Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot: Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.
Child says, “I can’t do this.”
Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.
Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.
Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.
The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.
The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:
-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.
-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.
-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.
-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.
I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.
But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.
#I wonder if this might potentially apply to people with autism as well?#because I haven’t been diagnosed with adhd but MAN do I fee this#and like I had the situation a lot of people went through#breezed through elementary and high school and in gifted and talented#but then college happened and I was LOST
There’s a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits. Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because I’m a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges.
A lot of “help” for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who aren’t, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.
Tag: ableism
“Omg look at this fucking shit, gluten free mascara, ahaha, people need to be fucking stopped.”
Yes, I’m sure the person with a wheat allergy wanting to avoid putting wheat containing things near their eyeballs is truly the reason society is failing.
Also if anyone does actually need gluten free mascara, Zuzu Luxe is one of the best I’ve been able to find. Hardly clumps and doesn’t flake off like a lot of the others. Their other products can be a little hit or miss texture wise, but the mascara is great.
I once saw a person point out that common allergens are in so many things, and it even has to do with “this facility uses it in another product but it’s still the same facility” and I stopped laughing. And then I felt bad. I was ignorant, but I didn’t think about like. My corn tortillas better not have gluten! They’re corn! And then I realized….same facility. Airborne particulates. Someone working on one line, accidentally dropping particulates in another line just by walking past.
Cause there are people who are *that* sensitive. And they deserve to be protected and have safe products.
I specifically do not take issue with people just not knowing things. Cause why the heck would anyone know things like that unless they ever had to? Why would you know wheat is a common ingredient in things like mascara or shampoo? I sure as shit didn’t till I started to piece together why my body went into meltdown every time I washed my hair.
What does get to me is how inherently shitty some people are about it. Like why is the first go to for things like this mockery? Why? I mean I know the answer is “society is inherently abelist even if people don’t realize they are doing it” but I’m still allowed to be frustrated by it. (It’s the same with infomercials. Those products are not lazy or worthless, they are designed for people with disabilities!)
And I know this seems like such an over reaction to something like someone in Walgreens being shitty over gluten free mascara haha. But it’s so much more than that.
So much of my daily life is emotional and mental labor just trying to spoon feed people how not to be unthinkingly mean all the time. And
it’s not like I can ever stop because this is my life. I am living in a
world not designed or meant to include me, so constant emotional and
mental labor is required to justify both myself and the things that make
my life easier.And I wish people would just think with a little more kindness sometimes. That’s all.
Hey uh so, full disclosure here, my dad is gluten intolerant/has celiac disease, and I didn’t know that having non-food gluten-free products was important too… I thought it only affected you if you ate the thing.
So then I think the problem is that people don’t know enough about gluten-free and think it’s some fad, because if you’re not gluten intolerant/cursed with celiac disease, then going gluten-free has no benefits, right? (not knowing these things still doesn’t excuse people mocking others’ needs, though.)
The thing is neither do a lot of people with celiac disease. It’s not something all doctors mention to their patients as a possible source for issue or contamination (why? usually because the doctor diagnosing it will be a GI doctor and not always an immunologist, and that’s a problem cause celiac is an auto-immune disease), so a lot of us wind up wondering why we are still presenting with flare ups and other issues when our diet is so strict and we do everything we can to control symptoms through diet.
The latest trend of using wheat by-product to make compostable paper plates and cups has me on edge too, cause I’ve been handed a cup of water in one of those cups at a venue before and not realized until I’ve drank most of it and felt my throat start to constrict and realized that I am in Danger. And I’d have never known Why if the person hadn’t started talking about their cool hippy biodegradable cups which I thought were paper, but were paper spliced with wheat-by-product.
And the thing is, those things are marketed as “allergen safe” cause in theory the protein has been processed to death, but as anyone with severe allergies or celiac will tell you, even the smallest, tiniest amount can be enough to trigger a reaction.
So you’re right, not enough people understand what it is, or how severe it can be. And you could argue that part of this is because people treat it like a fad diet and a thing to be mocked vs say, a peanut allergy where people (though not everyone) respects the severity of what that can entail. But honestly, given how prevalent wheat allergy has become in the last couple of decades, it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people, even those without actual celiac, have found some sort of relief through cutting out wheat products (ie their issue is not necessarily gluten but wheat) so in all honesty, who gives a shit. Allergies, diseases and yes, even food preferences need to be fucking respected. Which they currently are not.
i'll apple your turnover 