My Mother With (probably) ADHD: Help I Get Focused Super Hard On One Project Or Business For A Few Months,

My mother with (probably) ADHD: Help I get focused super hard on one project or business for a few months, spend lots of money starting up said interest, then drop it before 6 months is up. Also I put all my effort into studying for a career I'm good at but has turned out to be super unfulfilling to me personally.

My sister with (probably) ADHD: Help I have difficulty experiencing empathy and get angry far too quickly. I especially can't handle scolding or reprimandation, no matter how light the issue is. Also Noises Are Bad.

Me, diagnosed as a child with ADHD: Help I experience extreme hyperfixations on fictional worlds and characters to the point of learning everything I can about the making of said media, studying the intricate lore within the world, or picking apart a character's psychology and finding headcanons where there probably aren't supposed to be any, and can channel my euphoria from said hyperfixations to help with school worl only sometimes. Also Noise Sensitivity and Sentimental Clutter Hoarding.

it's so stupid, adhd is a dozen vaguely related neuroses in a trench coat, including such popular hits as

Can't Fucking Sleep Disorder

Can't Fucking Wake Up Disorder

What Is A Focus

Oops I Did It* Again (*Spent Thirteen Hours On Youtube And Forgot To Eat Or Drink)

The World Is Too Noise Today

All My Friends Hate Me (I Deduced This From A Three Word Text)

I Forgot About [thing] Literally As Soon As I Turned Around

...and they decided to call it Trouble Sitting Still Disorder?????

that thing where you lay in bed and you’re ready to sleep but you are still in *thinking* mode so you just kinda lay there gesticulating while imagining youre making a youtube rant at the same time youre reimagining again and again the fanfic scene you wanna write if you actually had the capacity to think in words inteaad of really specific images and sounds anyway hate that whish it could be turned off

being a fan of a band with auditory processing problems is so funny bc i can listen to a song 300 times and be able to sing the whole thing and think i’m fine & suddenly one of y’all will post a lyric edit and i’m like... “you mean That’s what they’re saying???”

i love the feeling when someone asks me about one of my hyperfixations and it summons all my thoughts at once like my brain is a discord server that just got hit with an @everyone

That read like an extremely cohesive thought, to me!

“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”

— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

Okay but real quick can we talk about the fact that the events of The Nightmare Before Christmas only happened because Jack Skellington didn't know how to properly handle the rush of euphoria and hyperfocus on Christmas because Halloweentown has never even heard of the concept of ADHD, let alone gave its inhabitants the tools and coping mechanisms to deal in a safe way?

Because you KNOW the whole Christmas thing was 100% a Hyperfixation.

Also cultural appropriation but that's not the can of worms I want to open right now.