ADHD IS:

potatovirgin:

greatgreedyguts:

teal-deer:

whatireallythinkaboutyourlasagna:

The next ADHD/squirrel joke I hear, I’m going to punch the person who said it right in the face. Same for “Oooooh shiny” or the “counting sheep/old McDonald” jokes. Stop it. You’re not funny. You’re not cute and quirky. You’re a jerk who makes people with ADHD feel like a joke. I’m very sure that what YOU suffer from is merely simple distractions. Everyone’s mind wanders from time to time that’s okay. It’s not “your ADHD kicking in” or whatever you want to call it. You don’t have “ADHD moments” You don’t have ADHD at all. So you wouldn’t know what it is. Well, here is what it’s ACTUALLY like.

ADHD can’t be turned off. ADHD doesn’t kick in. You can’t pick and choose.

ADHD is laying out everything you need for school the next day: Backpack, books, all clothes—right down to earrings and underwear, folders, pens, paper, pencils, laptop, everything, and forgetting to bring your house key with you.

ADHD is like sitting in class, listening to your professor speak about the French Revolution and suddenly finding yourself out in the hallway. You don’t know how you got there. You don’t remember getting up from your seat. No one saw you get up or leave, But when you notice you’re in the hallway, you rush back to your seat—again, no one noticed you left, no one noticed you came back in. You frantically look down at your notes. The last thing written was “French Fisherman’s Wives” but now the professor is talking about Kings. How did he get there? What happened in between? You don’t know, You were in the hallway, so you keep writing where you left off. Maybe you can ask your friends for the notes just ONE more time. Maybe they won’t roll their eyes at you and tell you to pay attention. You hope so. Without realizing it, while worrying about what your friends will say about your notes, you’ve stepped into the hallway again. You run back to your seat and stare straight ahead, watching the professor intently. Maybe by looking at him, you can listen better. He’s talking about that castle getting torn down by hand. You glance at your hands, thinking about how difficult it would be to tear down a stone castle. Did they use shovels or picks? Your nails aren’t nearly strong enough to tear through rock. They always bend backward on things when they’re too long. Actually. You need to cut them. Do that when you get home. Your nail clippers are…. Where? Uhm. You had them last a few days ago in your room. But then you cleaned. Were they in the bathroom? By the sink? You hear people get up around you. Class is over. You look down at your notes:

—-French Fisherman’s Wives

– stormed castle
—-King of France during ______A.D



—-Castle torn down by villagers by hand (YIKES!)

An hour and a half’s worth of notes. This happens every day.

ADHD is having post-it notes EVERYWHERE in your house for quick note taking. ADHD is writing a post-it note reminding yourself to check your post-it notes.

ADHD is writing the most extensive, detailed, and organized list anyone has ever seen, just for waking up in the morning and starting your day.

ADHD is constantly hearing people tell you “just do it,” “Don’t be distracted,” “Just sit down and do your homework,” “You can’t keep ‘forgetting’ things,” “’Forgetting’ isn’t and excuse for not doing something,” and “I’m NOT telling you again.”

ADHD is having to ask “What?” after almost everything people say because you were wondering exactly how the locking mechanism on a car door works, or what words you can make out of the word ‘Hyperbole.’

ADHD is going home after school and crying because your friend refused to give you the notes for history class.

ADHD is stressing because your Professor only extended the deadline by two days and told you that if you didn’t have it turned in by then you’d get a 0.

ADHD is looking helplessly at your notes, needed for the project, and realizing you have NO material to work with.

ADHD is seeing posts about “I have ADH- OOOH LOOK A SQUIRREL!” from your closest friends and family and realizing you problems are nothing but a joke to them.

ADHD is wishing desperately that you were “normal” and trying to fit in as much as possible.

Some days ADHD is feeling incredible and accomplished because you remembered to get the clothes out of the dryer while they were still warm.

ADHD is feeling terrible because you left your clothes in the washer too long and now they stink.

Some days ADHD is movement. You don’t care what kind. Bouncing, running, cleaning, writing, fiddling, twiddling, or squishing something, but you MUST do something. And not moving? You feel sick. You feel SO compelled to move. If you could just run around the building once, and yell loudly—you could focus. The urge would go away. You wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable and you could figure out x^2+ 2. But right now, YOU. MUST. MOVE. YOU. MUST. MOVE. But you’re not allowed. So you shift. You cross your legs, you wiggle your foot. You click your pen. Those are acceptable right? That’s more normal than yelling and running right? No. The person next to you is glaring. You stop clicking your pen. What else? What else? You bounce your foot. You like the little metallic noise the bar makes when your toe hits it. Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. There. Better than yelling. But the clinking isn’t as quiet as you thought. Your neighbor glares. “CAN YOU STOP?!” She almost yells, annoyed. You want to tell her no. You can’t, actually. But you make yourself stop. You look at the board. X^2+2 has been erased. Solved ten minutes ago. You look at your paper. Maybe it’s in the back of the book. You look at the page and problem number. It’s an even numbered problem. The answer isn’t there. You spend the rest of the class trying to find a problem similar so you can solve for that stupid 24^th letter.



These are only some of the things people with ADHD experience. What these people need is support. Not cheap shots taken at their expense. Not glares and eye rolls when they forgot something. They need encouragement. They need friends to help remind them of things. They need family members who encourage them praise them for accomplishments and offer gentle reminders. ADHD is real and needs to be treated as a disorder, not a joke. People with ADHD aren’t stupid or lazy. Most of us are highly intelligent. We don’t LIKE being late. We don’t ENJOY having to constantly ask people to repeat themselves. And by being made to feel bad about things, we stop asking for help and struggle all alone.

This is all hitting all too close to home. I’ve been fired because of my ADHD. It’s hard. 

I wrote an essay rather like the OP’s post for my grad thesis called Butterflies: Like Razorwire where I compared having ADHD to having a ribcage full of the most absolutely beautiful butterflies in the world that compel you, demand that you try to catch and touch them, only every last one of them is made of razorwire and you end up bleeding. And you never, ever learn. 

Aaaand this post just reminded me I started to do laundry two or three days ago and didn’t finish. In between seeing this and reblogging it, I have: gone to check that I was right, wondered about the possibility of removing the mildew smell, opened a new tab to check on that, checked my email instead because why else would I open a new tab, browsed youtube, closed those tabs and seen this again, found out that baking soda is the best thing ever, and gone and restarted doing laundry.

I never had the “getting up and leaving” issue the OP talks about, but I don’t want anyone thinking that’s all there is to it. Those notes look just like mine, I probably spent as much time doodling and fiddling while actively trying to force myself to listen as not. Falling asleep in the middle of a lecture I was super interested in while also being well-rested? Yuuup.

The quintessential story, for me, is from after college, though. I had to go to my bank to do something important, I don’t recall what, but I had to be there in person, and it had to be done that day. I lived nearby enough, so I went for a walk to the bank, because the bus was annoying and I didn’t have a car. It was about a twenty-minute walk.

It was not until several hours later, when I looked up from the book I had bought in the bookstore I had gone into on the way to the bank that I remembered, too late, that I’d needed to go to the bank in the first place.

I think I basically got really into art because I found I listened better when I was doodling. I could zone out a little if things were boring or someone was asking a question about something I already understood, and tune back in to write more notes. My notes were always a mess though, and yeah, I could barely make sense of what I wrote. I’ve learned that note-taking only has the benifit of searing things into my memory better, not as something I can re-read. If I don’t understand I read the chapter or lesson, and failing that the internet is a godsend.

I also have to take time to process things, to really explore the posibilities in my mind, and yeah, someone getting upset because I missed what they were trying to say because I was processing something else is one of the more distressing things I’ve experienced, right up there next to “this project is due tomorrow and you haven’t even started it even though you’ve had all week, not because you don’t understand but because you can’t seem to make yourself just sit down and do it.” I’ve noticed if I don’t write down what I’m thinking immediately after I start considering a subject, whether on Tumblr or writing an essay, I don’t want to write it because I’ve already thought it out and it’s boring now.

I have to say though, I don’t really see jokes about ADD/ADHD as ridicule. My cousin has been diagnosed (unlike me) and he’s got a shirt that says that, and he clearly finds it funny. I don’t find it particularly insulting, it’s just an attempt to explain to people who don’t have ADD what having ADD is like. You’re trying to focus over here, but even when what you’re saying over here is important to you, even vital, your brain still goes OOOH SHINY and suddenly all your attention is over there.

I feel like context matters a lot for determining ridicule vs joking, and a lot of people read the context they’re used to into things. People used to ridicule take everything as such and assume the worst, people unused to it assume things are friendly.

I’ve definitely gotten ridiculed for ADHD in ways similar to that (though at the time I was undiagnosed), and can find the jokes tiring, but it’s largely more of a general “I have heard this so often, can we please have some new material” feeling. Sometimes the “oh, whoops ADD moment” thing can grate from people who definitely don’t have it, but there’s always the issue (especially on tumblr) of diagnosing others or assuming that they just don’t have it when they might.

It’s not all bad, or always bad, but boy howdy it can be, and while I’d quibble with the mouth-punching I can get the frustration of feeling like people look down on some of the associated hardships or don’t understand how much it affects.

So, we were talking about this last night some, and realized that there’s this perception of Superman as being the obvious extrovert and Batman the obvious introvert, right? Like, Superman’s all friendly and Batman’s pretty dour, it just seems to fit…

But it’s also just so far from the truth.

How many actual relationships does Clark Kent/Superman have? As a mild-mannered reporter he knows Lois, Jimmy, and Perry. Partner, friend, and co-worker/boss. He also knows Bruce and Diana and the Justice League, most of which like him – all work friends, at least at first. He’s got his parents, and his dog.

That’s kind of it, and that seems to be all he needs. It’s not like he's unhappy with a half-dozen friends by any means, but he keeps busy and keeps to himself. He’s got a Fortress of Solitude for crying out loud, that’s not a name most extroverts would be super-thrilled about.

Meanwhile, Batman/Bruce Wayne (in the universes where one isn’t left with the feeling that he marathoned Ayn Rand the day after his parents died) is gregarious in both his lives. He shares a lot of Clark’s friends through the whole Justice League thing, but just in Gotham you’ve got, what… Alfred, Gordon, I think Montoya and a few other old friends he still likes even if he doesn’t see them all the time, Alfred, Lucius, the six kids he adopted, some of their friends/partners, and so on. On a regular basis he interacts with as many people as Clark knows and more.

I’m not buying that it’s all an act, either. He could find plenty of ways to make Bruce Wayne “obviously not Batman, that’s stupid, you’re stupid” than throwing lots of parties and going to lots of parties.

Not saying there needs to be that sort of distinction between the two of them, and it’s not like either of ‘em are consistently characterized… but if I had to lay money on which was which, this’d be my bet. Doesn’t make Clark less friendly or Bruce less maladjusted, though.

ADHD IS:

teal-deer:

whatireallythinkaboutyourlasagna:

The next ADHD/squirrel joke I hear, I’m going to punch the person who said it right in the face. Same for “Oooooh shiny” or the “counting sheep/old McDonald” jokes. Stop it. You’re not funny. You’re not cute and quirky. You’re a jerk who makes people with ADHD feel like a joke. I’m very sure that what YOU suffer from is merely simple distractions. Everyone’s mind wanders from time to time that’s okay. It’s not “your ADHD kicking in” or whatever you want to call it. You don’t have “ADHD moments” You don’t have ADHD at all. So you wouldn’t know what it is. Well, here is what it’s ACTUALLY like.

ADHD can’t be turned off. ADHD doesn’t kick in. You can’t pick and choose.

ADHD is laying out everything you need for school the next day: Backpack, books, all clothes—right down to earrings and underwear, folders, pens, paper, pencils, laptop, everything, and forgetting to bring your house key with you.

ADHD is like sitting in class, listening to your professor speak about the French Revolution and suddenly finding yourself out in the hallway. You don’t know how you got there. You don’t remember getting up from your seat. No one saw you get up or leave, But when you notice you’re in the hallway, you rush back to your seat—again, no one noticed you left, no one noticed you came back in. You frantically look down at your notes. The last thing written was “French Fisherman’s Wives” but now the professor is talking about Kings. How did he get there? What happened in between? You don’t know, You were in the hallway, so you keep writing where you left off. Maybe you can ask your friends for the notes just ONE more time. Maybe they won’t roll their eyes at you and tell you to pay attention. You hope so. Without realizing it, while worrying about what your friends will say about your notes, you’ve stepped into the hallway again. You run back to your seat and stare straight ahead, watching the professor intently. Maybe by looking at him, you can listen better. He’s talking about that castle getting torn down by hand. You glance at your hands, thinking about how difficult it would be to tear down a stone castle. Did they use shovels or picks? Your nails aren’t nearly strong enough to tear through rock. They always bend backward on things when they’re too long. Actually. You need to cut them. Do that when you get home. Your nail clippers are…. Where? Uhm. You had them last a few days ago in your room. But then you cleaned. Were they in the bathroom? By the sink? You hear people get up around you. Class is over. You look down at your notes:

—-French Fisherman’s Wives

– stormed castle
—-King of France during ______A.D



—-Castle torn down by villagers by hand (YIKES!)

An hour and a half’s worth of notes. This happens every day.

ADHD is having post-it notes EVERYWHERE in your house for quick note taking. ADHD is writing a post-it note reminding yourself to check your post-it notes.

ADHD is writing the most extensive, detailed, and organized list anyone has ever seen, just for waking up in the morning and starting your day.

ADHD is constantly hearing people tell you “just do it,” “Don’t be distracted,” “Just sit down and do your homework,” “You can’t keep ‘forgetting’ things,” “’Forgetting’ isn’t and excuse for not doing something,” and “I’m NOT telling you again.”

ADHD is having to ask “What?” after almost everything people say because you were wondering exactly how the locking mechanism on a car door works, or what words you can make out of the word ‘Hyperbole.’

ADHD is going home after school and crying because your friend refused to give you the notes for history class.

ADHD is stressing because your Professor only extended the deadline by two days and told you that if you didn’t have it turned in by then you’d get a 0.

ADHD is looking helplessly at your notes, needed for the project, and realizing you have NO material to work with.

ADHD is seeing posts about “I have ADH- OOOH LOOK A SQUIRREL!” from your closest friends and family and realizing you problems are nothing but a joke to them.

ADHD is wishing desperately that you were “normal” and trying to fit in as much as possible.

Some days ADHD is feeling incredible and accomplished because you remembered to get the clothes out of the dryer while they were still warm.

ADHD is feeling terrible because you left your clothes in the washer too long and now they stink.

Some days ADHD is movement. You don’t care what kind. Bouncing, running, cleaning, writing, fiddling, twiddling, or squishing something, but you MUST do something. And not moving? You feel sick. You feel SO compelled to move. If you could just run around the building once, and yell loudly—you could focus. The urge would go away. You wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable and you could figure out x^2+ 2. But right now, YOU. MUST. MOVE. YOU. MUST. MOVE. But you’re not allowed. So you shift. You cross your legs, you wiggle your foot. You click your pen. Those are acceptable right? That’s more normal than yelling and running right? No. The person next to you is glaring. You stop clicking your pen. What else? What else? You bounce your foot. You like the little metallic noise the bar makes when your toe hits it. Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. There. Better than yelling. But the clinking isn’t as quiet as you thought. Your neighbor glares. “CAN YOU STOP?!” She almost yells, annoyed. You want to tell her no. You can’t, actually. But you make yourself stop. You look at the board. X^2+2 has been erased. Solved ten minutes ago. You look at your paper. Maybe it’s in the back of the book. You look at the page and problem number. It’s an even numbered problem. The answer isn’t there. You spend the rest of the class trying to find a problem similar so you can solve for that stupid 24^th letter.



These are only some of the things people with ADHD experience. What these people need is support. Not cheap shots taken at their expense. Not glares and eye rolls when they forgot something. They need encouragement. They need friends to help remind them of things. They need family members who encourage them praise them for accomplishments and offer gentle reminders. ADHD is real and needs to be treated as a disorder, not a joke. People with ADHD aren’t stupid or lazy. Most of us are highly intelligent. We don’t LIKE being late. We don’t ENJOY having to constantly ask people to repeat themselves. And by being made to feel bad about things, we stop asking for help and struggle all alone.

This is all hitting all too close to home. I’ve been fired because of my ADHD. It’s hard. 

I wrote an essay rather like the OP’s post for my grad thesis called Butterflies: Like Razorwire where I compared having ADHD to having a ribcage full of the most absolutely beautiful butterflies in the world that compel you, demand that you try to catch and touch them, only every last one of them is made of razorwire and you end up bleeding. And you never, ever learn. 

Aaaand this post just reminded me I started to do laundry two or three days ago and didn’t finish. In between seeing this and reblogging it, I have: gone to check that I was right, wondered about the possibility of removing the mildew smell, opened a new tab to check on that, checked my email instead because why else would I open a new tab, browsed youtube, closed those tabs and seen this again, found out that baking soda is the best thing ever, and gone and restarted doing laundry.

I never had the “getting up and leaving” issue the OP talks about, but I don’t want anyone thinking that’s all there is to it. Those notes look just like mine, I probably spent as much time doodling and fiddling while actively trying to force myself to listen as not. Falling asleep in the middle of a lecture I was super interested in while also being well-rested? Yuuup.

The quintessential story, for me, is from after college, though. I had to go to my bank to do something important, I don’t recall what, but I had to be there in person, and it had to be done that day. I lived nearby enough, so I went for a walk to the bank, because the bus was annoying and I didn’t have a car. It was about a twenty-minute walk.

It was not until several hours later, when I looked up from the book I had bought in the bookstore I had gone into on the way to the bank that I remembered, too late, that I’d needed to go to the bank in the first place.

coelasquid:

When I see people I follow reblog posts that follow descriptions of social anxiety with commentary like “as an introvert this is so me!” I honestly consider unfollowing those people because this whole idea that all introverts have social anxiety and all extroverts don’t is just misleading and insulting to everyone and I get disappointed when people I generally hold in high esteem perpetuate it.

(via teal-deer)

mccoydarling-deactivated2015041 asked: Please talk forever about Helen and ancient greek you are so enpoint

professorfangirl:

elucipher-deactivated20151112:

in the iliad helen speaks the last lament for hector. the only man in troy who showed her kindness is slain—and now, helen says, πάντες δέ με πεφρίκασιν, all men shudder at me. she doesn’t speak in the iliiad again.

homer isn’t cruel to helen; her story is cruel enough. in the conjectured era of the trojan war, women are mothers by twelve, grandmothers by twenty-four, and buried by thirty. the lineage of mycenaean families passes through daughters: royal women are kingmakers, and command a little power, but they are bartered like jewels (the iliad speaks again and again of helen and all her wealth). helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, golden with kharis, the seductive grace that arouses desire. she is coveted by men beyond all reason. after she is seized by paris and compelled by aphrodite to love him against her will—in other writings of the myth, she loves him freely—she is never out of danger.

the helen of the iliad is clever and powerful and capricious and kind and melancholy: full of fury toward paris and aphrodite, longing for sparta and its women, fear for her own life. she condemns herself before others can. in book vi, as war blazes and roars below them, helen tells hector, on us the gods have set an evil destiny: that we should be a singer’s theme for generations to come—as if she knows that, in the centuries after, men will rarely write of paris’ vanity and hubris and lust, his violation of the sacred guest-pact, his refusal to relent and avoid war with the achaeans. instead they’ll write and paint the beautiful, perfidious, ruinous woman whose hands are red with the blood of men, and call her not queen of sparta but helen of troy: a forced marriage to the city that desired and hated her. she is an eidolon made of want and rapture and dread and resentment.

homer doesn’t condemn helen—and in the odyssey she’s seen reconciled with menelaus. she’s worshipped in sparta as a symbol of sexual power for centuries, until the end of roman rule: pausanias writes that pilgrims come to see the remains of her birth-egg, hung from the roof of a temple in the spartan acropolis; spartan girls dance and sing songs praising one another’s beauty and strength as part of rites of passage, leading them from parthenos to nýmphē, virgin to bride. cults of helen appear across greece, italy, turkey—as far as palestine—celebrating her shining beauty; they sacrifice to her as if she were a goddess. much of this is quickly forgotten. 

every age finds new words to hate helen, but they are old ways of hating: deceiver and scandal and insatiate whore. she is euripides’ bitchwhore and hesiod’s kalon kakon (“beautiful evil”) and clement of alexandria’s adulterous beauty and whore and shakespeare’s strumpet and proctor’s trull and flurt of whoredom and schiller’s pricktease and levin’s adulterous witch. her lusts damned a golden world to die, they say. pandora’s box lies between a woman’s thighs. helen is a symbol of how men’s desire for women becomes the evidence by which women are condemned, abused, reviled.  

but no cage of words can hold her fast. she is elusive; she yields nothing. she has outlasted civilisations, and is beautiful still. before troy is ash and ruin she has already heard all the slander of the centuries; and at last she turns her face away—as if to say: i am not for you

holy fuck

Obligatory mention that people of the Peloponnese (read: Sparta and surrounds) worshiped Helen as divine for centuries. Don’t let the overabundance of Athens-centric writing convince you otherwise.

isozyme:

anartisticanomaly:

phantomcat94:

meefling:

You Aren’t Boring I Just Suck At Conversations I’m Sorry: a novel by me

I’m Not Ignoring You I Just Don’t Know What To Say: a sequel by me

I Feel Like I have Nothing Interesting To Say So I Don’t Say Anything At All And I’m Really Sorry Don’t Stop Talking To Me: the trilogy.

huffs in frustration

okay so:

i know this feeling intimately and it really helped me to discover that sucking at conversations is not, in fact, intrinsic about you.  social anxiety is hard, but getting better at small talk is a learnable skill!  having interesting things to say is a learnable skill!  we are not doomed to feel this way forever!

skills i am constantly working on:

1) asking more questions!  asking people what they think then asking why they think it.  when someone says something confusing, asking them to explain better.  this is hard!  but good.

2) effectively narrativizing my life!  when something stressful or unlikely or hilarious happens to me, trying to find the punchline.  real life doesn’t always have a satisfying ending and i hate when my stories trail off into nothing, so i try to test-run stories, noting when an ending falls flat. remembering that being funny takes practice.

3) surrounding myself with good conversationalists.  extroverts are great for this!  learn to enjoy conversations while they do all the work.  steal their tricks!  it is so relaxing to socialize with a group of people who are genuinely drawing energy from just being around each other. 

4) no seriously asking people questions everyone wants to talk about themselves and their opinions more, and people have super cool stuff to say if they trust you to listen and not think they’re annoying.  it’s so tricky, but so fabulous when it works.

this may not help everyone, but seeing this helpless post with three hundred thousand notes was v concerning to me.

okay grumpy oldster out, carry on.

Really good tips here.

Also, worth noting, all the above is just useful in general. It helps with a lot of jobs, can make big social events more tolerable, and generally the better you can get at these things the less draining they are. Not because they aren’t still massively draining necessarily, but because you can sometimes avoid feeling as awkward.

Introverts aren’t the only folks with social anxiety, but it’s worth noting that most of the best conversationalists I know are introverts that learned the skills rather than relying on innate talent.