I think that this episode of chans room and something that happened to me irl made me v aware that i need to take several steps back from the mindset I have for chan and skz now

hi, it's the adhd anon again. according to the dsm-v, i think i have it, which is weird bc i've never seen myself as having more trouble than others. (my grades are better than almost anyone else in my grade.) (although that might just be bc i'm interested in what's being taught - when something's not interesting or too hard, i have a pretty hard time doing it.) anyway, if it's not too much trouble, what does feel like to stim/hyperfixtate for you? (i'm so sorry to bother you in advance)

Hey, dude, welcome back!  So, okay, first things first: the stereotype of someone with ADHD automatically doing terribly in school is based heavily on the original diagnostic criteria, which categorized ADHD strictly in terms of “young hyperactive white boy who has violent outbursts and/or disciplinary problems and Just Doesn’t Do Well in academics.”  And there are people who manifest ADHD like that, it’s a stereotype with roots in reality--a lot of people with ADHD either consistently struggle with academics or eventually reach a point where their previous focusing techniques fail them.

However.

I left high school for college two years early, and if I hadn’t, I would probably been valedictorian of the graduating class, because I had a GPA well above 4.0 due to my general habit of doing extra credit whenever it was offered.  In college, I had a reputation for turning in beautifully complete lab reports and essays five pages over the minimum requirement.  I got high honors on my thesis, graduated magna cum laude, and finished a pre-medical major in half the recommended time period.  When I was a kid, the phrase “savant syndrome” got thrown around a lot, to give you some context.

On the other hand, I manifest a lot of those stereotypical ADHD symptoms: I’m loud, I interrupt people a lot, I have erratic and overwhelming mood swings that I struggle to control, I fidget incessantly and can’t stand silence, I have a tendency to get destructive when I’m angry, I have managed to seriously injure myself because I couldn’t resist a stupid impulse more than once, and if we’re all being honest, I would never have graduated high school at all, because I was on the brink of expulsion for getting into fights during class periods.  

It’s easy to feel like “I never really struggled academically” is somehow a counterargument to any and all symptoms of ADHD that you might manifest, but it’s really not.  (Heck, sometimes ADHD is even helpful--I finished my thesis a full week before anyone else and had time to fix my citations, mostly because my ADHD responds well to pressure and that crunch time hyperfocus Had My Back.)  It might take time for you to come to terms with this idea, and that’s okay!  But try to at least consider it.

All that being said, I am actually gonna answer your question, I just got distracted because the amount of time I spent making the statement “I’m faking having ADHD because I did well in school” is mindblowing and I have a Thing about it.  Forgive my ramble.

Stimming: I’m going to answer this first because the answer is going to be the most useless.  The ways I stim tend to be vocal/auditory stuff (I talk a lot when I’m alone, I sing and play music when I’m doing menial tasks, if I’m really anxious I’ll hum a single note until I calm down) or tactile stuff (sometimes destructive things like scratching my arms, sometimes neutral stuff like tapping my fingers in specific patterns or rubbing my palms over my jeans or the leather of a jacket or something).  It’s mostly things that ‘pass’ for neurotypical with very few exceptions, because I trained myself out of a lot of my ‘non-passing’ stims (rocking back and forth, knocking into walls, hand-flapping, that sort of thing) really young.  As for what it feels like to stim, it’s just...good.  It’s sort of like the brain equivalent of running your hand the right way along velvet, and discovering that you’ve been rubbing it backwards all along.  Or like the equivalent of stepping into a cool shower on a really hot day--it’s not that it’s miserable outside the shower, it’s just that the shower is extremely good.  I have a playlist of music that, for whatever reason, hits the right combination of voice and rhythm and notes and words to make my brain suddenly get calm, and it’s not necessarily my favorite music or a cohesive collection of tunes or anything (featuring Six Shooter by Coyote Kisses and also Human by Rag’n’Bone Man, which have nothing in common), but it’s Good.

Hyperfocus: You didn’t actually mention this, but I think it’s worth mentioning because it’s one of the hallmarks of ADHD.  It bears more than a passing resemblance to the concept of “flow”, but turned up to 11.  Hyperfocus is the state of being so overwhelmingly tuned in to the thing you’re currently doing that everything else falls away--which is fine, unless you’re one of us folks who can hyperfocus ourselves right through meal times.  It’s inexorable, it’s all-consuming, and it can feel pretty fucking great, which is why it’s important to be careful and find a way to hydrate yourself.  The primary difference between hyperfocus and flow is that hyperfocus is generally involuntary and does not necessarily tune you into something you planned or wanted to pay attention to.  If you ever see me publish a fic that includes a note about “I didn’t mean to write this but it’s 2 AM so here”, that’s code for “please validate me, I’ve been hyperfocused on this for two or three hours and I failed to do a lot of important things as a result.”  The other thing about hyperfocus is that afterwards, the drop coming off it is a real bitch.  It leaves me feeling hollowed out, exhausted, and kind of pettily disinterested in anything that would usually hold my attention.  Being hyperfocused is like being a machine designed to do one thing and one thing only and doing that thing feels incredible; coming off hyperfocus is like being an overtired toddler.

Hyperfixation: Hyperfixations are the ADHD equivalent of a special interest, aka: that thing you’ve been struggling not to pester every single person you know about, every single second of every single day of the past two and a half weeks.  Were you around, dear anon, when this blog was Only Animorphs, All The Time, and if you didn’t give a shit about morphin’ teens you just had to sit down, shut up, and learn some stuff, or else unfollow me?  That’s what hyperfixating looks like.  Sometimes it’s useful stuff--do you know how unbelievably useful having a hyperfixation on triage techniques is to me?  I crushed my triage training, I owned that shit, I wrote a whole chapter of my thesis on it.  Other times, it’s...well, Animorphs.  Or the American Revolution.  Or X-Men.  Or dinosaurs.  Some random shit like that.  Learning about hyperfixations, talking about them, is generally pure unadulterated joy.  On the other hand--oh, God, listen, I know how annoying I am, but I cannot stop myself.  I know I haven’t talked about anything but Animorphs in three weeks, I know I’ve made forty-five TAZ posts today, whatever you’re about to complain about, I already know, okay, I am aware, and there is nothing more painful than to have a fucking out-of-body experience watching yourself rattle on about a hyperfixation while the other person obviously gets bored in front of you.  And then you try to keep your mouth shut and it physically hurts not to talk about the thing.  It’s hard to describe what it ‘feels’ like except that ADHD brains are magpies at their core and hyperfixations are the shiny, shiny objects your brain wants to take home.

Anyway, I’m not sure how useful ANY of this has been, but like.  After a certain point, you kind of have to trust yourself enough to decide, once and for all, whether you really, truly believe you’re faking a neurological disorder for the attention.  If the answer is no, then great!  You have sussed out your symptoms and can start managing them accordingly, whether that’s some helpful apps on your phone or medication or something in between.  If the answer is yes, then you probably need some therapy, and your therapist will be able to help you get to a point where you feel able to trust yourself.

Go with the neurodivergent gods, my dude.