Susan | 30+ | Multifandom Blog | Currently OBSESSED with Thai BL | Occasional Writer | Full time Lunatic | sailorbryant on AO3 | consortofkings is my hobbit blog
I see a lot of people joking about the adhd thing of “I have a appointment/phone call at 3pm, guess I won’t do anything all day!”
But no one seems to make the connection that it’s a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.
Can I go to the store? It’s 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON’T KNOW!
I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I’m aware that I don’t know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I’ve been like “hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that’ll take like 15 minutes!” and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.
Plus there’s also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.
Like, let’s say you decide to play a video game. You’ve got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it’s 2:49 and you haven’t showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you’re asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)
And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it’s great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You’ve got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you’re getting stuff done you’ve been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.
You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don’t have the drive to write them down. You can’t force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You’ve left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.
So next time you don’t even start. There’s not time. You’ve been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?
My point is that people seem to be going “lol I can’t do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm” like this is a quirky “oh I’m so scatterbrained!” weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.
(and that’s not even getting into the secondary effects. If you know that having an appointment ruins your whole damn day, you’re going to avoid them. Even when it’s things like “going to that party” or “meeting your friends for a drink/game” or “going to a movie with that cute girl from your math class”. Things you should enjoy. Things that’d help you be social. Things that make you feel human.)
All of this. But also: you can use this information once you have it.
One of the biggest breakthroughs for me in living more comfortably with my adhd happened years before I was actually diagnosed, when I finally grasped the meta concept that my brain doesn’t understand time. That I could not trust myself to make estimates of how long something would take, especially “low value” tasks like commuting to work (I mean, it wouldn’t be FAIR for it to take more than, oh, five minutes, right?) or “high value” takes that absorb me (I reeeeallly want to work on that craft project, I can finish it up in five minutes and then do the other stuff, right?
So I started timing everything.
Seriously. I timed my journey to work from front door to desk, and I wrote that number down. It took a few goes, because I forgot to check the timer when I arrived the first couple of times, but once I had a number, I added ten minutes. Then I subtracted that total from the time I needed to arrive at work.
Then I wrote that new time down and said, “this is the time I need to leave the house to go to work”, and set an alarm every day for that time.
The alarm helped, but more than anything it was the act of doing the cold hard numbers calculation. Of looking at that time (8.20 AM if you’re wondering) written down and learning it like a New Fact, visualising it in my head: 8.20 is when I leave the house for work. Even if my brain is whispering that SURELY that’s too early.
Then I did the same thing for a bunch of other stuff. Other journeys. The washing up. Having breakfast. And over time I got two things out of it:
1. I amassed a little collection of Time Facts that I don’t have to think about any more because I’ve learned them by heart. I know what time to leave the house to get to the appointment because it’s maths I’ve already done, I just have to grab the appropriate number from my mental list.
2. I got better at estimating time in general, because I could compare known times to new ones (do I think this task takes as long as the washing up? Longer? Shorter?)
3. The combination of 1 and 2. slowly gave me back a sense of trust in myself. I didn’t have to be in waiting mode all the time because I knew that I had a concrete time when I had to leave for X, and I would often set an alarm for it, and that until then I could let go and get on with things.
It doesn’t work perfectly or fix everything. I am still very familiar with “can’t do anything because I have a thing at 3”. There are still times I get too absorbed or forget an alarm or drastically underestimate how long something takes. But overall, just having the basic self knowledge of “I can’t instinctively estimate time so I have to do it by recording hard data and memorising that” was a game-changer. I hope it helps someone else.
(And if it doesn’t, remember that you’re fighting against the current on this one, and it’s not your fault if you can’t get far upstream. This is a “here is something that worked for me” post, not an “anyone could get past this if they tried” post.)
im really stoned and sleep deprived and im thinking about some of the “about” pages ive seen from young tumblr users and im like. who tf is out here telling 14 year old kids that they gotta put shit like a detailed description of all of their potential social privileges next to a summary of their medical history on public display. Who told them to do that. i don’t wanna see these poor kids pinning detailed lists of their traumas next to words like “thin passing” to the top of their blogs so that every unknown passing stranger can immediately see it. kids whoever is telling u that is wrong ok. im in my mid 20s and I don’t even put my real name on most things online. ur allowed to just be on here and have fun. also don’t blindly trust strangers ok. pls be safe. go look at cat memes
This Google Drive AI scraping bullshit actually makes me want to cry. My entire life is packed into Google Drive. All of my writing over the years, all of my academic documents, everything.
I’m just so overwhelmed with all the shit I’m going to have to move. I’m lucky to have Scrivener, but online data storage has been super important as I’ve had so many shitty computers, and the only reason I haven’t lost work is because Google Drive has been my backup storage unit.
My partner has recommended gitlab to move my files to - it seems useful, and I can try and explain more about what it is and how it works when I get more familiar with it. I’m unsure if it’s a text editor, or can work that way. He was explaining something about the version history that I don’t quite understand right now but might later. I’m just super overwhelmed and frustrated that this is the dystopia we live in right now.
I’m so sad to see so many panicked posts about google docs when the original inflammatory post has been debunked and retracted.
Google is ONLY talking about publicly available data. Stuff that is in your drive DOES NOT COUNT as publicly available.
There are SO MANY companies that use drive and docs for proprietary information who would have MANY lawsuits to bring if it was discovered private drives were being scraped.
Now, I’m not saying NOT to swap writing programs because google docs is pretty pants as an actual word processor, and also, never ever have all your stuff only in one place, but I don’t want anyone to freak out that their writing isn’t safe.
Ah, guys, just to be clear, I realize most of you probably know this but I’m seeing it framed….weirdly, so –
Tumblr is not $30M in debt. You can’t get Tumblr out of the red by giving them $30M. I mean you can, for a bit, but Tumblr is operating at a $30M deficit. That means yearly, Tumblr is spending $30M more than it earns.
None of this is to say we can’t have a Crab Day and try to get that $30M covered, sounds like fun! But that just means Tumblr breaks even for the current fiscal year. Tumblr has investors that want profits (or, well, I guess it’s Automattic’s investors, but regardless they want profit), so in order for it to continue operation, it has to either become Genuinely Profitable Very Quickly, or it has to do a fundraising round of some kind and get even more investors on board, which is really just kicking the problem down the road a year or two.
And either way, the extremely slick and semi-alarming pitch Tumblr is making about all the changes it’s going to make to increase engagement and such is still going to be necessary, because that’s where the money is, unfortunately. I don’t like it either (my favorite bullet point from that pitch is that they will email people who have their notifications turned off, because sure, that sounds like it won’t annoy anyone who like me was already overly inclined to be annoyed) but like. Baby needs a new pair of shoelaces.
None of this is to be alarmist or anything, I just got a bit worried about all this talk of $30M in debt, because this is not a one-time deal.
Some people have been saying that Kawi’s character is alluding to the rumors about Krist and Krist’s reputation after his infamous outburst at people years ago asking whether the actor is gay.
I was like: nah, that is such a reach though…
Be My Favorite EP.8:
Oh.
OH.
Maybe there IS indeed a message they included through Kawi (especially celebrity!Kawi that Krist admittedly took himself as a reference for). The BL industry didn’t have any rules and boundaries back then, Krist was harassed, that’s a fact, how you feel about his reaction – depends on the person.
It is also interesting how we see the reaction of Pisaeng and not Kawi’s face while he says that. It makes sense in the story because that whole conversation hurts Pisaeng and is focused on his feelings, but also let me see the symbolism in it – that BL fans never gave such generosity to Krist: they never looked into him as a person, didn’t even want to see his face/his real self, didn’t ask him to clarify what he meant by this, instead they took and ran with it through someone else’s hurt who interpreted it differently (as Kawi never wants someone to even think that he’s romantically involved with Pisaeng) that it was intended (he is uncomfortable with the invasive private questions and he hasn’t been able to honestly sort it inside himself and Pisaeng yet).
