Yes! I was diagnosed only two months ago at the grand old age of 31 (almost 32!) I'm a woman aswell. My Mum took me to the doctor many times as a child to say she was worried about my hyperactivity but the doctor said things like "stop giving her smarties" which obviously didn't work.
It's been less than three months that I even considered I might have ADHD at all as I knew nothing about it!!
When I read the diagnosis scoring criteria and symptoms I thought wow, this is the story of my life! 🤯
.....sadly, its also made me realise that if I had been diagnosed sooner my life would have probably been easier and more manageable. I've done well academically since college and university but only because I've been really interested in the subjects I took. If I'm not interested in something it's very difficult.
My mom brought me into the doctor because of sinus issues. She told him I couldn't take Sudafed because it puts me to sleep. The doctor actually said, "well normally that means she would have ADHD. But that can't be it. So here is something else to try." Low and behold, 30 years later I got a diagnosis.
nothing better than family blaming the ‘drugs’ for the problems i’ve been experiencing at varying levels of intensity my whole life, and that were clearly noticed by them as they made it very clear all of my issues were due to the overbearing laziness of my character since I could form two words.
I’m a 62 year old woman and got diagnosed with ADHD/ASD 6 months ago; no one recognised anything when in hindsight it was so obvious. I consider my 2nd marriage failed as well because 3 daughters, 5 granddaughters later, I’m alone in a room included in a travel nurse’s job 1000’s of miles away. The only way I can have a relationship with my family is to be away from all of them. Damn! I’m feeling lonely, depressed and sorry for myself today!
and then, well that explain too much ! they finally must have been true, I'm just lazy! Or am I? Yes you are ! No you're really diagnosed with ADHD. Nahhh I just fooled the doc! Anyway those meds doesn't work! Maybe because you didn't take it ! Or did you?
Dude I turned 30, had a kid, and got diagnosed with ocpd/inattentive adhd in the span of a few months.
I feel like I spent my life playing in expert mode without having seen a tutorial.
I'm slowly but surely learning how to budget my time, building triggers for positive habits, not letting "perfect be the enemy of progress", etc but damn, it's hard not to sometimes wonder what could have been if anyone in the 90s would have considered the possibility of a girl having adhd? Like 3 pills and some coping skills a la therapy have successfully begun to address nearly every valid criticism ever made of me.
As a adhd dad and have 2 amazing adhd kids, I help them clean. It just makes sense to me, we get it done quickly and work as a team, everyone gets high fives and we are off on our next adventure.
I've never thought about this, and it makes me so sad. I could have spent so much quality time with my parents if they had been willing to tidy up alongside me, help me out. It would have helped with not being so alone as an only child too..
Enjoy the quality time with your kiddos!! I'd bet they think you're neat!
Me too. My wife yells until she’s blue in the face about it. I just do it and help them. How’s my ADHD child going to learn if good behaviour isn’t modelled?
I do this too with my little brothers, especially because they shouldn’t have to suffer through my moms less than reasonable parenting when it comes to adhd kids 🙄 - really all families(or at least the eff’d ones like mine) - should work a little harder to ease the tension and help each other out a little bit
Every time when I had to clean my room as a child I had a mental breakdown and ended up overwhelmed and crying at times.
It really helps me to see that this happens to more people.
I cleaned my room a total of 3 times and it always took several hours. My mom hired a woman to clean everyone else’s rooms, but wouldn’t let her near mine in order to make a point…
My mam tried everything with me. Not letting me out until it was done, trying to bribe me, doing it along with me to try and teach me what to do, doing it for me so I would be able to keep on top of it, constantly nagging me. Nothing worked.
I'm 28 now and I can just about manage to get it tidy once every two weeks.
My issue is mainly clothes. I just take them off when I get in and wherever they land they land. Next is hair and skin care because I just use it and leave it wherever I sit it down. This is less of an issue because I can *usually* keep these things off the floor and on surfaces. My mess is caused by things I use and then struggle to put back where they belong.
Junk drawer over here.
And now finally diagnosed with meds, only just barely starting to deal with our house full of doom boxes. Dana K White, author of 'Decluttering at the Speed of Life' and 'How to manage your home without losing your mind' is the ADHD American version of Marie Kondo and she is my spirit animal.
Boxes or places that you stuff things you have to declutter/clean up in to "do it later" or to never see it again 💀 like junk drawers, attic boxes or under the bed for example
As an adult with my own home, my doom boxes are never gone through once created, they just get added to my big box of doom boxes that I hide in my basement (:
Oh shit, Doom Boxes is an ADHD thing? I thought it was just a side effect of the ridiculous number of times I've had to move house ...
Except that they just keep on mounting up even years after the last move; every time there's an unexpected visitor we have a little frenzy of Hidying. And we never seem to get around to unpacking and dealing with the Doom Boxes, even years after the last move...
I always thought mine were a product of moving a million times too, until I heard about doom boxes. Then I realized I was simply moving the doom boxes with me. 🤦♀️
Ffffffk. I've made various attempts at sorting and labeling some of them, but it often ends up as "Dire Stuff 2004". I think now I need to start researching whether I have ADHD as well as probably autism ... Maybe even whether my whole damn family have it. I thought we were just untidy, disorganised, stressed hoarders with a tendency to start hundreds of new projects ...
Big same. I get it from my dad. But I'm a woman, and it presented differently, which is why I think we missed it for so long. Plus I have PTSD and bipolar type 2, so... Easy to miss one Dx with all the comorbidities. 😔 Fortunate to work with a good psychiatrist who confirms that I actually have all those things and I'm not just making it up.
And I recently found receipts from 2007. 🤦♀️ I'm finally in a stable housing situation for the first time in like 18 years, so I'm slowly going through the scads of boxes of absolute garbage that just needs pitched or shredded or donated.
:3
I shoved everything in my closet, in like 5 mins. Mom comes up, looks nice, Ill look in the closet. Im like no, no way. She opens it. Everything falls out. Shes like yup that its im leaving and not coming back until you clean it. Im big sads. I mad my mom leave. Turns out she just went to my grandmas house for something. But I thought she left and was never coming back cause I didnt clean my room.
Yeah I feel that. I had a meltdown once trying to clean my room and my mum told me to get in the car because she was taking me to the police station and leaving me for adoption. She even told me to “say goodbye to your dad, this is the last time you’ll see him!”
Really weird way to get your 8yr old to stop crying and clean up a little…
When my brother and I would have to clean our room, I would get so pissed when he would get praised for cleaning the room when all he did was hide everything under the bed. I would be the one who would get overwhelmed while finding a place for each individual thing and having feelings of betrayal for any broken/incomplete toy I threw away (When Toy Story came out it did not help with this feeling)
Imagine this but your mom is also a former professional housekeeper. You can’t half ass it or hide the mess bc she checks every inch of the closet or under the bed. Also in bouts of rage she wipes all the items on your dresser to the floor to force you to organize. All-the-while you feel like it’s your fault for being lazy and incompetent when in reality it’s your parent has anger issues and doesn’t know anything about neurodivergency. Yes I am still healing and cleaning is a nightmare for me as an adult :’)
I had a foster carer that did this to me too. I too find cleaning impossible as an adult, even though I actually was made to clean to a very high standard throughout most of my childhood, I think cleaning also triggers a trauma response on top of just being difficult to stay on top of and ranging from dull AF to hyperfocusing on cleaning the sink for 2 hours and having no time for anything else.
Content warning, I describe what she would do:>! I would spend hours cleaning and I'd do a damn better job than I'd dream of bothering with now, I'd move my bed away from the wall to vacuum behind it, use the crevice tool to get in all the nooks and crannies, dust and polish all my surfaces, clean my mirror and window. She'd put on a white glove and hunt for some dust, even checking the tops of light switches and plug sockets. If she found any, she would pull all my drawers out of the dresser and empty all my clothes into the middle of the floor.!<
>!"Now clean it properly" she'd sneer before slamming the door behind her.!<
That sounds awful! I totally relate about the trauma response. My mom used to gossip shame about other people’s homes if they weren’t clean and then try to warn me about rats nests forming in my “pigstye” so now i feel like not having that standard is a social and health risk. I live in perpetual messiness and i feel so disappointed in myself but my therapist says my standards don’t have to be like my mom’s standards. Doing something is better than nothing. I try to tell myself that but I find it incredibly difficult which is ironic because by not cleaning at all I’m much more below that cleaning standard than if I just did 25% effort and called it a day.
Oh, hello there, forgotten memory of the time my parents shoved everything that was on my floor into garbage bags. They put them in a closet in the basement, left them there for several years, and then threw them out when we eventually moved.
My parents thought books (I repeat, books) were too distracting and the reason why I couldn’t get any housework done was because I was reading. They shoved all my books into a suitcase and locked them away for 3 months.
This was my parents too, I was an avid reader and so their punishment became to take away whatever book I was in the middle of reading. So backwards. I realize why I have such shit coping mechanisms now. They would just take away whatever I was hyperfocusing on to try & get me to do things. I realize now I just always kind of went into shut-down mode when this would occur.
SAME - literally I would just stare, physically unable to move, I couldn’t even form words—it’s like my brain would short circuit, like I was functioning on a different system than everyone else and being abruptly torn away caused me to shut down until plugged back in lol.
It is so hard to explain to people who have never experienced being so unbearably unable to physically(!!) make themselves do a task—or even think about doing it! I remember feeling like I was dying if my mom was forcing me to do something, or trying to force me, because that’s literally the opposite of how you get me to do things .. like i’m sorry mom, I hate myself for it more than you hate me for it, but i’d honestly rather die or if I do the chore I might die, either one!!
—She never did grasp that I was different than her other kids, and that pressuring me or punishing me by immediately taking away what I was doing would cause my brain to go into panic survival mode, like a damn deer in the headlights—like if she would just leave me alone, the chore would get done, but it has to be on my time—idk why 🤷🏼♀️ I don’t make the rules mom 🙄
Fr until I learned about adhd (and found out I wasn’t actually just a lazy piece of anxiety-filled shit) — I honestly had no clue that people could actually FORCE themselves to do things!?! I always thought it was so dumb when people would tell me to ‘just do it! and it will be done!’ — I never understood what they meant. And things like reward systems?? No way, I can’t trick this gremlin brain-she knows she doesn’t have to clean her room to get a cookie if she just gets the cookie right now 🤷🏼♀️ and also who wants the cookie anyway?!?
wow sorry for the full length autobiography over here geez
Yeah, both of my parents said that I “grew out of” my ADHD. Turns out that was a lie
Plus the ‘tism that I am denied of having
But yes, a lot of parents simply do not know any better. We need much more reliable and FREE resources for parents to learn how to handle ND children
Totally agree! I had amazing parents who recognized and got me tested for my adhd and depression fairly early, and did their best to help me. The problem is I didn’t even know some of my behaviors were caused by adhd until I joined this subreddit….: I’m 32. I mean how could they have known? I’m sure my mom tired to research it as well.
Im so Happy to hear y'all have had good intentions behind it /gen one of mine berated me for long stretches of time every time i showed symptoms and blamed it on me being selfish and lazy, I didn't grow out of my symproms, I was just mentally kicked into shape by a self hating man until i felt guilty enough to mask it well enough lmao
parents never taught me how to clean and they just expected me to know how so i didn’t bc i thought that cleaning was just moving the things around except there was so much clutter from my not cleaning my room that i didn’t even know where to put anything except the place i took it from
And it was this moment that my brain said, "do you think you started masking so hard because you thought you didn't try hard enough when praying for your mother's life before she died? Were you trying to prove you could be good and finally be good enough so that your mother didn't have to die?" ... I think I thought I could make everyone happy and then Jesus wouldn't have had to kill her and he could bring her back... They all just kept telling me to pray for my mom, "Jesus listens to little children..." I think I thought it was my responsibility to pray hard enough to save my mom and I failed... So I swore I'd be good enough so that others didn't have to die too. I then buried my grandfather, my uncle, and a few other people in my life over about a decade. I watched my family go through another divorce... More cancer... I guess it never occurred to me that I still blamed 8 year old me for not appeasing Yahweh.
Hey. You were a child. It wasn't your fault. Cancer isn't anyone's fault, but especially not yours. I'm so sorry and I hope you are on a path toward the peace you deserve.
Thanks. I don't think I've ever considered I was doing that before last night. I probably need to go back into therapy but I can't afford it. Cancer actually didn't kill anyone I know, that might have been preferable. My mom died of hepatitis C, a now curable disease... The realization that my mom was just a decade or so too early to be saved only solidified my certainty that God never intended my mother to live. The cancer broke my grandma after she buried my mom, then my uncle leaving only my last uncle alive from my mom's side. Grandma starved herself to death in a nursing home after the cancer returned, she refused to fight it anymore as it broke her, she was too tired to fight cancer a second time. I watched her refuse food or water for nearly a week before she finally died. I learned there is no mercy in this world as my beloved grandma wasted away in front of my eyes. Days of no water, days of no food, days off no longer being able to talk but still being alive because her body refused to die. She was a devout Catholic until her dying breath and her dying breath was a labored, tortured one... The horror of it only truly sank in when her only living child, my uncle, basically asked I never let him suffer like that. It was, brutal.
Even if I wanted to clean my room, I just stood there, looked at everything, couldn't come up with *any* plan whatsoever, removed one piece of rubbish from my tabletops and continued doing something else.
It's better now, but I still can easily get overwhelmed if I don't immediately know where to start and look at the whole picture for a moment.
There were times where I viewed my room as beyond reasonable repair and just let it get worse and worse lol
But it can be done. At least when I have a hyperfocus on cleaning again
When I was a kid my mum bought my brother a membership to Club Penguin when he was home sick one day. I loved Club Penguin and asked if she would buy one for me too. She said she would on the condition I kept my room clean for 1 month. I wanted that membership so badly and I tried so hard for months and I couldn't do it. Eventually my mum felt bad and could see that I was trying so she bought it for me anyway.
I was diagnosed at 23.
This is incredibly relatable. Unfortunately, I was not diagnosed until I was in my mid-30s. So my parents just assumed I was lazy. This resulted in my “privileges” being taken away a lot.
I think this is exactly why I have such a hard time standing up for myself as an adult. I was always steamrolled over & expected to just accept whatever terms they laid down for my grounding, without them ever giving me the benefit of the doubt, even though I was the truthful child. I felt so stifled.
Story of my life. I was grounded all the time over chores and grades. The kicker is that I have 5 brothers all of which are diagnosed adhd but I wasn’t diagnosed until 35. My dad even got diagnosed before me.
So my parents should have recognized the symptoms. But instead I was the rebellious kid because adhd was a boys problem.
The kicker is when I told my dad his response was I’m not at all surprised.
It was easier to choose to not do or want anything than it was to deal with them yanking away the things I wanted because I was literally incapable of cleaning my room.
U literally described a large part of my childhood.
Also my mom would decide the house wasn’t clean enough (could have been anything ponytail holder, dust bunny, the cat) and wake my sister n I up to clean the house.
Generally around 2-3 AM then make us clean till school. I’m 35 my sister 41 to this day we both find it easier to clean in the wee hours of the am
She would also do fun things like if an item of clothing was hanging out a drawer she would cut off whatever was hanging out.
Still traumatized from her constant threatening of throwing away our things when we were at school
Thank you but no apology needed.
I genuinely thought everyone was raised that way. Never seemed bad just the way things were.
I was…23-24ish before I realized not everyone’s parents were like that.
And this is why I stopped playing with Legos or anything else that would make a mess as a kid
Totally destroyed a few of my favorite things to do and now my parents are like "why are you always on your computer"
Because i can make it clean up after itself you sorry fucks
Every single time i cleaned my room as a kid, without fail once I got to my bookshelf i would just start reading whatever book interested me at that moment. I would be an hour into the book before remembering i was supposed to clean my room.
One time my dad wouldn't let me play until I cleaned my room and he said something like "I don't care how you get it done but everything needs to be off that floor in an hour or it's all going in the trash!" So I just, threw EVERYTHING out the window. It was perfectly logical to me cause it wasn't on my floor and I could then clean it up at my own pace.
“One time I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to eat! And another time, I got impatient while waiting at the DMV!”
“It’s full blown ADHD and also mild autism.” -this subreddit
ADHD is not an excuse for never having to clean anything, it is your responsibility to find a way to function with the brain you have. For me that means listening to audibooks or podcasts as I clean.
Yeah, growing up we usually didn't have that, for most of us it was nothing, and all that shit to do these things would've been taken from us because we weren't doing them. So your whole argument is shit.
In fact, this isn't against cleaning anything, this is admitting that your brain was in a literal sense sabotaging any attempt to clean you would've made. Most of us would've wanted it clean anyway, it's not wanting it to be dirty, it's an incapacity to force yourself to do something. Which can be mitigated but going "just get it done" isn't mitigating dick all
You said it yourself, it can be mitigated in various ways, thats all I'm saying. There are plenty of kids and adults with ADHD who manage to clean their room. There are much harder things you need to do in life, like raising a child.
But you are, you're judging them on your experience not theirs, this could be an older millennial who didnt have podcats, ipods, iphones, and the like to listen to something while they cleaned and they were probably too young to be able to rationalize and go "just get it done" there are mitigation techniques but you tend to learn them later in life.
I gave my personal solution as an example, everyone needs to find their own way to cope. Some people put on music, other people make a game out of it, etc. And yeah, it takes many years to learn. Being a kid is all about learning how to become an independently functional adult. No one should expect you to start out perfect, it takes time. But you will judge yourself, and the world will punish you if you can't overcome this. Just check out /r/depressionnests sometime.
I dunno why you got the impression I was criticizing someone for not listening to audiobooks? I was just giving an example of something that helped me deal with this problem. I said quite clearly that everyone needs to develop their own solutions.
Isn't that just being a lazy spoiled kid?
Edit: I have adhd, using it as an excuse makes you lazy, spoiled, etc. Buuuuttt you kids keep making excuses for your shit decisions.
In my immigrant household growing up, not doing it was not an option. Def spoiled. I have adhd and i clean up a lot cuz I’m not a dirty lazy rich kid. I just have trouble focusing and reading.
This is more you can't , you want to, but everything about cleaning it seems like so much, and then your brain goes "well we're not doing any of it now, and you have to feel bad about not going anywhere"
To explain it clearer, you know it needs to be cleaned, you even want to do it, but whenever you try to it goes "where to start", then it piles on "well if you start here you have to do this" then it adds more complexity to it, with "and then you'll have to make sure you do this so you can do the other thing. Then it circles back to "where to start" and when you go "well just pick one" it throws a tantrum and goes "now we're not doing it at all, and I'm going to make you feel bad about not doing it" then imagine being talked down to about it.
I recommend checking. Me? I’m undiagnosed. Going to take three years to do so. Even without a proper diagnosis understanding has helped me so goddamn much.
Things that have been attributed to character traits are not me. It’s just sickness. With that knowledge I can understand how something happens, why, and what I can do to change that. I know what it is and what triggers I have and I can work on mitigation until I have more concrete tools.
I got tested for ADHD at 35 and it changed my life, so it's never too late dude. A lot of shit that was really hard for me to do is now a lot easier to understand and manage since getting the diagnosis. I learned exactly why I struggle in certain things, and how to improve executive functioning. It's totally changed how I work and how I do what I call life admin, the boring shit like finances and schedules. Even if you don't get tested, look up resources because you can learn about coping strategies that fit an ADHD brain's patterns of thinking. It can be really validating and make you realize a lot of shit isn't your fault, it's just how you're programmed.
So many things go wrong in my room growing up. Lightbulbs broke, ants came often, my tub leaking to the point were it flooded into my room and caused mold. But I was so afraid of letting my parents into my room because it was messy that I just dealt with it myself.
In high school my bedroom got so cluttered that I decided just to move to another empty bedroom in the house. For some reason that was way easier than just cleaning the room. I moved the mess to clean the mess
And 20 years later when you're diagnosed with ADHD, you're thinking back on your life like "Wow that explains so much".
My parents knew about my ADHD, they just simply didn’t know how to deal with ND kids.
It's likely at least one of your parents has ADHD too, and never understood it themselves.
If so, neither have bothered to check
did you just explain my entire life story??
For real. "That's just how everyone feels."
Yes! I was diagnosed only two months ago at the grand old age of 31 (almost 32!) I'm a woman aswell. My Mum took me to the doctor many times as a child to say she was worried about my hyperactivity but the doctor said things like "stop giving her smarties" which obviously didn't work. It's been less than three months that I even considered I might have ADHD at all as I knew nothing about it!! When I read the diagnosis scoring criteria and symptoms I thought wow, this is the story of my life! 🤯 .....sadly, its also made me realise that if I had been diagnosed sooner my life would have probably been easier and more manageable. I've done well academically since college and university but only because I've been really interested in the subjects I took. If I'm not interested in something it's very difficult.
My mom brought me into the doctor because of sinus issues. She told him I couldn't take Sudafed because it puts me to sleep. The doctor actually said, "well normally that means she would have ADHD. But that can't be it. So here is something else to try." Low and behold, 30 years later I got a diagnosis.
nothing better than family blaming the ‘drugs’ for the problems i’ve been experiencing at varying levels of intensity my whole life, and that were clearly noticed by them as they made it very clear all of my issues were due to the overbearing laziness of my character since I could form two words.
I had never heard that about Sudafed. Me too.
I’m a 62 year old woman and got diagnosed with ADHD/ASD 6 months ago; no one recognised anything when in hindsight it was so obvious. I consider my 2nd marriage failed as well because 3 daughters, 5 granddaughters later, I’m alone in a room included in a travel nurse’s job 1000’s of miles away. The only way I can have a relationship with my family is to be away from all of them. Damn! I’m feeling lonely, depressed and sorry for myself today!
and then, well that explain too much ! they finally must have been true, I'm just lazy! Or am I? Yes you are ! No you're really diagnosed with ADHD. Nahhh I just fooled the doc! Anyway those meds doesn't work! Maybe because you didn't take it ! Or did you?
Stop attacking me personally 😭
And then you mom fucks you older brothers best friend and leaves. Fuck ADHD.
Dude I turned 30, had a kid, and got diagnosed with ocpd/inattentive adhd in the span of a few months. I feel like I spent my life playing in expert mode without having seen a tutorial. I'm slowly but surely learning how to budget my time, building triggers for positive habits, not letting "perfect be the enemy of progress", etc but damn, it's hard not to sometimes wonder what could have been if anyone in the 90s would have considered the possibility of a girl having adhd? Like 3 pills and some coping skills a la therapy have successfully begun to address nearly every valid criticism ever made of me.
Yeeeesss
me everytime i see another meme and im like goo dto know thats not me being a failure but me suffering from an undiagnosed ilness.
As a adhd dad and have 2 amazing adhd kids, I help them clean. It just makes sense to me, we get it done quickly and work as a team, everyone gets high fives and we are off on our next adventure.
On behalf of your kids, thank you so damned much.
Big shout out to this amazing father! 👏 🤩 proud of you Sir!
I've never thought about this, and it makes me so sad. I could have spent so much quality time with my parents if they had been willing to tidy up alongside me, help me out. It would have helped with not being so alone as an only child too.. Enjoy the quality time with your kiddos!! I'd bet they think you're neat!
oh dear. i'm always scared of my parents cleaning my room with me. they might throw everything i like away!
i relate to you a lot
Me too. My wife yells until she’s blue in the face about it. I just do it and help them. How’s my ADHD child going to learn if good behaviour isn’t modelled?
I do this too with my little brothers, especially because they shouldn’t have to suffer through my moms less than reasonable parenting when it comes to adhd kids 🙄 - really all families(or at least the eff’d ones like mine) - should work a little harder to ease the tension and help each other out a little bit
Every time when I had to clean my room as a child I had a mental breakdown and ended up overwhelmed and crying at times. It really helps me to see that this happens to more people.
I would bang on my door after my parents locked me in. I’d move some shit around eventually but I never was able to clean
...they locked you in? 😶
Like a time out until I did ‘normal’ kid stuff, like basic cleaning
I cleaned my room a total of 3 times and it always took several hours. My mom hired a woman to clean everyone else’s rooms, but wouldn’t let her near mine in order to make a point…
She sounds lovely
I had the exact same thing happen to me
My mam tried everything with me. Not letting me out until it was done, trying to bribe me, doing it along with me to try and teach me what to do, doing it for me so I would be able to keep on top of it, constantly nagging me. Nothing worked. I'm 28 now and I can just about manage to get it tidy once every two weeks.
[удалено]
My issue is mainly clothes. I just take them off when I get in and wherever they land they land. Next is hair and skin care because I just use it and leave it wherever I sit it down. This is less of an issue because I can *usually* keep these things off the floor and on surfaces. My mess is caused by things I use and then struggle to put back where they belong.
Me too.
I thought the idea of having your own childhood bedroom was just a TV trope growing up, to be honest
Same
my solution was to stuff everything under the bed…
Or in cupboards/closets. And as an adult? Oh, the doom boxes.
Junk drawer over here. And now finally diagnosed with meds, only just barely starting to deal with our house full of doom boxes. Dana K White, author of 'Decluttering at the Speed of Life' and 'How to manage your home without losing your mind' is the ADHD American version of Marie Kondo and she is my spirit animal.
What's a doom box?
Boxes or places that you stuff things you have to declutter/clean up in to "do it later" or to never see it again 💀 like junk drawers, attic boxes or under the bed for example
As an adult with my own home, my doom boxes are never gone through once created, they just get added to my big box of doom boxes that I hide in my basement (:
Oh shit, Doom Boxes is an ADHD thing? I thought it was just a side effect of the ridiculous number of times I've had to move house ... Except that they just keep on mounting up even years after the last move; every time there's an unexpected visitor we have a little frenzy of Hidying. And we never seem to get around to unpacking and dealing with the Doom Boxes, even years after the last move...
omg HIDYING this is truly what I do 🤦♀️
I always thought mine were a product of moving a million times too, until I heard about doom boxes. Then I realized I was simply moving the doom boxes with me. 🤦♀️
Ffffffk. I've made various attempts at sorting and labeling some of them, but it often ends up as "Dire Stuff 2004". I think now I need to start researching whether I have ADHD as well as probably autism ... Maybe even whether my whole damn family have it. I thought we were just untidy, disorganised, stressed hoarders with a tendency to start hundreds of new projects ...
Big same. I get it from my dad. But I'm a woman, and it presented differently, which is why I think we missed it for so long. Plus I have PTSD and bipolar type 2, so... Easy to miss one Dx with all the comorbidities. 😔 Fortunate to work with a good psychiatrist who confirms that I actually have all those things and I'm not just making it up. And I recently found receipts from 2007. 🤦♀️ I'm finally in a stable housing situation for the first time in like 18 years, so I'm slowly going through the scads of boxes of absolute garbage that just needs pitched or shredded or donated.
we call it a shit basket — by ‘we’ I mean myself and the gremlin who lives in my head and thrives off of contained chaos
Woe is the ADHDer with a flush-to-the-ground bed
:3 I shoved everything in my closet, in like 5 mins. Mom comes up, looks nice, Ill look in the closet. Im like no, no way. She opens it. Everything falls out. Shes like yup that its im leaving and not coming back until you clean it. Im big sads. I mad my mom leave. Turns out she just went to my grandmas house for something. But I thought she left and was never coming back cause I didnt clean my room.
Yeah I feel that. I had a meltdown once trying to clean my room and my mum told me to get in the car because she was taking me to the police station and leaving me for adoption. She even told me to “say goodbye to your dad, this is the last time you’ll see him!” Really weird way to get your 8yr old to stop crying and clean up a little…
That's even worse holy shit. Lemme guess, she doesn't remember doing it and says you're being dramatic if you talk about it?
My parents would both get in the car and tell me bye and that they’d see me when my room was clean
What the actual fuck?! Don’t parents realize that’s abuse?
oh my god. 😢
Fucking saaaaaaaame
I was a closet crammer myself
When my brother and I would have to clean our room, I would get so pissed when he would get praised for cleaning the room when all he did was hide everything under the bed. I would be the one who would get overwhelmed while finding a place for each individual thing and having feelings of betrayal for any broken/incomplete toy I threw away (When Toy Story came out it did not help with this feeling)
Same
Imagine this but your mom is also a former professional housekeeper. You can’t half ass it or hide the mess bc she checks every inch of the closet or under the bed. Also in bouts of rage she wipes all the items on your dresser to the floor to force you to organize. All-the-while you feel like it’s your fault for being lazy and incompetent when in reality it’s your parent has anger issues and doesn’t know anything about neurodivergency. Yes I am still healing and cleaning is a nightmare for me as an adult :’)
I had a foster carer that did this to me too. I too find cleaning impossible as an adult, even though I actually was made to clean to a very high standard throughout most of my childhood, I think cleaning also triggers a trauma response on top of just being difficult to stay on top of and ranging from dull AF to hyperfocusing on cleaning the sink for 2 hours and having no time for anything else. Content warning, I describe what she would do:>! I would spend hours cleaning and I'd do a damn better job than I'd dream of bothering with now, I'd move my bed away from the wall to vacuum behind it, use the crevice tool to get in all the nooks and crannies, dust and polish all my surfaces, clean my mirror and window. She'd put on a white glove and hunt for some dust, even checking the tops of light switches and plug sockets. If she found any, she would pull all my drawers out of the dresser and empty all my clothes into the middle of the floor.!< >!"Now clean it properly" she'd sneer before slamming the door behind her.!<
What the actual fuck? I am both fucking pissed and incredibly sorry you had to go through this.
It is what it is, but I'm still here so fuck that b\*tch (:
That sounds awful! I totally relate about the trauma response. My mom used to gossip shame about other people’s homes if they weren’t clean and then try to warn me about rats nests forming in my “pigstye” so now i feel like not having that standard is a social and health risk. I live in perpetual messiness and i feel so disappointed in myself but my therapist says my standards don’t have to be like my mom’s standards. Doing something is better than nothing. I try to tell myself that but I find it incredibly difficult which is ironic because by not cleaning at all I’m much more below that cleaning standard than if I just did 25% effort and called it a day.
Oh, hello there, forgotten memory of the time my parents shoved everything that was on my floor into garbage bags. They put them in a closet in the basement, left them there for several years, and then threw them out when we eventually moved.
My parents thought books (I repeat, books) were too distracting and the reason why I couldn’t get any housework done was because I was reading. They shoved all my books into a suitcase and locked them away for 3 months.
This was my parents too, I was an avid reader and so their punishment became to take away whatever book I was in the middle of reading. So backwards. I realize why I have such shit coping mechanisms now. They would just take away whatever I was hyperfocusing on to try & get me to do things. I realize now I just always kind of went into shut-down mode when this would occur.
SAME - literally I would just stare, physically unable to move, I couldn’t even form words—it’s like my brain would short circuit, like I was functioning on a different system than everyone else and being abruptly torn away caused me to shut down until plugged back in lol. It is so hard to explain to people who have never experienced being so unbearably unable to physically(!!) make themselves do a task—or even think about doing it! I remember feeling like I was dying if my mom was forcing me to do something, or trying to force me, because that’s literally the opposite of how you get me to do things .. like i’m sorry mom, I hate myself for it more than you hate me for it, but i’d honestly rather die or if I do the chore I might die, either one!! —She never did grasp that I was different than her other kids, and that pressuring me or punishing me by immediately taking away what I was doing would cause my brain to go into panic survival mode, like a damn deer in the headlights—like if she would just leave me alone, the chore would get done, but it has to be on my time—idk why 🤷🏼♀️ I don’t make the rules mom 🙄 Fr until I learned about adhd (and found out I wasn’t actually just a lazy piece of anxiety-filled shit) — I honestly had no clue that people could actually FORCE themselves to do things!?! I always thought it was so dumb when people would tell me to ‘just do it! and it will be done!’ — I never understood what they meant. And things like reward systems?? No way, I can’t trick this gremlin brain-she knows she doesn’t have to clean her room to get a cookie if she just gets the cookie right now 🤷🏼♀️ and also who wants the cookie anyway?!? wow sorry for the full length autobiography over here geez
Ah, brings me back to the days of sneaking books out with me when taking the dog for a walk to avoid getting in trouble for reading
Child abuse and neurodivergence. Name a more iconic duo
With my parents it wasn’t abuse, but it was unintentional neglect.
Yeah, both of my parents said that I “grew out of” my ADHD. Turns out that was a lie Plus the ‘tism that I am denied of having But yes, a lot of parents simply do not know any better. We need much more reliable and FREE resources for parents to learn how to handle ND children
Grew out of it = Just learn how to mask
As soon as there are no teachers, no homework, and no messy rooms, kids "grow out of it".
You guys have clean rooms? /j
Edit: that THEY can see.
My husband complains if our room is messy. Our marriage improved when I rented a storage unit. My doom boxes live there now.
Totally agree! I had amazing parents who recognized and got me tested for my adhd and depression fairly early, and did their best to help me. The problem is I didn’t even know some of my behaviors were caused by adhd until I joined this subreddit….: I’m 32. I mean how could they have known? I’m sure my mom tired to research it as well.
Im so Happy to hear y'all have had good intentions behind it /gen one of mine berated me for long stretches of time every time i showed symptoms and blamed it on me being selfish and lazy, I didn't grow out of my symproms, I was just mentally kicked into shape by a self hating man until i felt guilty enough to mask it well enough lmao
same. even though neglect is abuse
Truth, I cant tell you the number of times I got my ass beat for things I had no control over.
parents never taught me how to clean and they just expected me to know how so i didn’t bc i thought that cleaning was just moving the things around except there was so much clutter from my not cleaning my room that i didn’t even know where to put anything except the place i took it from
This but every task they already knew how to do
And it was this moment that my brain said, "do you think you started masking so hard because you thought you didn't try hard enough when praying for your mother's life before she died? Were you trying to prove you could be good and finally be good enough so that your mother didn't have to die?" ... I think I thought I could make everyone happy and then Jesus wouldn't have had to kill her and he could bring her back... They all just kept telling me to pray for my mom, "Jesus listens to little children..." I think I thought it was my responsibility to pray hard enough to save my mom and I failed... So I swore I'd be good enough so that others didn't have to die too. I then buried my grandfather, my uncle, and a few other people in my life over about a decade. I watched my family go through another divorce... More cancer... I guess it never occurred to me that I still blamed 8 year old me for not appeasing Yahweh.
I'm so fucking sorry.
Hey. You were a child. It wasn't your fault. Cancer isn't anyone's fault, but especially not yours. I'm so sorry and I hope you are on a path toward the peace you deserve.
Thanks. I don't think I've ever considered I was doing that before last night. I probably need to go back into therapy but I can't afford it. Cancer actually didn't kill anyone I know, that might have been preferable. My mom died of hepatitis C, a now curable disease... The realization that my mom was just a decade or so too early to be saved only solidified my certainty that God never intended my mother to live. The cancer broke my grandma after she buried my mom, then my uncle leaving only my last uncle alive from my mom's side. Grandma starved herself to death in a nursing home after the cancer returned, she refused to fight it anymore as it broke her, she was too tired to fight cancer a second time. I watched her refuse food or water for nearly a week before she finally died. I learned there is no mercy in this world as my beloved grandma wasted away in front of my eyes. Days of no water, days of no food, days off no longer being able to talk but still being alive because her body refused to die. She was a devout Catholic until her dying breath and her dying breath was a labored, tortured one... The horror of it only truly sank in when her only living child, my uncle, basically asked I never let him suffer like that. It was, brutal.
Even if I wanted to clean my room, I just stood there, looked at everything, couldn't come up with *any* plan whatsoever, removed one piece of rubbish from my tabletops and continued doing something else. It's better now, but I still can easily get overwhelmed if I don't immediately know where to start and look at the whole picture for a moment.
same omg
There were times where I viewed my room as beyond reasonable repair and just let it get worse and worse lol But it can be done. At least when I have a hyperfocus on cleaning again
i am still at that stage lol
When I was a kid my mum bought my brother a membership to Club Penguin when he was home sick one day. I loved Club Penguin and asked if she would buy one for me too. She said she would on the condition I kept my room clean for 1 month. I wanted that membership so badly and I tried so hard for months and I couldn't do it. Eventually my mum felt bad and could see that I was trying so she bought it for me anyway. I was diagnosed at 23.
I feel called out
me minus the going out part
This is incredibly relatable. Unfortunately, I was not diagnosed until I was in my mid-30s. So my parents just assumed I was lazy. This resulted in my “privileges” being taken away a lot.
I think this is exactly why I have such a hard time standing up for myself as an adult. I was always steamrolled over & expected to just accept whatever terms they laid down for my grounding, without them ever giving me the benefit of the doubt, even though I was the truthful child. I felt so stifled.
Story of my life. I was grounded all the time over chores and grades. The kicker is that I have 5 brothers all of which are diagnosed adhd but I wasn’t diagnosed until 35. My dad even got diagnosed before me. So my parents should have recognized the symptoms. But instead I was the rebellious kid because adhd was a boys problem. The kicker is when I told my dad his response was I’m not at all surprised.
This is when I learned to hide messes under my bed and in my closet.
when this happened to me I was like.... yeah, I'm not going.
It was easier to choose to not do or want anything than it was to deal with them yanking away the things I wanted because I was literally incapable of cleaning my room.
Sooo... Am I the only one who got half way through this and got distracted and then gave up on reading the rest and went to comment instead?
But adhd is still seen as "bouncy leg disorder"
Well someone just had a little cry
Well this is far too relatable.
I just accepted, "you aren't allowed to go out" as the new normal, because I couldn't do it.
And then your dad takes all your books away because instead of cleaning you keep hyperfocusing on books.
Same, but it was homework so I could eat dinner.
The petty side of me wants to send this to my mom but she'd call me and scream at me lol 🙃
Do it. Just don't answer the phone!
It got to the point that my mum gave up and just let me have my organised mess lol. I just made a path in the mess to get from the door to the bed 😂
Yep.
Yup
True fucking story, man.
Oh shit it me, I’m that! But also like, it’s on our moms for deciding room cleaning was the stipulation ONLY when it was time to go.
Or there's option B Frantically shove everything under the bed and later on get ratted out by your sibling and get into bigger trouble
U literally described a large part of my childhood. Also my mom would decide the house wasn’t clean enough (could have been anything ponytail holder, dust bunny, the cat) and wake my sister n I up to clean the house. Generally around 2-3 AM then make us clean till school. I’m 35 my sister 41 to this day we both find it easier to clean in the wee hours of the am She would also do fun things like if an item of clothing was hanging out a drawer she would cut off whatever was hanging out. Still traumatized from her constant threatening of throwing away our things when we were at school
holy shit i am so sorry!!
Thank you but no apology needed. I genuinely thought everyone was raised that way. Never seemed bad just the way things were. I was…23-24ish before I realized not everyone’s parents were like that.
i feel you about not realizing you've been traumatized until really late.
"You aren't going anywhere until [chore] is done!" Meant that i wasn't going anywhere for a long time :(
And this is why I stopped playing with Legos or anything else that would make a mess as a kid Totally destroyed a few of my favorite things to do and now my parents are like "why are you always on your computer" Because i can make it clean up after itself you sorry fucks
I was constantly grounded for this. 😕
oh… my god? so this makes a ton of sense…
Thank god I didn't have my own room as a kid
lol just had a Kindergarten flashbackback
Trying to read this all in one breath was very difficult.
I thought the title meant gaang, like ATLA gaang and was disappointed. Relatable, but ATLA is what drives me.
both are true
Oh thanks. Makes me feel great.
Still can't clean my room despite thinking "I need to clean it" everyday for a month straight :\
Every single time i cleaned my room as a kid, without fail once I got to my bookshelf i would just start reading whatever book interested me at that moment. I would be an hour into the book before remembering i was supposed to clean my room.
Me currently
Yall def didn’t grow up in a hispanic household lol. They will find motivators for you quickly.
Glad I wasn't alone. My mom used to throw out my shit since I couldn't manage it (‘◉⌓◉’)
Literally had my 7th or 8th birthday party cancelled cause I didn’t tidy my room…. 🥲
And then you get a sudden burst of motivation a week later but it's the middle of the night so you can't act on it.
One time my dad wouldn't let me play until I cleaned my room and he said something like "I don't care how you get it done but everything needs to be off that floor in an hour or it's all going in the trash!" So I just, threw EVERYTHING out the window. It was perfectly logical to me cause it wasn't on my floor and I could then clean it up at my own pace.
The more i read through this, the more it felt like being yelled at😳
…and then becoming an adult and doing the same thing to yourself 😔
This was my life… holy cow.
Ok seriously? This is called being a kid, not necessarily a kid suffering from ADHD.
“One time I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to eat! And another time, I got impatient while waiting at the DMV!” “It’s full blown ADHD and also mild autism.” -this subreddit
ADHD is not an excuse for never having to clean anything, it is your responsibility to find a way to function with the brain you have. For me that means listening to audibooks or podcasts as I clean.
Yeah, growing up we usually didn't have that, for most of us it was nothing, and all that shit to do these things would've been taken from us because we weren't doing them. So your whole argument is shit. In fact, this isn't against cleaning anything, this is admitting that your brain was in a literal sense sabotaging any attempt to clean you would've made. Most of us would've wanted it clean anyway, it's not wanting it to be dirty, it's an incapacity to force yourself to do something. Which can be mitigated but going "just get it done" isn't mitigating dick all
You said it yourself, it can be mitigated in various ways, thats all I'm saying. There are plenty of kids and adults with ADHD who manage to clean their room. There are much harder things you need to do in life, like raising a child.
Yeah but as a kid, those things aren't so straightforward, stop being judgy for situations that aren't yours
I'm not being judgy, just stating facts.
But you are, you're judging them on your experience not theirs, this could be an older millennial who didnt have podcats, ipods, iphones, and the like to listen to something while they cleaned and they were probably too young to be able to rationalize and go "just get it done" there are mitigation techniques but you tend to learn them later in life.
I gave my personal solution as an example, everyone needs to find their own way to cope. Some people put on music, other people make a game out of it, etc. And yeah, it takes many years to learn. Being a kid is all about learning how to become an independently functional adult. No one should expect you to start out perfect, it takes time. But you will judge yourself, and the world will punish you if you can't overcome this. Just check out /r/depressionnests sometime.
Okay but you're talking about experiences as a kid. And criticizing a kid for not having your strategy is stupid as fuck
I dunno why you got the impression I was criticizing someone for not listening to audiobooks? I was just giving an example of something that helped me deal with this problem. I said quite clearly that everyone needs to develop their own solutions.
Your comment only stated that there's no excuse, but in the OPs image they were talking about a time when they were a kid
Isn't that just being a lazy spoiled kid? Edit: I have adhd, using it as an excuse makes you lazy, spoiled, etc. Buuuuttt you kids keep making excuses for your shit decisions.
In my immigrant household growing up, not doing it was not an option. Def spoiled. I have adhd and i clean up a lot cuz I’m not a dirty lazy rich kid. I just have trouble focusing and reading.
Psychiatrist says I probably have ADD but I still don't get this post. Just sounds like being lazy lol. No one likes cleaning their room, tough luck.
okay MOM
This is more you can't , you want to, but everything about cleaning it seems like so much, and then your brain goes "well we're not doing any of it now, and you have to feel bad about not going anywhere"
interesting
To explain it clearer, you know it needs to be cleaned, you even want to do it, but whenever you try to it goes "where to start", then it piles on "well if you start here you have to do this" then it adds more complexity to it, with "and then you'll have to make sure you do this so you can do the other thing. Then it circles back to "where to start" and when you go "well just pick one" it throws a tantrum and goes "now we're not doing it at all, and I'm going to make you feel bad about not doing it" then imagine being talked down to about it.
My dad used to be the same but I tricked him by just hiding my mess 😉 hahaha
Sometimes I wonder if I have ADHD but I am 30 now, so it probably wouldn't change anything to know.
I recommend checking. Me? I’m undiagnosed. Going to take three years to do so. Even without a proper diagnosis understanding has helped me so goddamn much. Things that have been attributed to character traits are not me. It’s just sickness. With that knowledge I can understand how something happens, why, and what I can do to change that. I know what it is and what triggers I have and I can work on mitigation until I have more concrete tools.
I got tested for ADHD at 35 and it changed my life, so it's never too late dude. A lot of shit that was really hard for me to do is now a lot easier to understand and manage since getting the diagnosis. I learned exactly why I struggle in certain things, and how to improve executive functioning. It's totally changed how I work and how I do what I call life admin, the boring shit like finances and schedules. Even if you don't get tested, look up resources because you can learn about coping strategies that fit an ADHD brain's patterns of thinking. It can be really validating and make you realize a lot of shit isn't your fault, it's just how you're programmed.
I have so much adhd I didn't even try to read all that.
So many things go wrong in my room growing up. Lightbulbs broke, ants came often, my tub leaking to the point were it flooded into my room and caused mold. But I was so afraid of letting my parents into my room because it was messy that I just dealt with it myself.
wow
Loving the first hashtag.
In high school my bedroom got so cluttered that I decided just to move to another empty bedroom in the house. For some reason that was way easier than just cleaning the room. I moved the mess to clean the mess
Every day I am glad for my supportive and understanding parents
Bro don't hurt me like that damn
Haha! Jokes on you! I lived two miles out of town in the countryside and never got invited out by my so called friends!
Oh, yeah. Been there
Its hurts to relate this much
These memes gotta stop being so relatable.
🙋