For me, it was studying more effectively. Whether it’s studying, cleaning, or even enjoying a hobby, I just cannot buckle down and grind through the hard part. My brain needs some minimum level of efficiency to be satisfied. If it feels like I’m working too hard without enough of a result, it’s an impossible battle.

So I figure out how to do things better. Someone already mentioned Anki flash cards, and those were great for pure memorization. But every subject - and person - is different. The key was always going off the beaten path to look for other ways and other resources rather than just trying to grind it out. If I were in school now, I’d probably ask ChatGPT a lot of questions to help me learn. But I want to stress that I’d do so very carefully.

Maybe it’s because I’m AuDHD, but I tend to have to figure out my own way of doing things anyway. I rarely expect that the way other people do it is going to work for me. So I research and experiment until I find my own unique path. That feels less awful and it’s much easier to stick with.

I’ve always had something wrong with me. The various diagnoses never fit and treatments didn’t do much. After making progress with my depression, I reaffirmed that it’s a result of my struggles, not the cause of them. So I stopped taking my meds, which never helped anyway.

At least, not how I expected. All my life, the mental fog and feeling scatterbrained was just normal. Even when starting Wellbutrin, it was mixed with other medications and ramped up so slowly that I never noticed the difference it made. But suddenly going without, I realized … oh, this has gotta be ADHD. So I got diagnosed and I’m seeing where that leads me.

It’s been a long road, and more difficult than most. But maybe soon it’ll finally get a little easier.

I can’t remember the specific examples (surprising nobody), but I have had at least a couple occasions where I found traces of something I’d done that showed me I did actually react that exact same way some while previously and forgot about it entirely. In one case, a friend stopped mid conversation to say, “Wait. Haven’t we had this exact conversation before?,” and I while it wasn’t as concrete as finding my own evidence, I was pretty sure he was right.

It’s almost like a coping mechanism, even if I don’t do it intentionally. My life is a book, but at any given moment I might not know what happened on the last page or three. So I have to just figure it out and act how I would act even when I’m clueless.