So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that I’m not shit at being an adult, I just can’t do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single “organize your life” books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD
by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on “aesthetic” over “function”. And the function of most standard “organize your life books” is to “make things look Show Home Perfect”.
So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.
To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.
Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”
And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.
Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????
Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.
Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?
My lived space will never look a certain way, and that’s okay. It will never look show home perfect, and that’s okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and that’s okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and that’s okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.
please make sure that wherever you’re at in life, you don’t treat it like a transitory period. don’t waste your college years wishing to already be graduated & have a job. don’t waste your single years wishing for someone to be in love with. if/when those things come, they will come in due time and they will be good. but there is nothing like looking back and feeling empty because you wasted literal years ignoring what you had because you were hoping for something better. while it’s important to better yourself and reach for your goals, don’t neglect the present because that’s where you are now and it’s your now that determines your future.
And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.
Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism
You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong.
It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.
Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive.
I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected.
And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars.
why are there 5,000 people on this site holding back from doing something with literally zero repercussions for anyone in a world that will never remember the chances you didn’t take? don’t waste your time on this earth live your life slap some rice
Hi my job is literally to reset the shelves and honestly??
Slap that rice. Slap it good. patting down the bags makes it easier to stack more, which means when I have to do it it’ll be flatter and more settled and more likely that I can just slide it along without it slidin’ around.
“Please don’t use ‘I love you’ as a filler when you’ve got nothing to say. Don’t use it as an alternative for ‘sorry’. Don’t use it when you’re feeling bad or mad. Don’t use it to escape an argument. Don’t say it out of pity. Don’t use it against someone. Instead, please use it wisely. Calm yourself then think once, twice, or maybe even a hundred times before using it. Question yourself before uttering it. Make sure you know it’s what you feel before saying it. Say it only to the right person. Say it because you mean it. Say it because not saying it makes you anxious. Say it because there’s no other word nor phrase that compares to how you feel. Say it because that person earned your trust to hear it and last; Say this to yourself. You deserve it.”
PSA: never put stickers on your helmets (unless you have checked with the manufacturer) because the adhesive can weaken the structure!
One day my health teacher in middle school just like … didn’t show up for class. And so of course we were all “oh if he doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes we’re legally allowed to leave”, giggling about it and all the bullshit. He did eventually show up, ten minutes into the class time. He looked haggard as fuck, sweating all over, hair messed up, beaten to hell and back. We stared at him and were about to ask what in the world happened to him when he stopped in front of his desk and smacked his bicycle helmet down on it.
His helmet had this odd discolored patch on it. Like, white against white, but … weird? It’s then that I realized his helmet didn’t have a discolored patch, it had a patch missing. A big chunk of his helmet had just been shaved away, the curve of the helmet gone and sanded flat by whatever it had been scraped against. And running through that patch, from one side of the helmet to the other, was this big crack, like the whole helmet had split like an eggshell.
Our teacher took a couple deep panting breaths and then told our class: “And this,” he took another deep breath, “is why you always wear your helmet”.
And that’s the story of how an entire class of middle school students took helmet-wearing very seriously for the rest of their lives.
YOU ARE NOT ANNOYING FOR TALKING ABOUT STUFF YOU LIKE.
If you’ve found something that you can talk about for hours, that makes you so happy and excited when someone brings it up, that’s not annoying. That’s amazing and beautiful and you’re adorable.
Keep talking about the stuff you like. The right people will listen.
Hey you know what, you might not ever fully grasp or understand why something is hurtful or offensive to someone else but that doesn’t mean their hurt isn’t real. Their experiences might be so foreign to you that you won’t ever “get it” even if you want to but that shouldn’t actually be a prerequisite to sympathizing with someone else’s suffering.
•They have an eye deformation they do not wish to show
•They have snow vision and literally cannot see in bright light conditions
•They are blind or partially blind
•They get migraines and could throw up or pass out from the fluorescent lights
•Don’t be an asshole
· That they have sensory processing issues that makes bright lights uncomfortable or painful and therefor could make them unable to focus and function.
They don’t want to be judged by their eye contact or facial expressions.
They just like wearing sunglasses inside. It’s none of your business why.
ifesbob 