This is amazing! AMAZING. Chronic illness does its best to strip you of your dignity, your control, and your identity. This is a great example of how things that might seem trivial to a healthy person, can make all the difference in someones life.
my art, slapping me mercilessly: stop pretending that a simple box of color counts as a background you stupid sonuvabitch u stupid motherfucker stop it
me, spitting out blood: w h ,,at if it had a gradient tho,,
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.
Nonono, fuck sorting socks but don’t buy them all the same colour. Just embrace wearing mismatching socks! It’s more colorful! Why did you want boring matching ones anyway!?
I mean, it was never by choice :p but I used to have a regular conforming job where everything about your appearance was scrutinized right down to the color of your socks if they happened to be visible.
I once got in trouble for wearing mismatched colorful socks cause it looked “unprofessional” and I remember just sitting there like buddy, you’re lucky I showed up at all.
This was also the place that forbade “bright or unnatural hair or nail colors” and I had to take my ear cuffs off before each shift. God I hated that place.
Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD by Susan Pinsky is a good book.
I own it, have read it several times, and re-reading it remind me to brutally purge the dumb shit I impulse-buy.
I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone with ADHD. The author is a professional organizer for people, has an ADHD daughter, and the 2nd edition has all her little tips and tricks that worked with her own family, and with her clients that she realized were exhibiting ADHD symptoms.
