Tag: actually adhd

#MonthofSpreads Day Ten: The Court Signifier

Signifier
IX – The Hermit
Solitude, meditation

1. What message and or energy does this card portray?
Eight of Swords
Obstacles, difficulties on all sides, flawed perception, inability to see the way out

2. Which part of my life does this card represent?
Five of Wands
Inner conflict, lack of direction, scattered focus

3. If this card could speak one piece of advice, what would it tell me?
Eight of Pentacles
Skill, craftsmanship, mastery, accomplishment against the odds

Thoughts
I struggle to find inner peace, to find focus and direction in my life where concerns my thoughts, my mental health, and the direction I take to manage and balance my mind. Like the Hermit, I’m naturally introverted and solitary, but balancing that with a world that demands everyone be an extrovert is hard. It puts a strain on things. For me, being the Hermit isn’t that hard part – it’s smoothly transitioning back and forth as needed. I also really struggle with transitioning in general, in switching without a slow adjustment phase. A sudden phone call can leave me reeling. A change in plans can throw me completely. It’s something I know is a part of life, but it’s never pleasant, especially on days when I just want to be left alone in my shell.

Decluttering

I’m a chronic multiple tabber. And I’m not talking five or ten or twenty. This evening, I looked at my browser groaning under ninety odd tabs and decided EVERYTHING MUST GO. The tumblr posts I’ve been meaning to reblog, the fic I’ve had open for over a year…. all of it.

So for the last five hours, I sat and did that. All the tumblr links are in a txt file, I’ll get to them maybe. All the fic, I also saved the links of, but saved a download of each story, too, in case of author deletion. I didn’t count, but it’s in the hundreds.

Now, I just have social media, email, a short story, and four ravelry patterns I’m tossing up between for my holiday project.

I feel cleansed, but also like I’ve just run one of those army survival courses with obstacles and booby traps and also maybe occasional gunfire.

It probably doesn’t help that it’s 5am, but I couldn’t sleep and this was the only quiet time I’d had in weeks where I actually had the focus to do it, so.

star-anise:

star-anise:

Sometimes I just wanna go back 20 years in time and fucking punch all those adults who believed in Indigo Children.

Like, I don’t know if you guys know how they used to speak about Millennials?  We were supposed to save the fucking Earth.  Indigo Children were supposed to be a generation born with the dawning of the new millennium who were more creative, empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and loving than ordinary children; Indigo Children were also supposed to be fucking psychic. We were literally theoretically fucking born for the express purpose of coming in and using our fucking magic powers to save the entire goddamn earth from all the problems previous generations had left us: War, famine, pollution, disease, you name it. Psychically. 

I got invited to speak at Gifted conferences when I was a teenager in the early 2000s because I’d done some self-advocacy work in the area, so I got to see this in action a lot.  Like, a lot of kids want to solve world peace, right? You’re thirteen, you do Model UN, you believe in the power of love, it all seems so possible.  

And fucking Indigo Parents would be like, “Of course I believe you can do it!  I can’t wait until you’re 25 and I can come visit you in Switzerland when you’re working on world peace summits! You can achieve what no other generation can!”

Then the kids would come over to me, as the only Gifted Child at the conference who got to speak for myself instead of a parent speaking for me (my mom was in a corner, looking dubious) and be like, “I think maybe I wanna be an animal trainer? Or a rock star? But I’m afraid that’s too selfish. I’d be wasting my gifts. I know I have to do something great with them.”

And like… these days, I know so many former Indigo Children who are, for example… living in attics in the outskirts of Washington DC, struggling to pay their student loans from the triple-major they graduated from an Ivy League college with at age 18, writing policy briefs for an NGO about the questionable nature of foreign aid and feeling like they’ve failed as people because this isn’t living up to their potential. They were supposed to have solved everything by now. The best parts of their weeks are Saturdays when they can dress up like an elf and hang out with their friends, though lately it’s been taken up more by going to protests. But there’s still this faint sense of having failed on some fundamental cosmic level.

I’m left being really angry at parents who wanted an easy way out of the pain and fear of sending their children out into the world. 

Who didn’t want them to be “labelled” with “fake disorders”, so we’re now helping each other crowdfund our ridiculously expensive autism diagnoses so we can finally get disability benefits, or giving each other advice on ADHD meds so our lives stop looking like slow wrecks.

Who didn’t want their children to encounter difficulties, and therefore told them they’d never have any.

Fuck Indigo Parents. Fuck them.

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

iamshadow21:

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

anonymousalchemist:

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

I… may have too many tabs open…

im coming for your tab throne 

tbh i easily have more’n twice as many if i got the tabs i haven’t re-opened from when i switched computers, so… BRING IT

I have 71 tabs open right now.

….yeah you win

Not bragging, just cursed. I got down to under fifty last week and was so proud of myself. It never lasts.

So, state of me

Mental health – still blows, but is somewhat more bearable than three months ago

Talking therapy – is still useless for me, so I’ve finished my six sessions I get for free and am going back to reading books. Currently reading You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Crazy, or Stupid?, and have The Body Keeps The Score waiting in the wings.

Exercise – is something I should be doing, again, but I’ve been struggling to leave the house, so, ugh.

As for more mental health stuff, I’m trying to get back into drawing and colouring, and man, it is so hard after not doing it for about ten years.

Also, I found my old deck of tarot cards in the one of the boxes of belongings I’d left at home when I moved out and mum totally neglected, and it was utterly destroyed.

Yeah.

So I’ve ordered a replacement of the old deck I had, and ordered a new one too, both on Mum’s dime, since it was her fault my stuff was trashed, and she offered to replace things. There’s a lot I’m not going to bother with, and a lot I flat out CAN’T replace, but I wanted my damn deck.

I don’t tend to use decks like a lot of people do. I don’t think they’re magic or sentient or anything (no problem if you do), but I do think you can find answers by using a draw to look at your question sideways, if that makes sense, and using a card to make you think of a solution or look at a situation differently. So that’s what I’ll be trying to do with them. The replacement deck will take at least three weeks to get here, the new one will probably take over a month, so I’ve got some time to think about how to use them before they arrive.

I bought some remnant fabric from Spotlight in dark grey panne velvet, black satin and poly chiffon that’s patterned in grey, green and purple. They’re so I can make a cloth to lay out readings on and make some storage bags for the cards when I’m not using them. The bags at least will have to wait until I’ve got the decks so I know the dimensions and can make them the right size.

Anyone out there interested in tarot who has anything to suggest that might be helpful for me getting started, bearing in mind I tend to be an instinctive reader, not a rule follower, and my decks are going to be fairly gender neutral ones open to intepretation outside conventional cis/het/neurotypical norms?

meimagino:

bpdkageyamatobio:

I hate how asking “am I annoying you” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

literal actual pro tip, because i used to do this, along with “are you mad at me?” (which, as you know, results in people getting mad at you.)

try asking instead “how are you feeling?” or “i know you’re probably not [x emotion], but i’m having a rough day, could you reassure me that we’re cool?” that way, the focus is on either finding out how they actually feel in that moment, or on the fact that you need reassurance. they shouldn’t get upset that you’ve “assumed” (i know we don’t have control over it!) how they are feeling, because you haven’t said anything of the sort! you’ve only asked how they are feeling or if they can reassure you.

the trick here is making sure you’re surrounding yourself with people who are willing to be honest about how they feel + provide reassurance. (people who are not willing/able to do this should probably not be your close friends, though. idk about you all, but friendships like that are full of doubt and anxiety for me.)

As an autistic/adhder who struggles with reading vocal tone and expression, I rely on ‘am I annoying you’ and ‘are you angry’ on a regular basis because I genuinely need to know this information. ‘How are you feeling’ is useful if I actually want to know the other person’s general state of mind but the former are NEEDED because they are specific and to me, bored, thinking about something, tired, in pain and annoyed ALL LOOK THE SAME. Unless I ask, I am uncertain, and I might make my partner annoyed by misreading a situation. ASKING COSTS NOTHING and she answers me honestly. It saves time and stress on both our parts. I need specifics. Generalities might work for others, but for a lot of ND people, brutal, truthful nonambigious honesty is so, so much better. YMMV, but that’s my personal preference. I understand puns and idioms, but NT doublespeak? Why don’t NT people just say what they meeeeean? Seriously.

adhighdefinition:

BBC Horizon 2017: ADHD and Me with Rory Bremner

“For as long as I can remember, I had a really active brain. The problem is, when it gets too active… it jumps around all over the place, gets distracted by a million and one things when it’s supposed to be concentrating. I used to think that was just what it was like to be me. But recently, I’ve come to suspect that it’s what it’s like to have ADHD.”

lexrhetoricae:

adhighdefinition:

Things You Should Never Say to People with ADHD and Why!

People with sensory processing disorders like fibromyalgia and other chronic pain diseases have the same experience. Until I started talking to people with ADHD, I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to spend every waking minute feeling your clothes against your skin or cataloging the changes in sound and light and smell. It wasn’t until I watched Elementary and saw the characters around Sherlock not noticing sensory details around them that he picks up that I realized it’s not normal for brains to do this. 

Unlike folk with ADHD, though, I never had this experience full blown until I was in my twenties. It build gradually over about a decade, and I thought I’m just getting older.  I didn’t have these issues as a young child, so my lack of focus in my mid-20s  had to be age-related, not ADHD, right? 

And that’s how you trick yourself into thinking you’re normal for years. It’s easier than admitting difference, even as you carefully pick out only silk and pure cotton clothes, wash everything (including yourself) in unscented soap, and eat only a handful of foods (mostly sugar, because it’s boring and you don’t have to think about it much). 

Spoonies, pay attention: if you can’t focus, it may not just be the pain. What else is your brain, primed for pain signals, now also processing without end?