One of the things that kind of blew me away about ADHD Twitter was learning all these things that are ADHD things.

There was actually a specific thread about those things. Reading the thread was really enlightening for me. I’m sure as I go along I’m going to realize more stuff like this, but I wanted to start documenting them.

One thing about ADHD is that the name is really not very descriptive. People tend to think that ADHD is a thing that boys have, and that those boys are noisy and can’t sit still or behave themselves or do homework.

For me though, I think the biggest symptom and the biggest trouble is executive dysfunction. There’s a lot of good stuff explaining executive dysfunction on the intarwebs so I won’t try to describe it at length. It’s that thing where you’re sitting there and you know you have shit you have to do but you somehow can’t start doing it, and you sit there and panic and worry because you’re not doing it, and you think, if you just do the things you will stop worrying, but just the idea of standing up seems overwhelming.

So part of it is that, but part of it is just not knowing how to do things. One of my many adaptations was to figure out a way to figure out how to do things. So, with cleaning the house, no wait, that’s too big. So let’s start with cleaning the bathroom. But even that’s too big. Cleaning bathroom sink. OK, so then I go to the library or the bookstore (back when I was a young adult there was not much in the way of intarwebs) and find a book on how to clean. Or a magazine article, or something. Then I find out what cleaning products to use, what brushes to use, how to actually use each thing effectively. Also – how often to do the thing. How do people know how often to do things?

Doing a thing is so hard. Because you can’t just do the thing. You have to research how to do the thing, get the supplies you need to do the thing, practice the technique of doing the thing. And then you have all this stuff you don’t know how to clean up, because besides doing the thing you have to put all your tools somewhere.

But you haven’t even started moving shit away from the bathroom sink so you can start scrubbing. Because wherever you go, stuff just seems to pile up. And in your wake is a trail of dropped papers, keys, and shit you knocked over.