- cross-posted to:
- neurodiversity@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- neurodiversity@lemmygrad.ml
As an AuDHD person, the college dropout story is relatable to me, except for the YouTube career success. I grew up in a madhouse during my traumatic childhood, and going to college free from my backwards, overprotective, overly strict parents was essentially like falling off a cliff. I was already burnt out during my last year of high school, and I was too excited with the freedom and ended up wasting time playing video games and skipping classes regularly because I had little energy to function as an adult. I still struggle with burnout to this day due to being an overworked IT contractor for years.
That's an indication that you may have ADHD.
Okay, so it's important to recognise that the symptoms of depression and ADHD can mimic one another. I'm not going to try to convince you either way on this, not would I try to diagnose you if I were qualified to, I'm just going to throw info out there to help you have a better understanding of your own situation.
This is going to sound odd and you don't need to answer this but - do you enjoy putting off tasks? A person who is lazy enjoys putting things off. A person who struggles with motivation wants to do things but is unable to get started, and they generally feel very stuck and very uncomfortable not being able to do what they want to do.
How are you with finishing up tasks? Do you often find yourself nearing the completion of a task, even something like playing a game through to the end, and you lose all motivation so you tend to have a lot of things that are left abandoned at 90% completion?
The typical ADHD experience is that, when the task is near completion, suddenly all your will to get to the finish line just drains away to nothing.
This is distinct from being exhausted and pushing yourself to finish but not quite getting there, and it's particularly noticeable with tasks that are independent of external demands - at work or studying there's a lot of external expectation for you to finish the task so you will probably get there. Outside of that, in your personal life, without those external forces you will likely notice this is a pattern for you if you have ADHD.
Do you lose all sense of time when you're down a rabbit hole?
What was your ability to pay attention to boring things like prior to being depressed?
When you say bad at paying attention, are we talking like you mind wanders a bit and you have to put in effort to pay attention or are we talking like trying to pay attention to a boring topic makes you feel like crawling out of your skin, like it's almost physically unbearable, or being on a 10-second countdown before you're staring out of the window with unfocused vision until someone starts clicking their fingers in front of your face multiple times before you snap back to reality?
Just a bit of info: neurodivergent refers to people who have atypical neurology. This includes all the different forms of mental illness. I think it's an extremely common misconception that ND just means "autistic and/or ADHD" but that's really not the case.