zenforyen

Woah. If all what you say is true (your account is just one day old and you might be an internet troll for all I know, but if you were, I should not reply further, so if I reply, I have to assume that you are serious, but maybe it's just me being paranoid), then I'm sorry to hear how life has been so far for you.

I don't know how old you are, I would guess between 15 and 20, as it's sounding like school is or was not too many years ago for you (and you are not a native English speaker, are you?)

"Not knowing the definition of a friend" sounds like a familiar thing to me from when I grew up. Teenage/very young adult times were the WORST times of my life. If I guessed your age roughly right, then - good news! Life only gets better from now on !

I had similar experience of not belonging properly to any group in my class back in school and being the weird one who is not avoided like the "outsiders", but also not fitting anywhere properly. This also seems to be a common ADHD experience.

Well, after school you are free to choose your own path - and on the path you tend to find more people like yourself, with similar interests, and more open minded people, with different quirks. Some of them might eventually become friends. People who peaked in school are the true boring losers!

Either you are someone pushed into being socially an introvert by circumstances, or you might also have some autistic traits. ADHD and some form of autism often come together. You might want to research into that. Just had to mention this as a possibility.

If that does not apply to you, then in general - social cues are learnable, if it was just due to missed opportunity. I think I learned to "read" people and behavior of others pretty well, but was very insecure and inadequate as a teenager. It's a matter of practice and self-confidence (which is also learnable, and it grows as you find your self-worth with increasing positive interactions with others and successes in life).

You should definitely not wait with therapy as long as you say you will, and do it once you have the opportunity. You seem to have a lot to unpack. And you SHOULD. You need to process all that crap and talk to other people. At the very least, the therapist can be like a paid friend. In the best case, they are actually good at their job and can do more than just listen and validate you and give you opinions, but also help you navigate your problems and difficulties better and try fixing them. Finding friends is a thing that just happens eventually and you can't force, but finding a therapist is in your hands. If you are in a civilized country where you don't have to pay it yourself - just go for it !

Also, you should check out /r/ADHD on Reddit, it's a huge community (I wish there was more here on Lemmy, well I'm trying my best to make this a good place too, e.g. by replying), there you can see so many people sharing similar struggles, and exchanging ideas and celebrating successes. It was nice to find my "flock" and feel validated and understood. And others could give much better advice than I could, or provide more perspectives. I'm just one random dude you opened up a little to (I might also give bad advice, who knows).

The ADHD community on Mastodon is also pretty friendly and active, so you can go and try hanging there with the people!

That sounds like a severe case of "ADHD paralysis". I never experienced it so strongly, but I know the feeling when you want to do something but can't force yourself to stand up and actually do it. If this is purely ADHD related, then it is what is called executive dysfunction, because of (most likely) a lack of dopamine available in the brain. That's where the right medication can help. Never had this "paralysis" again since I got them.

But you're also talking about sadness. I thought I had depressive episodes, but it turns out in my case it was all just secondary to living with ADHD. However some people develop serious depression and/or anxiety issues.

Did you get professionally evaluated and diagnosed? If not, you really, really should. It was the first step on my path of fixing these issues.

I said only you know yourself best, but depending on how bad it is, sometimes the best you can do for yourself is get some help to get you out of the "black hole" first. Your case does sound pretty serious, so you maybe should not try to fix it all on your own. At some point I accepted that I need some help, because I did not know what to do (and did not really know what was "broken" back then).

My diagnosis is now more than 2 years ago, I have been struggling in certain ways all my life, and some problems will never go away, but feeling inadequate, sad and paralyzed - I only remember this like a dim nightmare from the past. Don't give up, there is hope - it can get better!

I'm just a random guy on the internet, but a doctor with experience in ADHD diagnosis and treatment can help you get access to the support you need.

For overthinking, a CBT self help book actually helped me to analyze that mess that is my brain and see lots of pointless worries and anxiety and emotions. Been a horrible overthinker most of my life.

Thoughts, emotions and behaviors form a kind of feedback loop and overthinking is often fueled by anxiety, at least in my experience. Thinking of all the ways things can go wrong or you can mess up. I guess there's some amount of this we can't get rid of with ADHD, because of being forgetful and inattentive etc., but there's lots of worries that are blown out of proportion, like what other people could think, and always elaborately thinking about the worst case etc. So that's stuff one can try to realize.

What helped me was realizing all the stupid stuff I think about and look at myself from a distance and then kind of realize how ridiculous it is. Thinking too much about what happened and whether what I did or said was ok, or worrying about something that can happen in the future. Other people have their own lives an worries and do not think as much about us as we do, and there are many things outside of our control, also no point worrying too much about those, etc.

You can try to create a mind map of what things you believe about yourself and others and why and follow thought spirals, and then looking at this crazy mess of a map shows a lot of garbage. Just have to be critical of your own reasoning and feelings, there's a saying "don't believe everything you think". Truly internalizing this really helped me getting out of it, I believe.

Concerning motivation... Well, I think getting meds was the most impactful thing, helps me a lot to do and complete stuff that I do not enjoy, and be more calm (less thoughts, less emotional swings). But changing the attitude to certain things does also help (like, I'm not doing chores just because, but e.g. because it makes my wife happy and reduces her work load, and I want to see my wife happy, etc.)

Nobody knows yourself better than you do, so nobody can cut through the bullshit or find tricks for your brain better.

Hope this helps a little bit.

Good luck on your own journey :)

Yep, we have this one short and precious life. Should not waste it thinking too much about the eternity of un-being that comes after and rather make the most of the time we have here.

That moment the meds are kicking in and the wave of calm arrives and takes over for a moment. The beautiful silence of just being. So called stimulants make me zen like a meditating monk at optimal dosage.

Sometimes I take a small dosage to fall asleep when I feel my brain is spinning in pointless circulating understimulated overdrive, it's not only keeping me balanced during the day, but also sometimes helps me fall asleep at night.

I put them on humus-rich soil

(I'll show myself out)

By authority of the central bank and the state? Checks out.

Haha nice bait, which I took to get some actually interesting statistics, well executed !

Here is your comment, you deserve it. Now your post made it to "average"! You're welcome.

(Was there any correlation between upvote count and the comment-based metrics? That could also be pretty interesting)

My maybe unpopular opinion is that it sucks that my meds, which are like my "glasses" correcting focus, motivation and emotional self-regulation, which are much safer than any antidepressants and at high dosage have about the same side effects as too much coffee, are being framed as dangerous stimulants and abused by idiots who snort them in their noses, and have to be so heavily regulated.

I got late diagnosed and since I got my meds I overcame my overthinking and anxiety issues, have no more of what I thought to be depressive episodes (caused by severe under stimulation and the burn-out of chronically forcing myself to do stuff against the strong child tantrum-like inner resistance with raw will power as you ADHD "expert" and all of my family suggested all of my life), and finally can feel and function like an adult and at the same time am much more zen and balanced.

Yes, having some symptoms does not qualify. Just as being sad sometimes does not qualify for depression. But every mental disorder is a matter of severity. You cannot feel how things feel to others. If a diagnosis and meds help a person, why would you not want them to get that help? It's like saying that people who are short-sighted should just try harder and train their eyes and do not need glasses.

Level 2 of these people: learn regex and try to parse something non-regular like XML or C++ templates with it.

Same people who did not pay attention and hated the "useless" formal languages lecture in university and who have no clue about proper data structures and algorithms for their problem, just hack together some half-working solution and ship it. Fix bugs with extra if statements instead of solving the real issue. Not writing unit tests.

Soo many people in software development who really should not be there.

Seymour :'(

A beautiful answer, our trajectory was pretty similar, only that we were together and building it for over 10 years before we finally got married last year :)

My wife is my home, my constant, my safe harbor, the anchor of my sanity and peace of mind.

Two planets orbiting each other - I could not have said it better. We're a unit that is greater than its sum and we grew and continue to grow together as individuals and into each other.