I’m diagnosed autistic and ADHD… Fortunately learning about ADHD (although a lot later than I was told I was autistic) has meant understanding myself better as I never was the shy, nerdy, socially awkward autistic type and always found those autistics really hard to understand…throw ADHD into the equation and it all makes sense now 🤷🏼♀️
Thanks for the diagnostic tools. I will now reorganize life my life accordingly.
is this sarcasm?
It’s all we’ve got
i just can’t tell online anymore
Yeah, in the sense that it’s facetious and at least somewhat critical, but I meant it more as a humorous farce. The only critical part is that I feel like the disclaimer is a little unnecessary:
The kind of person that needs it probably won’t follow it, and the kind of person that follows it probably didn’t need to read it to do so. Then again, hairdryers still come with warnings not to use them in bathtubs, so what do I know?
Idk. I’m not hard autistic. Sure when I was younger. I had emotional problems. But now. I’m able to get that under control for the most part. Because I can recognize it now. But my ADHD makes it nearly impossible to sit down and read anything. I never read anything in my life because I just can’t. My focus breaks with every sentence. I just can’t keep my eyes in line with writing. So I have to be told things by people. They have to read to me.
it’s crushing because I also have cptsd and bipolar disorder so sometimes the stars align and i’m incredibly productive because of mania+perfection trauma but usually it’s just depression+depression+paralysis while you recall how functional you can be and loathe yourself for not being able to perform. lot of self-loathing tbh. But i do love myself these days and even when i’m spiralling i have learned techniques to pull myself into a stable position.
Sympathy and solidarity. I’ve been there
i don’t have an official diagnosis for either, but I find it increasingly concerning how much I relate with the posts in here. maybe I should get screened
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the symptoms described here sound more like OCPD than Autism
Diagnosed autist here; mine’s usually just “things need to be done so I can’t do anything at all” lmao. The more things I have piling on the list, the more paralyzed I become. Great times
Having the knowledge that you’ll be passionate about a big project at the outset, but that there’s a serious risk of suddenly feeling overwhelmed and/or disinterested and needing to abandon the whole thing in the middle, leaving a much worse mess than when you started. Better to leave it alone.
I do this a lot. It took me until my later 30s to fully recognize the pattern. I used to spend so much damn money on hobbies right away only to become disinterested later. I do this with projects at work sometimes where the end part feels like a soulless slog of torture to get done.
100% feels like me. But then again im pretty sure everyone in the universe feels this way. I dont think im special because life is fucking hard, it just is that way and we have to deal with it.
it wouldn’t be an open neurodivergence thread without at least one ableist take in the comments!
I like to be the realist :p really though, if you asked anyone on the street if they fit this, they’d say yes.
I don’t agree with you at all. What you said is the kind of thing undiagnosed neurodivergents say because they wrongly assume that everyone goes through the same struggles that they do though!
Yup.
Well I’m still coming to grips with it.
It would have been really nice to know growing up, beyond a pure ADD diagnosis.
One of us! One of us!
Replying to my own comment to add that I am having a very AuDHD morning:
- Got up, took meds, make coffee
- Go to get some breakfast, I want edamame - in shell. None upstairs.
- Okay, check the chest freezer in the basement. Get lost looking in the freezer because there is a lot of interesting stuff in there. Get cold, remember what you are looking for, no dice.
- Go back upstairs thinking you’ll just have a bowl of veggie mix.
- No veggie mix upstairs. There were three bags downstairs. Stand paralyzed. Do I want to go back downstairs? Do I want to eat breakfast?
- Decide to combine the remnants of spicy fries and spicy tots in the air fryer.
- Sit on the couch and look at memes, your regular chats, etc. Get into some discussions. Forget about air fryer.
- Air fryer dings, go get food. It’s not right. Eat it anyways.
- Look at more memes. You haven’t scratched that itch for edamame, you can’t move on.
- Eat some kaju katli because that’s what you needed, more junk food.
- Chat some more, fall down some rabbit holes - oh look my coffee is cold
- Finish cold coffee, realize you could share this journey you’ve been on for the lols and also realize you’ve been trying to get to the garden for two hours and it’s already 29 C outside.
- Still haven’t had the satisfaction of some tasty, salty, vegetable edamame goodness and can’t.make.self.go.
- Realize all my socks are downstairs…game over.
the struggle is real! I have been trying to put my earrings in since yesterday morning. Have done many other bathroom related tasks but somehow still no earrings.
I’m only ADHD but I get the project paralysis all the time when faced with something big. Recently I’ve been typing up a few lines of what I want to do covering the big picture then I list out in bullet points the key features or tasks. Once I have that I upload it to chat gpt and ask it to develop an outline with details or instructions for each bullet point.
Sometimes I have to refine my wording to get it to work, but I’ve finished several projects that sat for months and one for years just by using this method. I’ve also created a dedicated gpt to become an expert on the one really big project where it was the research that was holding me back, then just asked it questions until I had all the data I needed.
It’s not perfect and you still have to do some work, but it’s been working for me so I thought I’d share.
With regard to research/data, you’re fact-checking the robot, right? They often say untrue things because they’re not capable of knowing whether or not something is true.
Valid concern, and yes I’m fully aware of AI hallucinations, I fact check everything. Thankfully most data points have a citation link so it’s at least easy to verify.
When I create a gpt for a specific task or subject I will give it guidelines as to where it can pull data from.
What’s the one where you actually try to do everything all the time because it will drive you crazy if it isn’t done?
Functional Anxiety, or type A maybe
This supports my theory that for me it’s just ADHD
