The Key to Managing ADHD is Meeting Yourself Where You Are

If we have to meet other people in our lives where they are in personal and professional capacities, we can do the same for ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand all this productivity porn.

Like I get stabbier than the original gangs of New York every time I see those headlines with the same old stories and “tips” dredging up in my feed.

We get it, Chad. You get SO MUCH done because you don’t have things like chronic pain, a mental illness, shitty housing, and conveniently neglect to mention how much your labor is subsidized by a wife or girlfriend if not a parent. The rest of us are just not as smart as you for figuring these things out!

Yes, I’m getting gendered here because I notice that it’s primarily privileged white men who write these pieces taking up all this real estate that could go to other writers in more underserved groups who write about more under-discussed topics. And while there’s zero shame in hiring help like housekeepers or virtual assistants, there’s also a major double standard in that a man who hires one is smart, but a woman who does it is some lazy Karen who’s neglecting her family and thinks she’s too good for this kind of work.

But there’s one thing that makes productivity porn so insidious.

I cannot help but think that these articles solely exist to make neurodivergent people feel like complete garbage about themselves.

That if we’re not getting things done, it’s because we’re just lazy.

That we’re simply choosing to be slackers.

That even if we have ambitions, dreams, and so on, we’re not actualizing them because we just don’t believe enough or just can’t manage our time well.

That we’re just doing things wrong, which we’ve likely been told our entire lives.

When in fact, we ARE trying. We’re trying fucking hard but are up against systemic barriers. When you spend your whole life being told you’re not trying hard enough, that you’re to blame for not making enough effort, but we still JUST. CAN’T. FOCUS.

People around you aren’t exactly nice and understanding about it, either. Maybe it’s different nowadays since we discuss mental health more often and more frankly, but ADHD was not really discussed when I was younger. It definitely was not recognized in girls, it was considered a “rowdy boy thing”.

ADHD also isn’t the only type of neurodivergence. But it’s the one I’ve got and as much as I hate the overuse of this term, I had my ADHD “redpill moment” in 2019, at the age of 34 when things finally began to make sense.

Now that I’ve had two years under lockdown to learn more about ADHD in the greater sense of things and what makes mine tick, SO many things make even more sense now!

And my god, it makes the productivity porn even more sickening. You just can’t do half the crap on those lists when you have some form of ADHD.

So, ADHD is a many-tentacled hydra.

It manifests in people differently, and it can co-exist with other neurodivergences like autism, PTSD, general anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and numerous other personality disorders and ways that your brain is wired from trauma. ADHD can also be traumagenic.

In fact, ADHD often gets mistaken for autism or bipolar disorder — and vice versa — particularly in women.

As I say in that linked essay above, ADHD is a lot like a phone battery. Executive dysfunction and function are like the battery’s nodes. Some things generate more electrons for us while others sap them away faster than they would in a neurotypical person.

Just like how electronics vary by age and maker, so do our brains. We have to set reasonable expectations for OURSELVES and our unique limits and circumstances.

Understanding this doesn’t discount things like medications and therapy, or taking other steps to accommodate yourself with home and career setups. But a big part in managing ADHD is simply knowing yourself and meeting yourself where you are.

One of the hallmarks of undiagnosed ADHD is when you are constantly feeling overwhelmed, to the point you feel like having a nervous breakdown, crying, throwing shit, you name it.

I’ve experienced this when I’ve taken on too much work for my own good. With stressful long-term situations like my pending cross-country move, my executive function has been horrible and the overwhelm is making me feel like constantly having a breakdown. (I already had a major one, if you read that piece I just linked.) But even though I have control over my time, client list, workload, and so on as a small entrepreneur, it’s made me take all this neurotypical babble about productivity and just working harder to heart regarding my projects, which then crashed because of ADHD perfectionism.

Then take things like the expectation to cook at home several days a week when I’m one freaking person and I need to focus on earning.

ADHD-friendly recipes are only possible with a real kitchen and I didn’t have that privilege in shitty apartments that lacked things like prep space and a dishwasher, and were constantly under siege by roaches.

While I’m lucky to have a dishwasher in my condo and it’s free from pests, it’s still too short on space to do much. This is a bachelor/ette condo meant for someone who’s rarely home and never has to cook for more than two people. Which was great when I traveled all the time pre-COVID, toughing out the pandemic was one of many things that made me want to sell.

Once I realized that this expectation of five home-cooked dinners a week was a relic of the postwar era when someone (usually a woman) stayed home to subsidize a primary breadwinner (usually a man) and no, you’re not ACTUALLY supposed to do everything for your household when you have to focus on bringing home money?

I stopped feeling bad and began to meet myself where I am with food prep things, stretching my takeout, and so on. That and come on, I don’t live in a city with some of the world’s greatest food to eat slop at home all the time, screw that.

Plus, I feel worse about all the produce and other things I kept routinely throwing out because they rotted or expired. I know my degree of executive function now and learned to stop wasting money on these things!

So when some preachy MF gets in your face about not doing your dishes, ordering out often, or sticking to microwave cuisine? Tell them they’re welcome to cook for you and reimburse you for all the things that wound up in the trash when you tried to meet this dumb and unrealistic social expectation.

Or perhaps they can go to your kitchen and have a nice big cup of shut the fuck up if they can’t meet you where you are.

Clutter is another one. I want to prevent it before it accumulates, and I have special considerations as a short woman who also has physical disabilities.

For this one? I swear to god, if you tell the next short person in your life to “just get a stepladder”, it matters not if they’re also neurodivergent on top of being short.

Because I’m gonna tell you where you can shove that stepladder. Got it?

In my loudest Joan Crawford impression: No. More. STEPLADDERS!!!!!

This “advice” has an extra layer of obnoxiousness as an ADHDer. Because in addition to the injury risks a neurotypical person would want to avoid, many ADHDers are “out of sight, out of mind”.

If it got on that top shelf, it’s never coming down. End of story. I need to be able to reach for things, especially if I use them regularly.

Instead, every builder of every apartment in the universe assumes you are the same height as Peter Steele. And that if you’re under 5’7”, it’s because you’re a child or elderly person dependent on someone else.

So this is a pressing accessibility issue! Stepladders are the stupid fucking neoliberal answer to this problem, like making someone give up their car to get food stamps.

How I met myself where I am on this: shelves, baby. If you’re not very handy and the thought of drilling your drywall and mounting standards and brackets makes you queasy, fear not. The Billy bookcase from IKEA is your friend. I used a hand-me-down bookcase plus a $25 Closetmaid attachment as a pantry for a decade because I could only reach the bottom shelf in my kitchen cabinets. IKEA, Amazon, Target, and so on have very inexpensive options for this, as do thrift stores and shopping at the curb!

And speaking as someone who’s got a cross country move coming up, moving sales are a great way to get free or cheap storage and shelving for very short people.

As an executive dysfunction bonus: you can move bookcases, shelving units, sideboards, and those cube storage Closetmaid thingies with you to different housing, or you can easily leave them at the curb without having to dismount them, and risk having your security deposit dinged either way. Win-win!

So if you need to meet yourself where you are in “out of sight, out of mind”, find ways to get more shelving and visible storage in your home. Labeling helps too, especially if you’re like me and can remember photographic details of extended family who died 20 years ago but cannot remember for the life of you where you put your Costco card.

By meeting yourself where you are with things, you set reasonable expectations for yourself and avoid the overwhelm and perfectionism that makes ADHDers crash.

You break it down into, “If I’m suffering with X or Y and/or have Z conditions or constraints, I’m going to have trouble with or will never do A, B, and C.”

“If my workspace is uncomfortable and cluttered, I won’t be able to get my work done.”

“If I’m tired and can’t reach shit in my kitchen, I’m not cooking.”

“If I know I have to leave for something in an hour, I won’t be able to focus on things demanding a higher degree of concentration and attention to detail.”

I know my executive dysfunction is going to be so horrendous until my move is over and I can stop worrying about moving dates, packing, pickup, and the ten million things with selling my home. So I’m meeting myself where I am. I got a 10-day pass pack for a coworking space because it’s Radiator Season, which means I cannot focus in this boiling dump whatsoever and I’m going to be this perimenopausal zombie functioning on 4 hours of sleep until I clear out.

I lament that I internalized all that messaging that I wasn’t trying hard enough. No. Now I set reasonable expectations, especially when in stressful times.

Nobody fakes having an affliction like ADHD. We fake being neurotypical to survive.