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Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

goblin.tools

81–90 of 255 posts

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#81
post #44

This could be overgeneralising a bit... but I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I realise it's a very impactful thing to have to deal with (I have ADHD too) but I feel like a lot of the time it's brought up for no real reason. E.g. you started daydreaming when reading a book? Forgot something to do when you walked through a doorway? Got angry? You…

> who tend to make it an essential part of their identity.

I tend to notice that more with younger people who find out earlier and get it treated.

Finding out in your 30's because you realize things shouldn't be going so inexplicably wrong is different.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#82
post #44

This could be overgeneralising a bit... but I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I realise it's a very impactful thing to have to deal with (I have ADHD too) but I feel like a lot of the time it's brought up for no real reason. E.g. you started daydreaming when reading a book? Forgot something to do when you walked through a doorway? Got angry? You…

I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years. I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope…

Russel Barkley, in his book “Leading With ADHD,” actually suggested mentioning or “blaming” your ADHD after a mistake as a way to foster empathy for your personal challenges. It’s not intended to be an excuse, but rather a means for the other person, who assumes XYZ is effortless, to comprehend better/gain empathy.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years. I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope…

[flagged]

As the parent of a teen with ADHD, I find myself comparing my growing-up experiences and anxieties with his. I'm confident that if I were coming of age today, I would probably have been diagnosed with something because I was firmly a couple standard deviations away from the societal mean.

Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.

Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.

"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#84
post #44

This could be overgeneralising a bit... but I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I realise it's a very impactful thing to have to deal with (I have ADHD too) but I feel like a lot of the time it's brought up for no real reason. E.g. you started daydreaming when reading a book? Forgot something to do when you walked through a doorway? Got angry? You…

> I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity

Honest question: why is this an issue? If someone makes it part of their identity its because they feel its important for others to know, and that can be for a variety of reasons.

Is there a reason we shouldn't make it part of our identity, if we so choose?

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#85
post #44

This could be overgeneralising a bit... but I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I realise it's a very impactful thing to have to deal with (I have ADHD too) but I feel like a lot of the time it's brought up for no real reason. E.g. you started daydreaming when reading a book? Forgot something to do when you walked through a doorway? Got angry? You…

> who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I tend to notice that more with younger people who find out earlier and get it treated. Finding out in your 30's because you realize things shouldn't be going so inexplicably wrong is different.

I think people in their 20s find it easier to make group identities, and being in a group that tends to be disadvantaged is a uniting force. This is true whether or not you actually have ADHD, which is a problem for sure.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#86
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Except that isn't how neurodivergence works. Yes, everything that the commenter originally posted are things that happen to normal people as well. The difference is in the intensity and duration of these symptoms. Your comment is overly idealistic about neurodivergent people dealing with their problems. If it was a simple as accepting that our symptoms are normal, don't you think that we would gladly take that as an…

Yes. Identifying it as just part of being human doesn't explain at all why I, in particular, am regularly incapacitated by these things, and it's the sense of incapacity that causes the shame.

You can absolutely rephrase "that's my ADHD" to "that's within the range of normal after all", but having a proper label for a cluster of people who stand out as a clearly distinct normal curve from the rest of the population is helpful.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all the disclaimers of talk to your own psychiatrist noted, I’m curious what specific medication is helping you. I went through a similar process and some of the side effects were too much to balance.

Vyvanse here. Very "soft" compared to other ADHD meds.

Thank you!

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#88
post #44

This could be overgeneralising a bit... but I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I realise it's a very impactful thing to have to deal with (I have ADHD too) but I feel like a lot of the time it's brought up for no real reason. E.g. you started daydreaming when reading a book? Forgot something to do when you walked through a doorway? Got angry? You…

I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years. I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope…

To be honest, I thought exactly like you for years. I still benefit from society choosing to label me with something, and that I do not choose to fight. For a while my diagnoses provided so many explanations to my problems and I could live with new purpose.

But a while later, I found it was not enough. I hadn't reached "true happiness" or at least whatever I can call my current state of being. I took a different path, shed all my labels, self-prescribed or otherwise, and am happier than I was before.

I still think I am "different" and have quirks, etc. So in practice, not a whole lot different than before. I just don't use the labels to describe these differences that others might use instead.

I think this only emphasizes that one approach does not necessarily apply when generalized to all people. In my case it only served as one step towards a greater solution, and hopefully even more effective solutions I can build on top of that later.

The same goes for heightened awareness for ADHD. More knowledge can be a blessing (as in your case). At the same time, the population such awareness can serve is shaped like a very complex blob, the form of which nobody truly knows, but I believe some clinicians/promoters see the "blast radius" of promoting awareness as a perfectly round circle overlaid directly onto the population.

My experience also made me realize what one can term "ADHD" may change with overarching cultural shifts or personal growth. I think ADHD should be seen closer to a symptom of a constellation of any number of potentially unrelated causes than a "disorder" to be focused on alone. Unfortunately the established terminology seems to have won out there.

The way we see health conditions and the words we choose to describe them can have profound effects on our understanding of ourselves.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years. I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope…

[flagged]

I was diagnosed with ADHD because I scored in the 10th percentile for some totally normal use cases of the human brain. You know, normal “being human” stuff. Evidently I can’t do normal human stuff.

I think getting ADHD isn’t special or interesting at the population level—when you aren’t face to face with it—but it certainly matters to individuals. I wanted to believe I was just being a human, but the reality is that I don’t have a typical human experience. I have a lot of overlap with everyone I know, but most people I meet genuinely can’t understand the experience at all. However, they are often confident that they get it. Meanwhile, they would not qualify as disabled on cognitive assessments.

To me that’s the big difference. People with ADHD often carry around legitimate, often hidden disabilities. Usually more than one.

Re: Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years. I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope…

[flagged]

I have ADHD and while you're right that everyone experiences some of these things occasionally, for those with ADHD our emotion regulation system is fundamentally different.

As a kid, you build your identity and coping mechanisms through emotional experiences, but when your emotion engine is 'broken' or works differently, you develop differently.

The intensity, frequency, and impact of these experiences for someone with ADHD is far beyond what neurotypical people experience.

It's not about occasional forgetfulness or distraction - it's about a brain that's structurally and functionally different, affecting every aspect of daily functioning.

Getting diagnosed isn't about finding an excuse, it's about finally understanding why basic things others find easy have always been so much harder for you.

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