Come Suck At Life With Me
Because Doing It Alone Isn't Working
We have an unlimited supply of knowledge and learning and understanding and science backed findings and videos and charts and infographics about our ADHD, and yet…
How’s that laundry? Still piling up? How many jobs did we apply for this week? Have we applied the learnings at all or just thought about whether or not it might work?
That type of question usually makes me feel shame. I don’t like feeling shame. But what if we took the sting out of the shame? Made it less craptastic by admitting it? Being cool that it exists? Don’t have to embrace it, but we don’t have to run from it either.
Rather than fight it with intense cognitive reframes, or run from it with alcohol or drugs, or dwell on it in a downward spiral…what if we allowed it?
The missing component of all this learning we have embarked on since we discovered it’s ADHD is the “doing of the things.” Doing the thing is still on the menu, and yet many of us aren’t ordering it. We keep ordering procrastination, or one of the other 5000 words/reasons/excuses for “not doing the thing”.
Feels shamerrific. Big deal. Wanna lean into the shame of it all with me? This has been my personal way into the actual “doing”, so maybe it helps. If not, chuck it in the garbage.
My brain tells me I suck. My brain tells me this will never work. My brain is big turd. What if I stopped listening to it, and I joined up with some other people who had a similar struggle? And what if we had more levity about it?
The most growth I have ever seen in my life happened when I got over the idea that I can peel off and cocoon myself. This idea that I can internally change and simply will myself into being a person who has their shit together like a normie. “It’ll be great” I’ll think, and then I would emerge this amazingly productive butterfly. And everyone would see the new me!
I’ve tried that approach so many goddamn times. I’d say I tried that for the better part of a couple decades, pre-diagnosis of my ADHD and depressive disorder.
Usually the end result is failure and the inner dialogue of “What the fuck is wrong with me? I suck! I’m broken!”
It is nice to hear on the internet that “I’m not broken.” But that resonates as wishful bullshit half the time to me. Yeah, I get it on paper, and I agree, on paper. But reframes don’t tend to work when my brain is all-powerful and tells me what it believes is “the actual truth.” So I’m left nodding and saying, “Yes, I’m not broken!” and yet feeling broken on the inside. Another mask for my ‘pretend to be a normie’ life costume.
My answer now, and every other time when a thing worked, always included other people. But those other people had to be specific. I know, because again…I’ve tried!
Normie productivity places don’t tend to have an open forum to celebrate the things we feel embarrassed to brag about. Things like “I brushed my teeth today” or “I did my laundry ANNNNND put it away.” If I called my mom up today and I told her I did ALL my dishes, she’d jokingly say, “What do you want, a cookie? You’re 50!” And we’d both laugh because, yeah, it’s fucking ridiculous when I say it out loud!
Our well-meaning spouses and our well-meaning friends do these technically simple things, suffer through these things, manage these things, and giving ME a high-five for it would feel weird to them. No biggie. My brothers aren’t going to celebrate my laundry with me. I don’t expect them to, either. The world isn’t a bunch of psychologists proficient at holding space for every possible diagnosis…yet. There are a lot of advocates out there doing the good work of educating the normies and making the world a better place. In the meantime, I’d like to help us get to doing the work while all that greatness is underway for future generations.
There are entire communities of adults with ADHD who show up every single day to high-five anything and everything. We are adults with ADHD who, in our various unique ways, have a tendency to suck at life.
Some people suck at exercise.
Some people suck at addictive behaviors.
Some people suck at putting in their solopreneur grind.
I’m sorry, I’m just sharing my own suckitudes…there are also others. We have laundry suckies, to-do list suckies, resume updating suckies and job searching suckies, media binge-ing suckies, and doomscroller suckies. The ADHD community has some sucktastic shit going on!
And to get on the other side of it, in my experience, requires other people. We make up games for life’s basic bullshit. We body double. We create accountability partnerships. And the result of it all? We get shit done. We move our needle forward. We do the fucking laundry. We declutter our rooms. We apply for jobs. We improve at our current jobs.
I highly recommend finding the right people to share your sucking at life with. Your ADHD community will help you remember to “do the things”, and will celebrate your laundry when nobody else in your life will.
These communities are everywhere! Seek them out! The big places like ADDA and CHADD have all kinds of stuff going on. Google em. And you can always try ours. We are the ultimate sandbox for ‘doing of the things’ at ADHDBB.
You can always suck at life with us! Life with ADHD and depression is hard enough. No need to do it alone. ‘Other people’ is the fix.