About the just

Why don't you just do the thing you can't do anyway?

One of the only really good self-help books I’ve ever read is Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. The title feels embarrassingly old-fashioned—just one trick—but works for the content, which is so embarrassingly obvious most of us don’t want to look directly at it. There are things we don’t want to do because, for perfectly logical evolutionary reasons, our brains are scared of them out of all proportion to the actual risk—and heedless of the reward. Facing that matters if you hope to ever overcome it.

Feeling the fear and cracking on is good advice. Unfortunately, the bastard cousin of this you get when you tell people you have ADHD is not.

It sounds something like this:

“Why don’t you just make a list and work through it one task at a time.”

“Oh, I get that noise in my head all the time but I just ignore it.”

“Well, we all do that to some extent, don’t we? You’ve just got to get on with it.”

Suffer the neurodevelopmental cognitive disorder but do it anyway.

The other day while I was talking to that clever bean Robyn Wilder on Instagram, I was complaining about this kind of thing and she summed it up beautifully:

“The main deficiency is in the ‘just’. As in ‘why don’t you just’.”

Well. Fill in your own injustice joke here.

Here’s the thing: you don’t get the diagnosis if you don’t have a problem

I don’t dismiss concerns about people self-diagnosing; I really don’t. Even though every diagnosis has to begin with thinking you might have the thing, I totally understand concern that people might be pathologising perfectly normal human quirks and behaviours. Social contagion can, in fact, be a thing, just as mass hysteria is. And because neurodivergent people are, shockingly, still people, so many of the behaviours that stack up as evidence for diagnosis also crop up in, well, pretty much everyone. So no, we’re not all a little bit on the spectrum; people on the spectrum are, in fact, entirely human.

Still. Just because some people think they have our conditions and don’t, that doesn’t mean the condition itself doesn’t really exist, is over-diagnosed, or the challenges that come with it are overplayed. Someone with one hand will still find it trickier to open jars even though everyone with two hands has to do the knife trick occasionally.

Most importantly: diagnosis does not depend entirely on having these traits. It’s critical that they also present a problem in your everyday life. This might be measured through obvious markers, like challenges keeping a job or maintaining relationships, taking staggering risks, or suffering addictions. Or it might be less obvious: like being really good at your job on the surface but also having to work an all-hours hyperfocus day to make up for every four that you spend arguing with your own brain to just fucking get up, please let me get up, I just want to get things done, for the LOVE OF GOD.

If you think they hand out controlled substances like candy to help you deal with this, you have clearly never tried to squeeze a stimulant out of the NHS.

The point, here, of course: if I could ‘just’ do it, I would not have an ADHD diagnosis.

But I do.

Yes, I’ve read those articles too

The ones about how ADHD magically goes away when you tweak the environment enough. No need to fuck around with drugs and dopamine management; let the office weirdos have their crutches so they will be useful and productive and their neurodivergence vanishes without a trace!

Except that: my entire home life is set up to make my ADHD easier to handle and yet there I am still having it. Still forgetting to fill in crucial paperwork for my kid. Still struggling with physically painful levels of rejection sensitivity. Still having days where I can’t stop and weeks where I can barely go even with deadline pressure shoving the dynamite up my ass and fear of getting in trouble lighting the fuse.

As it happens, my workplace is really ADHD-friendly—almost by accident, to be honest, but often kindly by design—and I do what I need to do (except my timesheets, sorry boss) and do it really, really well. But there’s a price. And I’m not the only one that pays it (sorry family and friends).

My ADHD doesn’t go away when I stop annoying my colleagues with it.

I regret to inform you that I can be both highly capable and intelligent and burdened with inglorious processing issues. And while I’m grateful that you’re making them easier to manage, I’m afraid they continue when you’re not looking.

If it turns out I’m wrong about all this, thank fucking goodness

Seriously, if it turns out it was all a fever dream and all you need to do is have everyone practise the fucking pomodoro method and I’ll be fine: GREAT. FIX ME. PLEASE.

Until then, though, perhaps don’t ask me what I can ‘just’ do, or I might just scream.