If you haven’t heard this cliche while discussing your neurodivergency with someone, then I envy your luck. Yesterday I fucked up, I feel shitty, but also I am pissed.
Our brains are impulsive af and tend to forget the most important information. We mess up, our RSD (and empathy) kicks in, we feel terrible, we vow to be more careful, but guess what? Thats fucking exhausting.
As a result, we start overthinking our every waking moment, stressing over every little thing. Because, we are trying to be aware of the things we cannot perceive.
At some point, hopefully we realize that we cannot live like that, and we start to arbitrarily ignore our compulsion to overthink. Most often that works out great because most often the threat is not real, but sometimes we make the wrong call.
The times we overthink are still more than the times we do not, and we still mess up. Let us have our fucking peace.
I’m in my mid 30s, and I have been dealing with ADHD my whole life. I have some important, but hard advice. If you aren’t up for that, just don’t read the rest of my comment.
I get the frustration of having people not struggling telling you to just struggle harder, and people you would expect sympathy from (friends, family) not supporting or sympathizing with you.
That said, and this is a bitter pill to swallow, the world at large does not care about your personal conditions. Whether you are a reliable friend, teammate, worker, spouse, etc matters far more than your ever present inner turmoil.
Work with medical professionals to get your symptoms under control so you don’t beat yourself up at every turn for fucking up in ways that you are predisposed to. Learn to work with and around your own shortcomings and limitations instead of beating your head against the same damn wall every time. Build proper internal responses and coping skills to these events.
You clearly are aware of some of your own behavioral and thinking patterns that are not good or helpful, like overanalyzation after a fuck up. You already have your targets for things about yourself to work on.
This is not a nice thing to hear or to have to do, but it is essential if you want to survive as a grown ass adult in this world. You don’t need to be perfect, but you will need to keep trying to do better, forever.
You can blame the condition that you are just going to have to live the rest of your life with, or you can take ownership that you fucked up again and work to not do it going forward. The fact that you are already beating yourself up about your mistake does not invalidate the right of other people to be frustrated at what happened.
No one has the right to make their internal turmoil everyone else’s problem, even if it may be particularly burdensome. The world should be far more sympathetic and empathetic, but at some point you have to take responsibility for you. That means more than “I feel so bad”, it also means “What can I do to prevent repeats, that I can actually follow through on rather than just have as magical thinking?”
Don’t make plans dependent on getting your shit together. Make plans that will still work even if you keep fucking up in the same ways you did before.
It all gets easier with time, as long as you keep trying.
I mostly agree, but (what else ^^):
IMO you do take responsibility when you tell others about your boundaries and how they can work around them. If they don’t want to because it also costs them a little bit of energy and disrupts their typical workflows they have (again: IMO) no right to blame it all on you. If I tell them “I can’t do X” or something and they again and again expect me to do X, it’s also on them.
Simple example: I tell colleagues, family, whatever to please remind me again if they feel I missed something they expected of me. If they do, all is good. If they later are pissed that I missed something and immediately blame me … sorry my friend, I warned you. (If I had the ability to set a reminder, sure that’s on me for not doing that. But it doesn’t always work that way.)
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But … that was the point. “Telling them your boundaries” implies not accepting something you are not up to. My managers know that I am not a good manager myself. I have a lot of qualities, at being a driving force in a project is not among them. So they don’t utilize me for that. Which is good.
Yes, it would be on me if I constantly tell them “sure, just let me handle it” and then not handle it. But that would be the opposite of what I wrote above.
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Yes and no; you left out part of my quote. Stuff that can be put in a reminder is up to me (especially if I tell them “I’ll handle it”). But if for whatever reason that’s not possible and I tell them “you might have to remind me again next week” and they are fine with that, then they shouldn’t be pissed if I indeed needed a reminder. That’s what I meant with “I warned them”.
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Exactly. No idea why people have downvoted you.
Our happiness relies on being able to accept the limitations we have. If others can’t accept them that’s on them. And honestly it’s not that big a deal. I am successful and have been in the same profession for over 20 years. Everyone I work with knows about it and works with me. I also work around their limitations. That’s just part of being on a team.
I think this may be a misunderstanding of what they are saying.
If you think I’ve forgotten a task you asked me to do, then I probably have. Say something. Don’t sit there stewing like I forgot it on purpose.
It’s not about them constantly checking up and reminding, it’s about reacting with anger to something we have no control over.
Goddamn I needed to hear this
thats what i mean. this doesnt help. ritalin helps. because when i take ritalin, i can like understand what you are saying.
its not about KNOWING things, we all know what we shuould do.
Its about executing things.