I gotta ask, how do people, like, do stuff???

Michael Schneider

My specialty at work (eg, what I tend to get thrown into) is wrangling clever but extremely poorly behaved children. (The children are adolescent, but children nonetheless.) They tend to be boys. They tend to have ADHD. (It's possible that the focus on the clever rules out the ADHD girls, who have cleverly developed better masking skills by adolescence.)

The current bright and terrible-on-purpose disaster, A, is aware of the ADHD diagnosis but has apparently been told nothing about the disability. So a lot of our conversations go like this:

Me: Well, I'd ask you why you decided to start making richly detailed but extremely inappropriate jokes during class, but I'm pretty sure the answer is that someone started yelling at you for doing it before you realized that you were.

A, leaning backward, looking concerned: Are you following me?

Me: Yes, that's what I do with the spare time I don't have during the day, follow aggravating children around. We have so few of them here.

A, put out either because I've called him aggravating or because he's not special and aggravating: Sarcasm isn't very nice, Ms. T.

Me, sarcastically: I'm so sorry. Maybe you looked at the work first, thought boring, and then decided to be an enormous brat.

A: You can read minds?!

--

Me: Clearly we need executive dysfunction strategies for you, because if we don't get in front of it you'll be an adult who sits on their sofa for forty minutes yelling at herself to do the dishes and never does them.

A, trying to politely muffle laughter: Are you doing all right, Ms. T?

Me: Out of dishes, but fine. What's working in your classes? Your Literature grade is good, why are you doing the reading?

A looks left. Right. Up. At his phone.

Me: ... You aren't doing the reading, are you? The other kids ask questions because they don't understand it, and you figure out what it has to be about from the answers and never read.

A: Are you in my Lit class??

--

Me: Okay, look, ADHD brains are weird, and we tend to get them from our families, so these -

A, immediately: My dad.

Me, derailed from my drug interaction speech: Yeah, okay. When your dad has coffee, does he get calmer?

A, backing away: You're stalking my whole family now?!

A lot of us have trouble with self-care because we were taught by early caregivers never to put our own self-interest first.

Here’s the thing: in a perfect society, people would look out for each other, right? Because each person deserves to have people looking out for them. But sometimes there isn’t another person who can take care of you.

You are the person with the primary responsibility of looking out for you. 

Little kids’ parents have that primary responsibility, but when the kid reaches a certain age, they are the one with that primary responsibility.

Yes, you have some level of obligation to take care of friends and family and the needy, but the one person everyone can agree that you definitely have the responsibility to take care of is you. 

Think of it like a logic puzzle. Every person deserves to have somebody taking care of them. You are in a situation where nobody else is going to take care of you or nobody else can take care of you. You still deserve to have somebody taking care of you, and you are the person with the primary responsibility to do that. 

Yes, there are times when we don’t put ourselves first, for whatever reason, but for a lot of us, we have abandoned ourselves and have stopped fulfilling that responsibility to care for ourselves. You are as deserving of care as anybody else, and you are your primary caregiver: if you don’t do it, who will?

Listen, if you interrupt me with a new task while I’m midway through another, you aren’t allowed to be mad when I switch to the new task immediately. You clearly thought the new task was important enough to interrupt me with it!

I am just a little pikmin! You’re the one with the whistle!!

it concerns me that people really don’t know that adhd isn’t a personality type or behavioral problem.

adhd isn’t someone who’s personality is driven by fun and disorder.

adhd is someone who’s brain goes all over the place looking for dopamine, because it doesn’t make or register enough of it, and when it finds a source of dopamine, it hyperfixates on it. it’s about deregulation of attention as well as emotions.

it’s not a person who can’t behave. a person with adhd can look like a lot of things. misconceptions about what adhd looks like kept me from even looking for a diagnosis, and it also kept myself and others (professionals, even) from taking my suspicions seriously.

everyone’s encouraged to reblog, but if you don’t have adhd, keep your additions to the tags.