dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with undiagnosed adhd

Have kept pushing; guest bed is now cleared off entirely, and everything is sorted, and not just dumped into boxes. Well, not much anyway. And I finally actually cleared out a laundry basket that I've been dumping junk into for literally years. It's hard to convey how difficult it is for me to actually sort things in a meaningful way. On some level it seems really basic-- like laundry, you have pants, shirts, sweaters, underwear, right?
But what about leggings? Some of them are like pants. Some of them are like tights, which go with socks.
I wind up with things, like, sorted into spectrums. And the shirts-- well, this one is a tank top I wear with nice things, this is a grubby work tank-top, those don't belong together. This is a short-sleeved work shirt, this is a long-sleeved shirt I usually wear over a tank top. This is--
you see how I have trouble putting them all into a pile together. And then I put that pile in a drawer, and what happens then is that I can no longer see any of those garments, so I no longer own them. So I no longer wear them.
Even when I periodically remind myself they're in there, I don't wear them. And then I'm like, "oh hm there's a sale on at [clothing store i like], and I really could use a tank top to wear under this shirt, let me see-- oh there's a twofer, I'll just get two, I'd like to wear that shirt more." And then I have three tank tops to wear under that shirt, and by the time I rediscover the first one, I've put away the shirt I'd wear it under and can no longer find it.
( anyone who suggests minimalism gets blocked, lol )

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lazaefair reblogged your post and added:

Yeah, that’s why I don’t make my lists with the expectation or intention of finishing them because I have the exact same problem of not knowing how long a task lasts. They’re sort of just running lists that I can go back to when I find myself wandering around in a fog not knowing what to do next. And I learned never to write down “clean kitchen” because, yeah, way too big and vague. It’s more like

Open dishwasher
Unload bottom of dishwasher
Unload top of dishwasher
Gather dishes and put by sink
Put dishwashable things in dishwasher
Put soap on sponge
Wash non-dishwashable things
Put away things on counters
Wet towel
Wipe down big counter
Wipe down little counter
Put towel in laundry basket
Get out broom
Sweep dirt into piles
Gather piles up in dustpan
Dump piles
Put broom and dustpan away

And all of that gets put onto the to-do list not as sub-tasks under a large first-level task heading, because no, that leads to another ADD spiral. They are put onto the list as first-level tasks all in their own right, which means I can take breaks in between if I need to, and when I accomplish them, I treat them like I accomplished a first-level task, because I did. It’s not perfect because my breaks last way too long. But at least I have the list to refer back to when I jerk myself out of the zone, and I know that the next thing on the list is going to be a little tiny task that hopefully won’t trigger an ADD spiral, so I’m more likely to do it. And I keep reminding myself that it’s okay if I don’t get through the whole list in one evening or whatever, the list is there so the next evening I can remind myself again that there’s another little tiny task that I can do.Also, that thing about spotting something else that needs to be done before the thing I’m trying to do because I’m way too hung up on doing things in the “optimal manner” only to keep spotting more and more things - yeah, TOTALLY understand. So now the rule is that once I’ve made my list, NOTHING ELSE GETS ADDED TO IT. THE END. It’s okay to not do the new thing right away because I know that will lead to exactly the spiral you’ve described, so no, I have to stick to the already-written list. When it comes to household chores, most of the time it actually doesn’t matter what order I do them in and my brain is lying to me that I’m a bad person for not doing everything perfectly optimally. So the new thing I’ve spotted gets written down for doing AFTER the already-written tasks.Again, not perfect, because right now for example I’ve done maybe half of what I wanted to do this weekend, and that’s after I super downscaled my ambitions for the weekend. But I just have to keep telling myself, most of the time it doesn’t matter to other people nearly as much as it matters to me. It’s okay not to finish. It’s okay not to finish.But overall, I’ve slowly managed to get it together enough that I’ve gone from “nightmare roommate” to “not completely terrible to live with” (and she even thanks me for what I contribute to the household now!) so I’ll take that as a win..

__________
I hope you don’t mind that I copy-pasted this into a new post because it was getting so long– this is a good approach but I am so scattered I don’t know if I could reliably break a task down like this!! I might try it.

We have a whiteboard in our kitchen where I had been writing down shopping lists and meal ideas and I stopped updating it about six or seven years ago. I could probably clean it off and try it again– make my huge fantasy lists at work, and then come home and copy them over onto the whiteboard, so I could have like, a long-term Things I Want quadrant, and then a short-term OK Baby Steps quadrant, because the other thing that happens is that Dude is unable to remember anything I tell him for longer than seconds at a time, and so either accidentally prevents me from working on what I want to do (say… for example… decides to spend all weekend cooking a complicated dish… in the kitchen… so I really don’t feel I can clean it… which is what happened this weekend, he seriously spent 18 hours making French Onion Soup starting with a beef bone), so if I actually had a list he could look at and maybe add to–

well, he would ignore it, that’s what happens. But if I make a little progress with this method before I inevitably abandon it, then maybe it’ll be something.

I guess step 1 is seeing if I can get that whiteboard erased now that the abandoned lists have been on there for half a decade or more…

(edited to fix: the crossposter cut off my response!)

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lazaefair replied to your post “Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more,…”

Your post is giving me sympathy panic. the only way I can get through that shit is by writing the entire to-do list down and breaking it down to the teeny-tiniest increments, AND continually reminding myself that it’s okay for me not to finish it. So when I find myself wondering what to do I can go back to the list to remind myself. And I can cross things off the list for that little dopamine rush.

oh my god I have SUCH a love-hate with to-do lists

i love making the lists, see, but the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how long a thing takes to do. I just don’t. So a to-do list for a single weekend might consist of three hundred hours’ worth of work, if you could actually do the math out. And the other thing I’m bad at is, on a large scale, understanding the dependencies of tasks? So I’ll tell myself that I need to Do Some Big Thing but then I have no idea where to start, and I’ll try to come up with smaller detailed things but I’ll get to that item and then it needs me to have done fifteen other little things first?

I love lists. I write basically fanfic about what my life would be like if I could fucking do anything ever.

I have not been able to have friends over for about a decade because my house is too messy for anyone to get in the door. How do you fix that?

Well, I know how you don’t. You write “CLEAN KITCHEN” on your to-do list, and then you think, well, ok, I need more detail, that’s just silly, and you write “MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” and you’re like oh I’ll have to sweep first, and you write “SWEEP AND MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” instead, and you’re all pleased, and you spend your afternoon at work daydreaming about how clean that floor is going to be when you get home.

And then you get home and well, you can’t actually… mostly… see the floor in that room, and so you need to take out the recycling, and then you need to gather up all the film plastic recycling too, and you get that out the door and that’s great, and then you do the dishes, and that’s as much as I’ve gotten done this weekend, I’ve done the dishes like fifteen times because every time I go to do another bit of the big “CLEAN KITCHEN” to-do item on my beautiful list, there are more dirty dishes and I can’t do anything until I get those out of the way. And I’m also trying to do Christmas shopping and I really wanted to sit and write for a moment, well I’ll get to that later, maybe tomorrow, oh it’s Sunday already, well ok I won’t do any writing this weekend, fine, but I still have to–

Oop, weekend’s over, maybe next time?

That’s how you go four years without sweeping your kitchen floor.

So… no, to-do lists don’t really help me much. Lists are crucial– the Christmas gifts have lists to go along with them, and I’ve written down dimensions and things, and it’s possible some of them will get done now that they’re written down. Because things that aren’t written down don’t exist, to me, so they don’t happen.

But task lists don’t really help me much overall. I’m thirty-nine years old and I’ve never actually learned how to write a list of things that are actually possible in this world.

On Monday I’ll go back to work and look sadly at my list of what I was going to do this weekend (CLEAN KITCHEN was one two items of about twelve, and another one was PUT AWAY CLOTHES which is going to involve three rooms of the house and is a huge undertaking I’ve started working on about twenty times in the last two years, to give some idea), and then I’ll sit and start a new list and daydream about what it would be like if I were the sort of bitch who could actually write a reasonable to-do list and follow it.

At this very moment in my house if I had a kind of magical summoning ability so I could pull them out of the acres of shit in here, I could probably produce a stack for you of hundreds of to-do lists I’ve written myself, and not a single one of them has more than two items crossed off on it, no matter how many items there are. And I can’t throw them out until I finish them, or the tasks I’ve conjured will cease to exist.
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Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more, and I can’t crosspost from there to here because I have an IfTTT set up that posts everything I post here to there, and that would make some sort of infinite mess, I think. Anyway–

Am having one of those awful ADHD days of freedom where I pick things up, wander in a circle, set the thing down, wander some more, then realize I’ve lost the thing, and then do something else, and forget what I was doing, and then wander looking for the thing, and then find it again and forget what I had picked it up for, and then wander off again, and it’s miserable and I’m accomplishing nothing.

I have to, have to get a bunch of sewing projects started for Christmas. I do! There’s a deadline and not that much time left! But. Where do I start? I need a pattern. Here’s a pattern. I need fabric. This fabric might do, if I piece it. Oh, or this. No, that. This one for A, that one for B, this one for– I wonder where I put that other– oh hey I totally forgot I had this. Look, this too! Here’s another thing. I remember this thing. I just had to iron it– there’s the iron. If I– oh but the iron’s set up for this other– yeah it was with these– yeah I’ll just. *spends an hour ironing bits of things that have nothing to do with anything*

Where was I? Oh this pattern, I was going to make– I was– yes here– where was that, now? Oh, over– oh gosh this whole area’s all rifled through, now, I’ll never find, I’d better tidy– let me just set that over– oh this, though, I forgot I had this. I’d better take everything I find and make a pile out of it on top of the other thing I was looking for. Yeah, that’s a great idea.

The laundry! Shit I forgot. Hang on, I’ll just– oh and I was baking bread, “Did my timer go off?” “Yes–” Shit, I’d better– there we go– ok now I’m baking bread.

How is it 4pm? On Sunday? Where did Saturday go?

For my efforts, I have two curtain rods I had Dude hang, a loaf of bread baked, four loads of laundry done but only two sorted, several objects moved from one place to another, and here’s the punchline:

Not a single stitch of sewing done. Nor is the pattern cut out. Nor is the fabric selected.

Granted, I’m complicating it by insisting on repurposing worn garments instead of buying new fabric, but I own enough fucking new fabric, I don’t need any more. So I do have one (1) old garment halfway seam-ripped so that I can measure whether the pattern will fit on this fabric or if I have to piece it to make that work.
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