As Someone Recently Diagnosed With ADHD As An Adult, One Thing Thats Been Helping Me Grapple With The

As someone recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, one thing that’s been helping me grapple with the intense shame I have over all my “wasted potential” is accepting that potential doesn’t exist and never did.

This sounds so harsh, but please bare with me.

I procrastinated a lot growing up. I still procrastinate today, but less so. And yet, I got good grades. I could write an A+ paper that “knocked [my professor]’s socks off” in the hour before class and print it with sweat running down my face.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to!

And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

If ANYONE could make their top speed/most productive setting the one they used all the time, anyone could do anything. But you can’t. Your top speed is not a speed you’re able to sustain.

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

So all of this to say, I’m not wasting a ton of potential. I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

And if you have ADHD, I mean this from the bottom of my heart: you do not have limitless potential confounded by your laziness. You have the good potential of a good person, and you can access it with practice and work, but do not accept the story that you are choosing not to be all that you are or can be. You are just a human person.

Okay i know i myself have made jokes on Mr Darcy hating to spend time with Mr. Collins but. I feel like of the two of them Darcy is probably significantly less annoyed than Lizzie by Collins simply bc 1) he never received The most obnoxious proposal in the world from him 2) the combination of Darcy's superior rank and his not being an Elegant Female puts him in a position to just tell Collins to stop talking and probably be thanked for the privilege. Darcy probably just lets him talk for five minutes and then is all "hm. I'd like to meditate on that in silence for a while. Very intriguing." And gets like an hour of peace

“You were just flirting to get what you wanted?”

Adora Belle stopped dead in the middle of the square to confront him.

“And? You flirt with people all the time. You flirt with the whole world! That’s what makes you interesting, because you’re more like a musician than a thief. You want to play the world, especially the fiddly bits.”

-Terry Pratchett’s Making Money

“We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface”, The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

The teenager was asked to write a short scene or draw a short comic using a comedic trope from a list on a handout in their HS American Lit class. They chose to do the comic …

It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going around to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.

-Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic