keeping things organized (even though you have ADHD)

Markus Lüpertz, Student, 2020

I don’t reference ADHD very much anymore but under most criteria I definitely qualify. S: If we did a MRI scan of your brain we would find dozens of small rabbits running around. I also, maybe not coincidentally, happen to be an extreme late bloomer in several areas of basic living—I learned to cook in 2020 (like, I didn’t know how to turn on the stove before then), I learned to drive in 2021 (because I was living in Utah). My mom is an extreme neat freak (to this day when I close my eyes and imagine her, I see her talking passionately while wiping down a countertop), which led to a general aversion of domestic tasks. As a result I happily slept on an air mattress for years. I’ve always thought I have big male bachelor energy. Unfortunately, I also happen to be an extremely picky person who wants everything to look perfect all the time, so I have slowly but surely discovered ways to adapt.

1. Accepting that entropy is real. It drives me completely insane that you can clean something and then two days later it’s no longer clean. For some reason it’s taken me over two decades to grasp this properly. However I finally accepted that this is the nature of the world. Everything, it turns out, is just maintenance forever.

2. Immediately do the thing you need to do before it builds up to being unmanageable. The game I always play with myself: do it as soon as you think of it. The longer I wait, the more intimidating it seems.

3. Pretend to be someone who would do the thing you need to do. Sometimes I feel like I’m following a script. You are the actress who is texting your beloved friend. You are the actress who is scheduling a vet appointment for your dog. You are the actress who writes a paragraph in Signal, deletes it, rewrites it. You are the person who orders a paperback copy of From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Fake it, fake it, fake til it makes sense.