Gap-tooth - 🧶

"You think you're informed just because you read a bunch of grainy PDFs?"

Yeah man. Reading scholarly works on a topic informs you on that topic. That's how this works.

i can confirm

I went to the forest that makes you have multiple pronouns and accidentally touched some poison ivy there

there is so much overlap between ADHD and autism (and so many people who fit the criteria for both) that it's likely they will eventually end up being reclassified as related orders, or as members of the same spectrum. this is a good thing that will make it easier for people to get an accurate and helpful diagnosis! in the meantime, I'm so proud of how much solidarity I see between ADHD and autistic folks online. I see ya'll pooling resources and sharing tools & coping strategies, and just generally offering support and acceptance, and I am so proud.

Some of Bobs Burgers Halloween costumes through the years

As a kid, I wasn't taught any concept that there's a difference between wanting to do something, and enjoying it. I was a largely unsupervised kid with undiagnosed ADHD and parents who expected their kids to just raise themselves on their own. So when I was capable of spending hours drawing or reading a fun book, but couldn't even remember that I had homework, ever, I was told that I simply didn't want to do well in school. And who was I to question that, I'm eight years old.

Enjoyment and passion were the only forms of motivation I knew, and if I couldn't make myself either love doing boring math homework as much as I loved my hobbies, or force myself to push through things I hated with sheer willpower alone because I want to succeed so bad, then clearly I was simply not as good as all the other kids, who could do that. And that attitude carried onto adulthood. Every time I struggled to muster genuine love and passion into something, I thought that I just don't want it badly enough. Not to enough to love it, or to suffer through it.

Being medicated for the first time was a game changer. Like holy shit, so this is your brain on dopamine. And suddenly I wanted to do things, turned my life around, took up the passion career I had never dared to try. And when the first "honeymoon phase" of the meds wore down, the same fear came back - I don't like this anymore, do I not want it bad enough? What else could I possibly want?

And I shit you not I was literally 30 years old when I understood that life isn't just either loving every minute of pursuing a passion that you love, or joylessly dragging yourself through things that you don't even want to do. I can just tell myself "just because I don't like doing this doesn't mean I don't want to be doing it." It's not a mark of failure, weakness or lack of motivation, if sometimes the career you want to be doing just feels like having a job.

A really fun one, the second year that the same book club has commissioned a print of their reads!

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