As a kid, I wasn't taught any concept that there's a difference between wanting to do something, and enjoying it. I was a largely unsupervised kid with undiagnosed ADHD and parents who expected their kids to just raise themselves on their own. So when I was capable of spending hours drawing or reading a fun book, but couldn't even remember that I had homework, ever, I was told that I simply didn't want to do well in school. And who was I to question that, I'm eight years old.
Enjoyment and passion were the only forms of motivation I knew, and if I couldn't make myself either love doing boring math homework as much as I loved my hobbies, or force myself to push through things I hated with sheer willpower alone because I want to succeed so bad, then clearly I was simply not as good as all the other kids, who could do that. And that attitude carried onto adulthood. Every time I struggled to muster genuine love and passion into something, I thought that I just don't want it badly enough. Not to enough to love it, or to suffer through it.
Being medicated for the first time was a game changer. Like holy shit, so this is your brain on dopamine. And suddenly I wanted to do things, turned my life around, took up the passion career I had never dared to try. And when the first "honeymoon phase" of the meds wore down, the same fear came back - I don't like this anymore, do I not want it bad enough? What else could I possibly want?
And I shit you not I was literally 30 years old when I understood that life isn't just either loving every minute of pursuing a passion that you love, or joylessly dragging yourself through things that you don't even want to do. I can just tell myself "just because I don't like doing this doesn't mean I don't want to be doing it." It's not a mark of failure, weakness or lack of motivation, if sometimes the career you want to be doing just feels like having a job.
people make fun of people with ADHD for saying that everything is a symptom of ADHD. and that's fair. it's annoying. but please understand. having ADHD is an endless conga line of realizations that some shit you thought had nothing to do with your ADHD is actually a symptom of ADHD. so eventually you're just like "probably that too, yeah, fuck it" whenever basically anything happens
how it feels to listen to an album in order
^ me & the artist sharing their beautiful vision for a cohesive work of art
One of my favorite visual gags is drawing a passive/bubbly character with cartoon-y style eyes, but changing their eyes to be realistic whenever something annoys them:
Whatever the person behind SparkNotes' twitter is being paid it's not enough pt. you can't pay me to dig up which part this is
Made a chart about my three favorite families. Hope this helps.Β
does anyone want to start another dancing plague with me
i am a menaceMy name is Babyπ¦they/them/theirs dey/deren/dessen it/itsπ¦π¦This is my blog about all my favourite things: Bob's Burgers, The Simpsons, Halloween, Literature, Witchcraft, History π¦π¦ A-gender π¦π¦A-sexual π¦π¦A-romanticπ¦π¦ A-utistic π¦π¦A-DHDπ¦π¦I like peppermint ice cream, sour gummybears, salt'n'vinegar chips, pickles, ranch dressing and peanut butter m&ms π¦π§ββοΈπ¦π¦πΈοΈππ§ββοΈπ»π
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