is everybody elses' job to fix them. Luckily I have only met two of those. Everybody else I have met have been good people with their flaws and their struggles that may or may not get better ever, but at the very least they own their disability and don't think it is the whole world's responsibility to baby them. I knew one guy who expected me to call him in the morning to wake him up for work. He was in his 30s at the time. I was also supposed to do a bunch of other things that I have since forgotten. He had made a list like I was his mother. People like that, I genuinely despise.

As for myself, as I said, not diagnosed. I have a lot of symptoms and I appear at first glance to be a functioning member of society. I go to work everyday and deliver to various degrees, but I always deliver and I always meet my deadlines. Nobody, other than the ones working with me, knows all the acrobatics I do behind the scenes to make things look normal on the surface. I strive for extreme structure, yet I can barely set it up myself, and maintaining it is almost impossible. I start so many things that never get finished. I have constant racing thoughts and when I don't have that I have racing emotions where I can go through every emotion known to man within minutes and repeat them in a loop for hours with no pause button. I have so many different challenges I struggle with in my personal life that don't get to take over my life entirely because I'm super lucky to have good people around me whose abilities to create and maintain structures is something I lean on in my daily life. Every day I do my best to be productive and deliver. I have days where I just spin in my chair and water the plants at work or watch youtube videos. I have those days. I also have days where I am super productive and get a lot of things done and catch up on lost time. I always make it work, but I also know how fragile my structure is for me. Not too many things can go wrong before I crumble into a useless mess.

I suspect there are many people out there who are like me, who don't have a diagnosis, who don't appear to have it or who don't have it enough, who only appear that way because the systems they have in place for them and the people they have around them helps them to appear normal.

I can tell you that the only reason I haven't seen a psychiatrist yet is because the entire process of getting a diagnosis is so overwhelming and long that I just can't do it. I got a referral at one point and was supposed to find myself a psychiatrist on my own and I just couldn't do it. I have no idea how people who are worse off than me are able to get to the stage of seeing a psychiatrist in the first place. It is a complete mystery to me.