Holy wow it’s been a long time since I dusted this thing off. But it’s 2020 and still January, so how about some resolutions.

I might not do perfectly, but I’m going to try to make one post a week from now until the end of the year. That’s 49 posts in total. This will be post 1. I’m already off to a good start!

These posts will be about anything I happen to write about. At least two paragraphs long, otherwise that’s just a tweet and what’s even the point? So without further ado, post number: the first.

ADHD sucks. Many things suck about it, but perhaps the biggest is how invisible it is as a disability. Even if I can accurately describe it to somebody, all they tend to hear is how I’m not trying hard enough. For those who don’t know, ADHD is an executive function disorder. It’s only vaguely hinted at in the name. Attention deficit hyper-active disorder. Which sounds a lot like “doesn’t pay attention, can’t sit still” disease. And that’s the first hurdle to get past. For most people, not paying attention and feeling restless aren’t things they would consider a disability. For the majority out there, those are things they can put a little effort into and pretty reasonably correct. So the assumption goes, ADHD must be a fancy word to excuse bad behavior in lazy people.

There are some bad assumptions involved in that reading, though. Firstly, that ADHD is as simple as being distractible and squirmy. As you might have guessed I am about to say, it isn’t. Executive function is, essentially, the brain’s ability to Do Stuff. It encompasses things like processing and prioritizing information, making decisions, and communicating intent to the rest of the body.

Physical expressions of executive function disorders can be things like tremors, jerky or imprecise movements, clumsiness, and being unable to exert the correct amount of force when holding objects. On the mental side of things, executive dysfunction results in slow thoughts, difficulty directing thoughts where they need to be focused, slowness at interpreting incoming information, misinterpreting information, difficulty with memory recall, difficulty with prioritizing information in a timely manner, and a lot more.

For someone with ADHD, those symptoms add up to a wide range of expressions, but the typical array is difficulty maintaining focus, difficulty prioritizing one’s actions based on importance, short term and long term memory problems, and emotional dysregulation. It’s also very common to see auditory processing issues, depression, anxiety, and social isolation. Considering these as the result of the brain being unable to “do stuff” we can see that these symptoms are a lot more serious that one might first think.

This post is getting pretty long and, heh, my ADHD is currently telling me to wrap it up and go do something else more interesting. So how about I come back to it next time for a more detailed break down of that list of symptoms.

Thanks for reading and see you in part two!