Aujourd'hui, l'enfant a choisi de faire son jour off (une fois par mois, elle a le droit a un joker où elle ne va pas à l'école mais elle doit rattraper le travail qui a été fait). Le soir, la neuropsy a vu une poulette qui n'avait pas la fatigue liée à sa journée scolaire. Résultat : elle était surprise de son agitation extrême. Je lui ai parlé des difficultés pour les devoirs et du temps très important qu'on passe dessus. Elle m'a dit qu'effectivement elle n'avait jamais pensé à un TDAH mais que c'est fort possible
#ActuallyAutisticFR et finalement sûrement #ActuallyADHD

@actuallyautistic A few weeks in, I'm starting to see: this is and will be a long journey requiring me to understand myself more deeply than ever before. If I do not, I will remain as disabled as I am now. When I have a small success, identifying a (seemingly) new trigger, I am now seeing it as an invitation to let something go.

Letting go is not easy but it is easier than confrontation. There will certainly be times to confront but I will choose those; confrontation requires more energy and has a higher cost.

Sensory unmasking is brutal. It is almost like learning how to ride a bike all over again but without training wheels. But I am learning.

I plan to travel to the UK this summer. Does anyone has combined autism / ADHD printouts that fit a sunflower lanyard? #ActuallyAutistic #ActuallyADHD #AuDHD

Been playing on https://www.erionmud.com and am thoroughly enjoying the crafting system. Having the option to just work uninterrupted, in familiar patterns, appeals to my #ActuallyAutistic need for structure and familiarity, while when my #ActuallyADHD side wants novelty, I can go wander the realm and see what pops up. And if I need something, I can make it myself, darn it! LOL If you try it out and need some pointers, I'm usually up there as Tamryn, so feel free to ask me anything.

***Hashtags Here:***
#ActuallyAuDHD #MUDs #MUD #Gaming #MultiUserDungeon #Neurodivergent

I'm probably tempting fate but after 7 days of severe brain fog — so severe that for a few days I felt like a passenger trapped in a me sized, remote controlled cyborg.

Rethinking my allergic reaction as it's still going strong (gave up my 1 a day Matcha(=caffeine) habit just over a week ago). Though as I type this, it dawns that this might be the cause of my severe brain fog / disembodiment.

It's good to finally be getting back to feeling human or wherever I'm supposed to be.

It feels good to finally have enough dice / spoons / focus / energy / dilithium / micro-blackholes to interact with the fediverse again.

Question for other #ActuallyAutistic people and also #ActuallyADHD:

[Long post due to lots of context]

When there is a change to my routines - even if it’s an expected change that has been planned for days or even months in advance - I can feel something like “anticipation” until I’m back to familiar routines. This is also true when starting a new routine until it feels familiar.

The “anticipation” is strange as it manifests as if it’s anxiety with all the physical signs, but the word “anxiety” does NOT feel right to me at all.

I know it is definitely related to “uncertainty”. And that’s true even when I have a very good idea of how the change in routine will pan out (i.e. I have low levels of uncertainty, not always high). So this also excludes catastrophising MOST of the time because I already know nothing awful will happen.

If I can’t predict how the change of routine will unfold then I find my brain tries to calculate ALL the possible outcomes - good, bad or indifferent - and try to prepare for as many of them as possible. This response seems learned; I’ve been in situations when I’ve had an unexpected routine change in the past and been unprepared which led to awful outcomes. After those events, I have often reflected and seen that it might have been possible to predict what happened and prepare to a reasonable degree. So that’s what I do now. If this is catastrophising, then it ALSO includes the BEST possible outcomes and everything in between. So it’s not straight forward, anxiety-driven catastrophising which is focused only on the negative.

I really wanted to learn more about autistic “anticipation” as it relates to routine changes, or even “anxiety” in response to routine changes (even though anxiety doesn’t sound like the right word for me), but I couldn’t find much online.

So, do any of you have any good online resources that could help me understand myself better when it comes to this? (I may want to share a resource with a neuro-affirming therapist in future so an online resource would be great.) Could be blogs, articles, videos, etc. I’m not great with podcasts unless there is a full transcript.

Or, do you have any personal insights that you could share with me that might help me understand this better?

Key to note here: I can understand the anticipation or anxiety if something potentially bad might happen (classic anxiety / catastrophising) but I ALSO feel this way when I KNOW the routine change should bring about normal life things, just slightly differently. I.e. nothing bad and there are even benefits to the routine change! So this is the part I am most stuck on and wanting to change… if it’s even possible.

Phew! Long post. Please feel free to ask any clarifying questions. Alexithymia is common for us autistics so this question might not be easy to understand, and that’s okay

#AskingAutistics @actuallyautistic

True ADHD story…

For a good hour I was working on consolidating the tabs in my browser.

I closed lots of them. But when I finished there were actually more than when I began.

People always say ADHD is a superpower. It some ways it is. But in other ways it’s a lot of WTF moments.

Some people are so _poisonous_ that not even understanding them is an effective _antidote_.

How does one recognize whether or not what one experienced was narcissistic abuse?

It's not like one can ask the hypothetical abuser. They will deny it. Is learning about the patterns of narcissistic abuse and subsequently recognizing how they show up in one's lived experience the best one can do?

I find that a very unsatisfactory conclusion but it does seem like the best one can do. I probably lived in a relationship with at least narcissistic abuse patterns. And the unsolvable ambiguity of it all bothers me.

I feel this must be a deeply autistic experience: the disbelief when people actually try to convince you that they didn't mean what they said. And I'm not talking subtext, I'm talking about the grammatical meaning of their verbatim words and sentences.

And then you ask them to clarify and through a convoluted sequence of justifications they end up at "see? And this is why I couldn't possibly have meant this!".

Like wat? Why did you say/write it then in the first place? So fucking confusing. But maybe the explanation really is that autistic people choose their words much more carefully. It's certainly my lived experience.

#neurodivergent #neurodivergence #ADHD #actuallyADHD #Autism #autistic #actuallyAutistic #AuDHD #actuallyAuDHD @actuallyautistic @actuallyaudhd

I think I've asked this before but I forgor so I'm asking anyways, curious on both Autistic-Non-ADHD and AuDHD takes: does borrowing energy from your future state by caffeinating, in order to temporarily remediate executive dysfunction symptoms, result in an increasing "energy debt" which would ultimately result in burnout?

Heeeeeey come listen to me talk! Free webinar!
https://www.additudemag.com/webinar/autistic-burnout-adhd-masking/

Oops got excited and forgot to tag #ActuallyADHD #ActuallyAutistic @actuallyautistic @actuallyadhd

Ello sweet and lovely Friendos

At the GP, about ten minutes early, as I do .

Hopefully there will be something that she can help me with. I've dealt with my ADHD all my life, obviously, and episodes like the ones I'm experiencing now are also the reason I got diagnosed.

I've been on the methylphenidate for about 18 months now, and it's been helping me quite a bit, most of the time. But... Some of those bad days... It's just too much to stay sane.

Does anyone recognize this? That, even with their normal dosage of meds, the ADHD can get so overwhelming that you can't stand light or loud sounds? That you can't even concentrate on things you love? That it feels like the ADHD is on speed or something, as it's just so incredibly "loud"?

Fingers crossed the GP will be understanding and that she'll maybe know of something that could help me during days when it hits me this badly...

Catch you later folks!

#PixysJourney
#ActuallyADHD

Just finished watching an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise called Cogenitor. Heavy episode. But it's interesting rewatching all this stuff now that I am aware of neurodiversity and such. I think that what Tripp was displaying was a good example of ADHD justice sensitivity plus impulsiveness.

Please, help!

My 8yo ADHD kid is incapable of switching between tasks as she (and we) needs. Sometimes we have the 5/10/15 minutes required so she is able to select the task that she needs to do but sometimes we don't (school runs and after school activities being the ones were punctuality is required).

How on Earth can I help my kid to switch and select the one that she needs to do without shouting?

It's so exhausting and totally unfair as it's not that she wants to annoy us, it's just her executive function being a complete random activity-selector mess. But shouting is the only thing that works at the moment and she feels so bad (and this is overwhelming for me and push me to meltdowns too so we end being two hot messes).

I had seen her switching from jumping up and down to grabbing a pen to start her spellings after we asked her to grab her bag and go to the door (so she can go to school) in an amazing and unhelpful executive function mental fart. She has no control whatsover about her choices. #actuallyadhd

-----

A ver si alguien puede ayudarme:
Mi hija de 8 años con TDAH es completamente incapaz de cambiar las tareas a voluntad porque su función ejecutiva es una caca de la vaca Paca. No lo hace a propósito pero a veces no tenemos los 5/10/15 minutos necesarios para que su cerebro haga la conexión necesaria y elija la tarea adecuada, especialmente a la hora de ir al cole o actividades extraescolares donde se necesita sí o sí puntualidad.
De momento y para nuestra desgracia solo funciona pegar un grito; da igual que sean rutinas, repitas 25 veces lo mismo, se lo recuerdes con antelación... Pero los gritos son una mierda porque ella se siente fatal, yo me desregulo porque termino hasta las narices y termina todo como el rosario de la aurora.
¿Alguien tiene algún truco o consejo?
Es que la he llegado a ver pasar de dar brincos a ponerse a hacer la tarea al pedirle que cogiese la mochila para ir al cole, su cerebro elige en modo aleatorio. #tdah

Today it has been four weeks taking MPH. And I must say, I don't think this is a placebo effect anymore. Focusing on work has become SO MUCH EASIER! There are still days when I'm low on energy that I can't get a lot of work done. But even on those days I'm able to do things when they are really urgent.

So I definitely still need to manage my spoons. MPH doesn't really increase my energy level. It just helps me managing my energy better on a daily basis.

I'm finally able to function again

Back to watching lectures and reading compulsory texts for my masters course.

Stimming increased massively! Just can’t keep my attention on this types of tasks unless I see them as hyper-relevant to me right now. Using a screen reader helps but my gosh the software is crap!

Trying not to scratch myself too much… Not many stims help me pay attention though. Hmmm!

#ActuallyADHD @actuallyadhd

Ello sweet and lovely Friendos

Some moments, I love my brain, other moments, I really hate the way it treats me...

Like, I know I want to do something. Or I know I need to do something. I make this plan of how I want to do it all. And then I agree that it's a good plan.

So, I start the plan. And it starts off well. Step one and two are a success. So then, onwards to step three. And that's when part of my brain goes like "nah, I've had enough now, I don't wanna do that other thing, I just dismiss it and then stress over it later, as then it really needs doing".

I just wanna do it as I planned it. Keep away the stress. Have it done ahead of time, so I can relax afterwards.

Even if it's "just" something that I want to do for me, that won't impact others in any way... Even then, I beat myself up over it.

Why does my brain think of this great plan, and then it won't want to finish all the steps? Why is it OK with the first two steps, before losing interest for the next one?

Is this the part where my ADHD part is rebelling against the autistic bits? Where the ADHD (my "focus" is apparently on the H bit, according to the diagnosis) is losing interest, as it's focused long enough and, hey, I did those two things, didn't I?!

Ah well, I pressured myself into not forgoing the third thing, and I'm doing it now. But I do hope I'll be able to focus enough on it to do a proper "job".

Yeah, my brain can be my best friend at times, but also my biggest enemy (especially when it's inviting the dark monster back into my life)...

Fankoos for your support on my journey through life...

#PixysJourney
#NeuroSpicy
#ActuallyAutistic
#ActuallyADHD
#ActuallyAuDHD

I hope @altbot can help me with my image, then I'll edit the Toot to add the alt text.

Ow.

Won't elaborate. - (Because it is DEEPLY STUPID) But I just hurt myself -a lot, like not ER trip but yeah this will hurt for multiple days- and it was a uniquely ADHD way to hurt oneself.

Fuck.