1y ago

I can't see how anyone thinks ADHD is a superpower.

Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.

I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.

Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I'll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It's not.

Ok, I'll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.

It's not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.

At this point it's been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I'm praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.

None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.

I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it's some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I'm even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.

The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying "nice work" when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there's something going on with me that's making it hard to cope with the demands of life but "atleast he's trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude".

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I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and then pursued a psychiatrist to oversee my treatment, who determined I didn't have ADHD.
The way he described my situation made the "ADHD superpower" meme make more sense than anything I've ever read. I'm gonna butcher it but I'll do my best to share:
There are structural differences in the brain that contribute to a person having ADHD, but the structural differences themselves ARE NOT ADHD. The last D in ADHD is "disorder", and there are a whole bunch of external circumstances that mental health professionals use to determine whether or not you count as "disordered".
You can have an addictive, impulsive, obsessive, stim-hungry brain and not have ADHD.
Many children develop habits, coping strategies, or other accommodations that allow them to "overcome" the weaknesses that come along with these brain structure differences.
This is the situation where ADHD looks like a superpower.
In my case I have a very, very easy time slipping into flow state. When I'm intensely focused on a task I am time blind, I often don't respond to questions or acknowledgements, and I have an intense temper if I'm interrupted. So I've used timers and meditation/CBT to manage those drawbacks.
By comparison most people I know have a difficult time motivating themselves and accessing flow state. So to those people, especially when they DON'T see the extra work I do, it could look like I have a sort of super power.
It's not a super power, my brain just works differently and I've come up with ways to manage the problems and use it to my advantage.
- CBT as a coping mechanism
  Oh god, ow
- lol. I finally see myself in this thread. Timers are king.
  I was diagnosed at like 8. Grappling with adhd’s weaknesses is a journey that never ends! Glad to see others cope in ways I do.
  I just started meditating and I can’t believe it took me so long to find it. Only a week in and I feel it’s going to be a game changer.
  Out of curiosity, how do you leverage meditation?

87 comments