I got really excited to tell my mother that I had finally been able to start using a daily planner. Instead she sort of sighed, and said "Well teachers have been telling you for years one would help you." And I could barely express my frustration at this as an ADHD person.

My whole life has been people telling me things would help me and then me resoundingly absolutely failing to follow through on those things and not understanding why I couldn't, why they didn't work for me, why other people expected this to be easy, having nobody actually help.

Starting to use a daily diary took a lot of things, it took me doing it of my own accord, it took me having a steady and non traumatizing home life, but most of all it took a lot of trail and error as I figured out what worked for me and my neuroatypical brain.

Teachers were right when they said keeping a daily schedule would help me but they never explained how to do it, never gave me different options and examples of how it might work, they never asked me if there were problems at home that were getting in my way.

Another thing getting to this point with my organization took was hearing about coping mechanism for other people with bad adhd talking about their coping mechanisms rather than just expecting tools to be used in the same was as a neurotypical person might use them.

Its just so disheartening to do a ton of work to understand my brain and what works for it and what doesn't work for it and figure out what my day to day life needs, and be told well somoneone said this would help you 10 years ago when that "help" made you feel profoundly broken.

I honestly believe that treatment and coping tools for adhd only work when they come from a place of sincerely engaging with the neuroatypical person they are supposed to help, when the tools given match the problem and not the imagined problem.

My problem is I have a really hard time with motivation, time blindness, and an inability to break problems down. So a daily planner with lots of space to list things but that is already set up so I don't overthink things work for me. Just being handed a calendar didn't.

Another pretty fundamental thing that changed is I stopped trying to meet some arbitrary idea of how productive I "should be" and started using a dairy as a way to track what actually got done rather than as a self harm tool for beating my self up for not being productive.

I use a daily planner now because I get excited to see whats on the docket for tomorrow and excited to be prepared to face it, rather than looking at the planner my specialist is forcing me to use and looking at all the things I havent done. This planner wont be a tool for pain.