Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I’ll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It’s not.
Ok, I’ll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It’s not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it’s been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I’m praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it’s some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying “nice work” when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there’s something going on with me that’s making it hard to cope with the demands of life but “atleast he’s trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude”.
I can kinda understand Autism, to an extent. Certain forms of high-functioning autism - like the one I have - are more akin to mild learning disorders. Deliberate practice and effort can mitigate a great deal of the issues.
On the other side, I’ve seen people with more extreme forms of the condition and I can’t imagine having to deal with that. I know I can be difficult to deal with and I work really hard to try to mitigate my shortcomings with others - especially people who don’t know me well - but I pale in comparison to the difficulty of people with more extreme forms of Autism.
In this way, I think ADHD and Autism are probably similar - there’s a spectrum of impact the condition has. The milder forms of the condition may actually feel like a superpower to those that shape themselves to utilize their quirks in their favor. The problem arises when all forms of the condition are considered beneficial when they are demonstrably not.
Hell, even I have problems that no amount of learning can ever overcome. You can’t exactly teach yourself how to pick up on the subconscious body language queues that most people just know inherently. I’m totally blind to that stuff and it makes intense conversations incredibly difficult and a little terrifying.