Everything changed when I found the most understanding teachers at the end of my school. I switched schools and had a teacher recognize I was smart and bored and distracted, and she tested me out of the classes and let me spend my time on other random things that were tangentially related and still work with the other students. Game changer compared to where I was where I’d get deductions for doing problems early or reading ahead.

The point on the way to many interests and things, and loving yourself beyond the meds, very important! I found o was regulating myself too much for the first while after diagnosing, and the most relaxation wasn’t what people might typically find relaxing, it was letting the (healthy enough) chaos flow in a safer environment than I was previously prepared to setup.

100%. Great way of putting it. I bounce back forth on occasion, but the trend line is always toward accepting that old part of me, and realizing it’s okay to move on because it’s a very closed chapter that’s been outstaying its welcome. Like any death, you still have those same neural patterns, and they’re slowly getting overwritten, and it’s confusing and disorienting when your muscle memory reaches for something and it’s not there.

It’s extra confusing when what’s reached for is that feeling of not grabbing anything, but you do. When you’ve been falling for decades the ground feels weird for a while when you land.

Hah, yeah, I’m sure I could have taken time to phrase it better.

I definitely feel like a big part of what I’ve grieved is the childhood that I never had, moreso than the future I won’t. It was a big relief, and I felt like I could do well and cut myself slack. I’m just trying to do the same with past me; cut myself that slack, give my past self that love and understanding now that I didn’t get then, accept it was a brutal time, and that it was unfair, but that I’ve grown and learned and stopped rejecting that person was me, and we’re doing all right.

I do think stigma is a part, both your expectations of others and the expectations on yourself. I had a psychiatrist tell me years before my diagnosis that I was “too successful” for ADHD and that pretty much derailed the acceptance for a long time, heh.

Absolutely! Important to recognize you’re not “weird” for not going through this, sometimes it just aligns so well you’re already prepped for it.

I agree to an extent, but also that the parents need to take time to understand how to “gas them up” appropriately. It’s not everyone’s case, but it became very apparent to me when I was young that my parents would cheer me on over anything, and never take any time to learn about the things they were cheering me on over, and that led to disbelieving pretty much any positive feedback from anyone long-term. The only feedback of substance growing up was the very rare negative feedback, because they would only pull it out when they understood it enough to know it needed improving. That, and emphasizing their efforts as the thing to cheer on, not just the end results.

I’ve learned to work through that, and maybe it goes without saying for most people, but being a genuine and substantive cheerleader is important.

I know this is in response to a post saying your ADHD is not other people’s ADHD, but I’m pretty sure your ADHD is my ADHD.

Mainly learning that I did, in fact, have ADHD, Then: medication (Vyvanse); drastically reducing or cutting weed, alcohol, and caffeine; therapy to help deal with childhood issues (which exacerbate symptoms); taking time away from work to start recovering from ADHD-driven burnout and building some structures to support my ADHD in the workplace.

Systems to externalize things. I’ve accepted that if I don’t see something, it isn’t happening, so I try to arrange and organize things in a way that it’s physically out in the world for me. Digital doesn’t work extremely well for me for the most part, except for some work things where it’s all in one place, because digital disappears from existence when the screen turns off.

I hate it, but regular exercise, eating more healthy, and the nights where I can actually sleep are probably the biggest factors in whether I have a good day or not. Not that knowing that is enough, of course.

Oh, and just generally learning what my weaknesses are. I’m still hugely struggling with ADHD overall, but knowing the big weaknesses helps. It’s not about doing what’s easy, it’s about facing what’s hard head-on and accepting it sucks, but you have to go on.

• I struggle with transitioning, so random text messages or having to sporadically decide to move from Task A to Task B is hard/impossible, so I have scheduled socializing and build in transition “rituals” like going for a walk, having lights and TV automatically turn off at set times,
• I get stuck on tasks, so hard rules like “Under no circumstances can you do this after X time” are vital to live by, when you can,
• I don’t notice bodily needs, so practicing meditation and having regular reminders to check-in on myself help to make sure I’ve eaten / drank water / walked around and generally am not hurting my body with whatever weird way I’m sitting,
• I’m terrible with detail-oriented work, so I have workflows specifically designed to reduce the amount of detail-oriented work I need to do,
• I binge a ton of work in short periods and rest for periods, so I moved my career toward flexible scheduling to allow for this, with enough accountability to have deadlines I can’t violate.

Yeah! Not beating yourself up over this is really important, same with not overthinking it. Some days are hard, some are less hard, some, I’ve heard, are easy.

Some days the best progress/discipline is noticing it’s a day where you need your own compassion to admit you need to let yourself off the hook for a bit.

It’s a good start to a long path :) I’m not a doctor of medicine, and not medical advice, but I know it was really helpful for me when I started recognizing I was on a path to helping myself, not the ADHD, not the trauma, not whatever else it may be diagnosed as, but me, my experiences, my patterns, my brain.

The labels can be helpful for seeing, noticing, understanding, approaching, and getting medical support where needed, but ultimately it’s great that the symptoms were validated, and congrats on taking the steps! It’s hard work to identify the need, hard work to reach out and get support, and it means you’re very likely on a good path.

The remembral is really smart! I might need to find a way that works for me for that one.

Being really open is also great; radical authenticity and openness (with those it’s appropriate and comfortable) has helped me learn and help others, and gotten acceptance from people I’d struggled with. “Let’s assume I’ve been living underground for a while, how exactly do you go about X, if you’re comfortable answering?” Also great for those with absent/developmentally lacking childhood experiences.

Yeah, a lot of my systems have been built up by noticing bad patterns and finding easier alternatives. A frozen curry that takes 10 minutes of effort tops, with pre-made masala paste - it may not be the most satisfying, but it’s costing me about $4, I’ll be eating in less time than ordering in, and I won’t get stuck looking at menus for an hour.

Yeah, I fortunately had a magic bullet (not great for it, but works) from years ago I received as a gift. The other comment nailed it; any time I’ve added water, it’s been bland. While milk, some yogurts, and a healthy mix of fruits is really flavourful, and it might throw the texture, but the oats and spinach add a night nutrient punch.

Less of everything is real. I’ll regularly and unintentionally mentally itemize what I have and what my options are regularly and funding ways to limit that is always helpful. I have a nearly empty fridge, pantry, a mealplan which is more like a two-week menu of options, only a few pieces of each clothing, and on. Fewer opportunities to fall into bad patterns. There was a time where my solution to not doing laundry for two weeks was to buy more cheap “backup” clothes.

Then the purge happened.

Few, good things, that were bought with the intention of easy maintenance, minimizing choice, while allowing a bounded spontaneity.

Yeah, the struggles of this work pattern are real. I’ve been trying to temper it, but also to accept it as much as I feasibly can, because going against the mental grain can be much more exhausting. Some of us are sprinters, not marathon runners.

Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.

I agree with the recommendation for talking to the doctor; I’m in a similar position. This might be completely unrelated to your situation, so take it with many grains of salt.

What I’ve been learning is that a lot of my own burnout cycling seems to be cycles of intense and constant masking. I struggle with social situations, following “chronos” time instead of “Kairos” (if you will entertain the misuse of these), and eventually get so buried in obligations and actively resisting my natural impulses that my wants and needs get muddied and untended to and the pain of pretending or entering social modes builds up too much. Being in a mode, “professor mode”, “friend mode”, “colleague mode”, “spouse mode”, they all build up the tension and while I can seem socially adept, if I’m not in a mode I’m pretty useless. My Uber drivers can attest. Sometimes I do need a break from social activities while I break down the mask that builds up. A decalcifying of the brain. My friends seem to understand.

I’m a teaching professor, and I love the work, it has high flexibility but strict accountability, lots of room to experiment and find novelty, but a massive social burden and ridiculous workload. The only thing I’ve found to help so far, besides medication, is doing less. Fewer work obligations meant more time to de-mask, it meant I could take the more time on my tasks that I refused to admit to myself I needed compared to colleagues, more time to do stupid random impulsive (but safe) BS which I’ve found is the most relaxing to me, and that naturally led to meditating, exercising, and eating a bit healthier, which made things feel more manageable.

I don’t know what the long term prospects of this realization are for me, but consider that ADHD usually means that tasks will take longer and more effort than typical people. Admitting to myself that it’s a disability and I don’t need to work twice or three times as hard as other people to make up for it all the time has been really important.

You also mentioned trauma; a lifetime of letting people down without knowing why really turned me into an over-supporter as an adult. Fawning response to stress - feeling the stress build up and instinctively doing whatever you can to help other people at cost of yourself, rather than fighting or running away or freezing up - and then when you’re alone you fight yourself, freeze, or run away from everything. I’ve been told it’s a form of invisible self harm, and it’s nefarious because the goal is to make everyone else see things as all right.

So I don’t know if any of this clicks true for you, and I don’t fully know the solution to these, but awareness of my own issues has helped a lot, and I think awareness and recognition is key to getting started. Years of therapy, meditation, medication, it’s all making progress, but it’s slow, and awareness has been key to any of the positives. For me, it seems like working less and admitting to myself I have a disability, undoing years of traumatic people pleasing at my own expense, and learning to unmask more in social interactions and at home are key, however that path is treaded.

I really appreciate hearing this. I was diagnosed ADHD almost a year ago, and it made a lot of things make sense, but therapy continues coming back to, “Yes, definitely the ADHD, it’s obvious now, but there’s just something… else.” I’m going to begin trauma therapy soon, but stumbling upon some information on autism made me immediately recoil and say “That can’t be me”. When I learned a bit more, I realized where the reaction came from. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy avoiding and pushing away those traits. I blocked out a lot of memories as a kid, and as soon as I read about common autistic behaviours in children I started to be able to see those things and remember them and not immediately recoil, but suddenly consider them as something that really happened.

I think that’s the real fear of “high-functioning”, whatever it is, without having a label/diagnosis. Yes, I’m participating in society, I’m doing well, people like me, I’m good at my job - I guess it’s just that the cost of it is everything that makes me me, and if that’s normal, I don’t understand how anyone gets by - and if it isn’t normal, then what is it so much harder for me, and what does it mean for me?

So yeah, I do think I might look into assessment. I think for me, I’ve just pushed myself so hard for so long and blamed myself for so much that painful perseverance is deeply ingrained. Even though I should be able to follow my needs and rhythms without a diagnosis, it’s a lot easier to look at yourself when you can see the full picture and be properly honest.

Plus, masking is exhausting, even when it’s subconscious. Learning about ADHD got me to learn some things I’d been painfully masking without being completely aware. There’s a lot of programming in me that feels natural, but it’s just a reaction to how things “should” be done that really don’t need to be there.

So yeah, I really appreciate the comment, and I think I’ll probably find a lot of commonalities in your journey :)