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 never mention my ADHD to anyone but my therapist and friends I’ve known for several years. I don’t want people to change how they treat me, whether for better or worse, when they find out about it.
I find it helps navigate certain quirks and get the help I need to thrive. For example, after disclosing I have ADHD, people are much more open to move when I am affected by background noise.
I do the opposite and tell everyone. I am who I am and they can accept me or not, no skin off my back. But when I eventually forget something, I’d rather them already know it’s not personal or because I don’t care, in fact it’s not about them at all. It’s because my brain just sabatoges me sometimes.
100%, either outcome is positive: either i immediately learn that i want nothing to do with the person and that being around them would be detrimental to me, or they’re a decent person and can use the knowledge to make things easier for everyone.
“hi, just so you know, i’m autistic and have ADHD so i’m going to be staring at everything BUT your face while doing weird stims, and my leg WILL be bouncing and i might need to take a break to just go outside and jump my excess energy away. just a heads up so you know what’s going on and that i’m not trying to make you uncomfortable, and i don’t need to feel miserable by trying to mask these things away which would inevitably lead to me avoiding you”