it’s 8pm here and i just finally finished my thrice-weekly PT exercises which i didn’t have time to do any earlier today and i was so tired and sore when i started and i’m so tired and sore now i’m done and i didn’t want to do them and i groaned the entire time but i did do them and so i am posting here that i did them because i’m not exactly proud of myself and i’m not getting any serotonin or dopamine or whatever out of this but i feel like i should write it down so some other time when i’m not so tired i can say hey, b, that was good that you did that, and you deserve butt-pats.
I do deserve butt-pats.
instead I’m going to combine mucinex and sudafed and hope that gets me through the night. oh yeah! i got farmkid’s cold, complete with stuffed, oozing sinuses and a wet, rippling full-chest cough, i’m doing fucking great.
I did package like 150 lbs of chicken sausage today, and managed to make at least some dick jokes, so we know i’m not dead. I suspected I was feverish though, and tried to take my temperature, and it came back between 89.9F and 92.4F, so it’s possible I am dead, which wasn’t the result I expected right then.
I love the subtle little local accents that aren’t easy to pin down or explain to outsiders - like, do I have a distinctive accent? When I’m talking to people from a thousand kilometres away, I don’t sound distinct to them. I’ve tried, but I can’t switch from one accent or the other to demonstrate them.
And then one day my Youtube background noise played someone whose vowels itched in the back of my mind but didn’t really ping me, until he had to recite the letters of a common acronym
at which point my head whipped around and I said, “That bastard’s from [local AM radio station] broadcast range.”
And he was! He’s from my fucking city! I think my brother met him once!
Academics actually hotly (read: tepidly) debate whether my region has a distinct accent, which I understand, because like I said, it’s incredibly subtle and it mostly comes out in informal settings or when falling into the singsong chant of reciting some memorized speech.
Our society delights in recording and analyzing and cataloguing knowledge, and that’s actually a good thing on the whole. But every once in a while it’s nice to know something Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary or Yelp doesn’t.
I’m getting depressingly good at identifying the formula for Pop Academic Books About ADHD.
Regardless of their philosophy it pretty much goes like this:
1. Emotionally sensitive essay about the struggle of ADHD and the author’s personal experience with it as both a person with ADHD and a healthcare professional.
2. Either during or directly following this, a lightly explicated catalogue of symptoms, illustrated by anecdotes from patient case studies. Optional: frequent, heavy use of metaphor to explain ADHD-driven behavior.
3. Several chapters follow, each dedicated to a symptom; these have a mini-formula of their own. They open with a patient case study, discuss the highly relatable aspects of the specific symptom or behavior, then offer some lightweight examples of a treatment for the symptom, usually accompanied by follow up results from the earlier case studies.
4. Somewhere around halfway-to-two-thirds through the book, the author introduces the more in-depth explication of the treatment system (often their own homebrew) they are advocating. These are generally both personally-driven (as opposed to suggested cultural changes, which makes sense given these books’ target audience, more on this later) and composed of an elaborate system of either behavior alteration or mental reframing. Whether this system is actually implementable by the average reader varies wildly.
5. A brief optional section on how to make use of ADHD as a tool (usually referring to ADHD or some of its symptoms as a superpower at least once). Sometimes this section restates the importance of using the systems from part 4 to harness that superpower. Frequently, if present, it feels like an afterthought.
6. Summation and list of further resources, often including other books which follow this formula.
I know I’m being a little sarcastic, but realistically there’s nothing inherently wrong about the formula, like in itself it’s not a red flag. It’s just hilariously recognizable once you’ve noticed it.
It makes sense that these books advocate for the Reader With ADHD undertaking personal responsibility for their treatment, since these are in the tradition of self-help publishing. They’re aimed at people who are already interested in doing their own research on their disability and possible ways to handle it. It’s not really fair to ask them to be policy manuals, but I do find it interesting that even books which advocate stuff like volunteering (for whatever reason, usually to do with socialization issues and isolation, often DBT-adjacent) never suggest disability activism either generally or with an ADHD-specific bent.
None of these books suggest that perhaps life with ADHD could be made easier with increased accommodations or ease of medication access, and that it might be in a person’s best interest to engage in political advocacy surrounding these and other disability-related issues. Or that activism related to ADHD might help to give someone with ADHD a stronger sense of ownership of their unique neurology. Or that if you have ADHD the idea of activism or even medical self-advocacy is crushingly stressful, and ways that stress might be dealt with.
It does make me want to write one of my own. “The Deviant Chaos Guide To Being A Miscreant With ADHD”. Includes chapters on how to get an actual accurate assessment, tips for managing a prescription for a controlled substance, medical and psychiatric self-advocacy for people who are conditioned against confrontation, When To Lie About Being Neurodivergent, policy suggestions for ADHD-related legislation, tips for activism while executively dysfunked, and to close the book a biting satire of the pop media idea of self-care. (“Feeling sad? Make yourself a nice pot of chicken soup from scratch and you’ll feel better in no time. Stay tuned after this rambling personal essay for the most mediocre chicken soup recipe you’ve ever seen!” “Have you considered planning and executing an overly elaborate criminal heist as a way to meet people and stay busy?”)
Every case study or personal anecdote in the book will have a different name and demographics attached but will also make it obvious that they are all really just me, in the prose equivalent of a cheap wig, writing about my life. “Kelly, age seven, says she struggles to stay organized using the systems neurotypical children might find easy. I had to design my own accounting spreadsheet in order to make sure I always have enough in checking to cover the mortgage, she told me, fidgeting with the pop socket on her smartphone.”
I feel a little bad making fun, because these books are often the best resource people can get (in itself concerning). It’s like how despite my dislike of AA, I don’t dunk on it in public because I don’t want to offer people an excuse not to seek help. It feels like punching down to criticize these books, even though it’s a swing at an industry that is mainly, it seems, here to profit from me. But one does get tired of skimming the hype for the real content only to find the real content isn’t that useful either.
Les (not his real name) was diagnosed at the age of 236. Charming, well-read, and wealthy, he still spent much of his afterlife feeling deeply inadequate about his perceived shortcomings. “Vampire culture doesn’t really acknowledge ADHD as a condition,” he says. “My sire wouldn’t understand, even though he probably has it as well. You should see the number of coffins containing the soil of his homeland that he’s left lying forgotten all over Europe.” A late diagnosis validated his feelings of difference, but on its own can’t help when he hyperfocuses on seducing mortals who cross his path and forgets to get home before sunrise. “I have stock in sunburn gel companies,” he jokes.
None of these books suggest that perhaps life with ADHD could be made easier with increased accommodations or ease of medication access, and that it might be in a person’s best interest to engage in political advocacy surrounding these and other disability-related issues. Or that activism related to ADHD might help to give someone with ADHD a stronger sense of ownership of their unique neurology. Or that if you have ADHD the idea of activism or even medical self-advocacy is crushingly stressful, and ways that stress might be dealt with.
Fucking, thank you. I’ve been spitting mad about this for years.
Every seminar I attend, every group session, every ADHD coach that gets recommended by physicians. None of them actually do anything to help address any of the stuff that would provide meaningful and long-term solutions to several major ADHD hurdles.
But then why would they do that when they can just keep putting the onus on us to keep buying journal planners we’ll never use or creating intricate and elaborate maintenance systems that promise to completely rewire your brain when 9/10 we just need fucking help.
Here are some resources for those who like to become involved in their local disability rights groups. These are all US-centric as that is where I am located and where my knowledge of these groups is based. Please feel free to reblog with resources for your country!
Please let me know if any of these are more akin to groups like Autism Speaks, which does not actually advocate for the Autistic Community but actively harms it instead. I’ve tried to be diligent in my research, but sometimes things slip through.
Reblogging to share around the resources! I had only encountered CHADD and hadn’t seen much in the way of advocacy stuff (I was just doing an initial skim so that’s potentially a me problem) so it’s nice to see some others.
btw if you’re annoyed with Google search giving you results for stuff that’s similar to but not actually what you typed in, go to search tools, go to where it says “all results” and change that to “verbatim” and then it will search for what you actually asked for
why this is not the default is beyond me other than obvs enshittification but it has rescued a bunch of searches for me lately where the top results were completely unhelpful until i switched to that so. might be helpful for others
ALT
ALT
it’s here btw
i find it particularly makes a difference for the nicher searches and things where google is less sure what you’re looking for and/or if your keywords are similar enough to something it thinks it can sell you
foltest/roche, explicit, blasphemy, confessional sex, worldbuilding, inappropriate use of religious metaphors
It takes a moment for him to recognise his commander in the lean figure he passes in line, cowled head bowed low over a little scrap of paper prayer. Without his trappings of office, Vernon Roche is easy to glance right past, a trait no doubt he’s cultivated under Thaler’s abusive verbal teachings and makes use of on a regular basis during his more clandestine dealings. He looks plain, underfed and average, rather than the deadly knife Foltest has made of him.
Foltest slips into line behind him, grinning beneath the cover of his hood. “I didn’t take you for a religious man,” he says, gripping him by the elbow and steering him out of line.
Vernon has better presence of mind than to start a fight in a temple, but the way he goes stiff and electric means he’s restraining himself beautifully. He whips around as Foltest yanks him into the shadows, a snarl on his face and then his eyes go very wide and round at the sight of Foltest beneath his ragged cloak. “Your Majesty?” he gapes.
As I’ve continued to mull over what I wrote in the last post, it strikes me that it’d be good to kind of inventory what was, and what was not, found in the settlement, so that we can more effectively speculate on what we can’t know, which is: what actually happened.
I was going to do a big wrap-up of Everything I Learned From The Must Farm Site Report PDFs but then life got super busy. So I only have the things I turned over and over in my mind, just now, and I want to go back and reread but now’s not the time, I’ll have to do another pass through at a later date.
But the one tiny vivid little factoid I’ve got in my mind that I just have to write down– that necklace, with the big amber bead? Some of the glass beads were shattered from the heat but the amber bead was only charred a little on one side. So obviously some of the necklace was closer to the fire than the rest. I had initially connected that it was found near where there was probably a door, and I vaguely imagined someone dropping it as they fled. But now I’m convinced that’s not it at all.
I was like almost done with this for ages and there was one conversation I had to come up with one different line for, thanks to a couple of great line-edit suggestions from @bittylildragon, but then as I was working on it I realized a slightly different direction the conversation needed to go in order to actually get what I was imagining out into the actual page, and it meant I could introduce an entire new subplot and background, which was exciting, but–
well mostly I’m trying a different medication and suddenly I can write again, so that’s amazing and I’m excited and the only downside is that this new medication costs $160 more for a two-week supply than the medication that almost-worked but meant I didn’t so much as open a fic doc for four weeks.
mmmmyeah I love American healthcare. But I’ll eventually hit my deductible I guess.
So we all get what was supposed to be a couple thousand words of Morvran&Lu banter, but it’s a whole chapter instead. I didn’t figure anyone would mind, there’s new plot points all through it. They’re very effective, those two.
Now I have to rewrite several future chapters almost in their entirety, though.
❝
These are the Rohirrim, as we name them, masters of horses, and we ceded to them the fields of Calenardhon that are since called Rohan; for that province had long been sparsely peopled. And they became our allies, and have ever proved true to us, aiding us at need, and guarding our northern marches and the Gap of Rohan.
❞
ALT
ALT