ERROR 301 (@realcaseyrollins@pleasehug.me) @realcaseyrollins@gameliberty.club

Decided to reupload an updated version of my #ADHD bingo results since I recognized that I indeed do have trouble switching tasks (even though I can multitask, interruptions are extremely frustrating, to an illogical point).

Is it just me, or are there no men out there talking about #ADHD? I look around and it seems to be mostly women.

There’s something to the framing of ADHD as a "superpower", I think, but it’s also unsatisfying.

Many things that most people find relatively easy seem to be very-hard-to-impossible for me (e.g. sending a form, planning a day, remembering to do a thing, staying with a hobby after I got the hang of it). And I find it easy to do some things that most people seem to find hard (devouring the entire textbook on the first week so that I'm done with the class for the semester; learning from widely divergent fields and combining them; taking big risks).

A lot of the ADHD material concentrates on what I lack, and how can I compensate for it, which is useful but kind of depressing. I’m curious about how to try to work with what my mind got, rather than forcing it to grudgingly fit average patterns of working.

There’s some neurodiversity material out there that treats ADHD as a superpower instead. For example, consider the fact that I always write my stuff on the last couple days.

Standard framing is blaming myself for my apparent perpetual laziness and irresponsibility.
Disability framing means being bummed about this incurable hardware defect that puts some sort of impassable repulsive force between me and The Thing.
Superpower approach is when Perpetua Neo (pause to appreciate her name!) calls it "timebending". Timebenders have little control over their powers, and will unconsciously bend a short interval (the time to take out the trash or shave) for hours without end. But in an emergency, they can also compress superhuman amounts of output into impressively small amounts of time.

I guess from one point of view it is kind of impressive that I can write a publication-quality, professionally worthy article in 2 days. I can look at the full list of my accomplishments and feel like I’m an impostor tricking everyone because 99% of the time my mind was jumping all over the place, and all I did was done in the remaining 1%. I can fantasise of how much I could achieve if I got that hyperfocus for even 50% of the time, and then be disappointed in myself because that feels physically impossible. Or, I could pat myself on the back because with this mere 1% time I could get all these titles, accolades, positions, monies.

But this doesn’t feel quite right, either. For one thing, it reeks of meritocracy, which is to say ableism. "The Power of Different" by Gail Saltz has some pretty interesting case studies of how neurodiversity can be leveraged and not just lamented. Sadly the subtitle is "The Link between Disorder and Genius". It buys into the myth of the genius wholesale, never considering how much "genius" is shorthand for "useful to capitalism", and never considering what happens to diverse minds who don’t qualify as "genius". For people like me, who spend their childhoods hearing "you’re such a genius, if just you tried a bit harder!", the word itself is filled with trauma.

I’m trying to think of this as not a disability and not a superpower, but something like a character class. Most ADHD books read like this: You’re a rogue. That means you can’t wield two-handed swords or full armour. Let’s discuss some mitigation strategies, like how to layer boiled leather with chainmail, and how to avoid dungeons with large monsters. "Superpower" materials instead read like this: You’re a rogue! Your DPS can be quadruplied ! wow! you’re first tier!

I figure what I should do instead is to stop trying to function as a defective fighter, and try to acknowledge my strengths and limitations without ranking ppl into tiers. (I always thought parties are more fun when the game is _un_balanced anyway.) Like if my DPS is all-or-nothing, is there a way to increase the rate of critical hits? If I have this big range of lateral skills like detecting traps and opening locks, maybe I should embark on adventures where they can be put to use, rather than purely kill-the-monster quests. If I’m forced to run through a gauntlet full of attacks from all sides (=distractions), don’t feel bad at taking a defensive potion to increase my AC to levels approaching that of a less fragile class. I’m stretching this metaphor way too far amn’t I.

In real life: on the one hand I can only work in short bursts, on the other I know I’ve done some pretty neat stuff in these short bursts. It is what it is, neither genius nor lazy. If I just accept that this ain’t changing anytime soon, then what? How does one make a living on short work bursts, without being fired or called lazy? Is there any technique to doing the bursts right at the start (the way I got through school and college), rather than right at the deadline or past it (as I do in grad school and professionally)? Can timebending be, at least to some degree, tamed?

- it doesn't always look like a boy being hyper and screaming jumping flipping tables.

it can also look like a shy kid being late, again, because there was a funny green bug, and a cat ran away, and check out this red flower, doesn't it kinda look like a fireflower from super mario, maybe mom could teach me to plant flowers?, and I wonder if that ice cream cart has jackfruit, and then you're almost ran over by a car.

(or, in the case of child me, you ran _into_ the car. while it's speeding.)

this is called an innatentive presentation, and it's though to be more common in girls, leading to underdiagnosis. it's still considered to be the same condition because both kids are suffering from understimulation and desperately trying to find something, anything to busy themselves with. the "h" part can look like hyperactivity of the mind, rather than bouncing around the room.

- the name is a misnomer, and a pretty misleading one at that.

there's no deficit of attention. in fact adhd ppl are notorious for paying inordinate amounts of attention to the most random things (‘hyperfocus’). they will manage to be attentive to stuff that everybody else filters out.

the difficulty is in controlling what the attention latches onto, and how much of it to dispense. alternative names proposed include ‘executive function disorder’, ‘attention regulation deficit disorder’, and in a positive framing, ‘variable attention stimulus trait’.

- adhd and autism overlap somewhat in symptoms

for example, adhd ‘hyperfocus’ can look a lot like spectrum ‘special interest’ (I suspect special interests are more long-lived). both are likely fidgety and trying to stim. both spectrum ppl and adhd will have trouble with conversational behaviour norms, turn-taking, word-dumping etc. (spectrum due to problems with unspoken cues and nonliteral language, adhd because (interrupts you)—ever notice that the word "because" is made of "be" and "cause" (in German the prefix be- like this is very productive and it's an unaccented prefix (which is important because of this thing called separable verbs, where if the prefix is accented... (goes on opening a few more parentheses; won't rest until closing all of them properly))).

difficulty with social norms will lead to bad experiences which may cause social anxiety, correlated to both traits.

this overlap in symptoms means if you have one trait, you'll score higher than average in tests for the other, without meaning you have both. otoh...

- autism, adhd, dyslexia, gender issues are all correlated

(I hate the word ‘comorbidity’).

the new large-scale study on the connection between trans ppl and autism is notorious. but previous (smaller) studies suggest about just a strong a connection between gender stuff and adhd, and the intersection between the spectrum and adhd seems even bigger, and some 20~40% of adhd ppl have dyslexia (which in my opinion is less a ‘mental disorder’ than a hardware issue in implementing this weird new brain hack that connects an out-of-manual wire between the 3d edge detection module and the language module, a mod which we call ‘reading’).

trying to take a wider view, adhd and autism diagnoses are clusters of symptoms, and AFAICT it's not very clear yet the extent to which items in each box occur together vs. inter-boxically. irl ppl seem to be able to show some symptoms from each box. maybe you took ‘can't process faces and social cues’ from the spectrum box, but not ‘needs routine and known patterns’, preferring ‘needs stimulus from constant novelty’ from the adhd box.

I suspect these labels and models will probably be redrawn as our knowledge of weird brain stuff improves.

- adhd is significantly hereditary (35~75%)

so if you have a diagnosis, you might want to take a closer look at your parents/children, and vice-versa.

#adhd

> photog.social
> Runs Mastodon instead of Pixelfed.

A paperclip is a WAY better file attachment icon than the upload arrow.

From the AP:
14F4ADEC-E6E4-4A76-A639-EB3212C…

hell is real

Soapbox FE 1.1 is going to be a very grand release. It’s surprising how much we’re able to pack into a short period of time. It help when there’s major innovation on the backend.

image.png

@realcaseyrollins >rainbows

@realcaseyrollins this is most masto instances