Read on Twitter
Seeing some tweets on the TL about ADHD and I’m feeling a thread coming up... I have written several in the past but I’m not sure if any directly talk about how (my?) ADHD is slippery and resists negative reinforcement. You can’t frighten/intimidate ADHD away. I tried. For years
Funnily this is the intersection of the two next books I intend to write: Unlearning Coercion, and Constructive ADHD
Caveat: all of the following is my personal experience
ADHD is very, very, very stubborn. You can’t “contain” it because it will outlast your executive function
Caveat: all of the following is my personal experience
ADHD is very, very, very stubborn. You can’t “contain” it because it will outlast your executive function
This is something people don’t seem to get so I think it’s worth repeating: the game is rigged. No amount of clever strategizing can really help you outwit an opponent who is stronger, faster, and just better than you on every dimension. I struggled & failed until I accepted this
I’m not going to be able to get into all of the nuances of how to navigate this relationship well in a twitter thread when i haven’t slept all night but I’ma just line up a couple of riffs: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1169989222230421504
Actually if you click through the above thread you’ll get a bunch of useful details. This is part of how I manage my ADHD in a constructive way: I collaborate with past and future selves https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1076198966138527744
there is a lot of work that a person with ADHD can do to make life less miserable. But what I’m trying to convey here is that you can’t install an authoritarian government and expect to control a messy, chaotic, irreverent, independent people. You have to respect their autonomy
I have a good enough relationship with myself that I can joke about it. But there is a truth here. Not all people respond to repression the same way. Some will literally choose death. There is staggering variance here that many people don’t seem to appreciate https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1286993051735351296
If I am a charming and persuasive person, maybe half of it is that I had to charm and persuade others to survive socially, but another half of it is that I have to charm and persuade myself to get me to do *anything*. It’s a tremendous amount of work. It did pay off eventually
I am really like this even today, and it has gotten in the way of my life — so much so that I’ve basically designed my entire life around this
I can recognise that it’s unhelpful/costly and try to admonish etc but ADHD brain does not give a fuck about negative reinforcement https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1074979348749312001
I can recognise that it’s unhelpful/costly and try to admonish etc but ADHD brain does not give a fuck about negative reinforcement https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1074979348749312001
I do nrecognise that there’s a flavor of defeatism in some people’s tweets about their ADHD, and I don’t encourage that. But I understand it. Sometimes it’s a coping mechanism, sometimes it can be something much worse. Which is why I really like the frame “constructive ADHD”
Here’s a post with some of my existing notes on the topic, including a video. I will eventually expand this into a book https://www.visakanv.com/blog/constructive-adhd/
The text of this thread is available in the above post, but ima repost it here too if you don’t wanna bounce from the twitter app. I’m considerate like that 
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1293265193825312768
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1293265193825312768
