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.
How do you balance this with your partners compulsive need for everything to be exactly so?
No matter how much either of us does we’re both still so frustrated…
I also have compulsive tendencies, so I can somewhat relate to this. And the answer probably lies in getting them to address their unhealthy perfectionism and why they feel the need to be in control and have everything be “exactly so” all the time.
Unhealthy perfectionism, while not exclusive to this, can also go hand in hand with ADHD because we’re always having to struggle so much more to get things Right to appease others, so it can become an unhealthy coping mechanism to shield us from criticism which can feel especially bad if you are a person with ADHD who also has rejection dysphoria disorder. Which I do. And a neat freak of a mother who used to scream if you didn’t do something “exactly so”. Perfectionism was my only way to protect myself for a long, long time, and it has destroyed a lot of my self worth and my ability to just live my life and get shit done. And it made me hugely angry at others for not doing things “exactly so” cause I couldn’t understand why they just didn’t care enough to do something “right”. Now I know.
Therapy has helped a lot. And a good book for me has been “Better Than Perfect” by Dr Elizabeth Lombardo. The test near the front of the book really hammered home just how incapacitated I was by my need to have things be “perfect” as a coping mechanism for other stressors.
Also cause people were asking, here’s the ADHD organization book:
When I first got officially diagnosed last month…month before…I went out and read a million and one self help books, and this by far was the most helpful for actually getting me to unfuck my living habitat and thus get into a better mental head space. Most of them just talked a big game about uncluttering your life and going minimalist, and while Pinsky also talks about culling your possessions to get them down to a manageable level, she is by no means promoting an aesthetic lifestyle. One of her opening chapters is, to paraphrase it “sure this looks ugly, but if it helps you to shower without obstacles, who cares”.
(I’m posting this less to correct the timeline portrayed in Bohemian Rhapsody, which I mostly really enjoyed, than simply to share a beautiful story that shines light on who Freddie actually was, up to the very end.)
Can we talk about how cute this year’s seasonal transition google doodles were? Who was the artist who did these? I can’t find any information on who it was.
ealdor 