u/Plus-Horse892

i've been trying to "not care so much" for about fifteen years now.

not in a nihilist way. not in a cool detached way. just in the basic, functional, normal-human way where something happens and you go "hm, that's unfortunate" and then you continue existing. like a person.

instead what i do is: something small happens. a text i sent gets left on read. a meeting ends weird. someone's tone was slightly off. and then i spend the next four to six business days quietly constructing a case file in my brain. evidence. counterevidence. hypothetical conversations that will never happen. detailed reconstructions of what i should have said. appeals to a jury that does not exist.

the wildest part? i know it's happening. i can see myself doing it. i'm basically a courtroom observer watching my own trial and thinking "this is unnecessary, no crime was committed, the defendant should go home" and the trial just keeps going.

someone told me once to "just let it go." i've been thinking about that advice ever since, which i think is the most ADHD thing i have ever typed.

there's a version of not caring that i think neurotypical people do naturally. like a factory setting. r/ADHDerTips keeps surfacing posts about this and honestly it's hard to read, because it confirms that some people just... move on. default mode. no installation required.

i don't have that setting. my factory default is: care intensely, analyze completely, catastrophize gently, repeat. it's not even anxious, exactly. it's more like my brain found a project and will not close the tab until it gets a resolution it's satisfied with. spoiler: it is never satisfied.

i've gotten better at faking it. nodding and saying "yeah, not worth my energy" while internally the jury is still deliberating. the performance has gotten convincing enough that people probably think i've figured something out.

i haven't. i've just gotten faster at hiding the trial.

the closest i've come to actual not-caring is when i hyperfocus on something else and forget to keep caring. which means my best shot at peace is just finding something more interesting to catastrophize about. which is not the same as letting go. but it might be the closest i get.

still thinking about that text from tuesday though.

the feelings are too big for the brain that's supposed to hold them.

that's the closest i've gotten.

like, the INFP part of me wants to sit with every emotion, turn it over, understand it fully, write a paragraph about it in my journal at 2am. and the ADHD part just... left the journal in a bag i haven't opened since march. the intentions are enormous. the follow-through is somewhere in a pile near the door.

i read something over at r/ADHDerTips once that i keep returning to, about how some people don't just have trouble starting tasks, they have trouble starting tasks they actually care about. deeply care about. which is so much worse, somehow.

because with INFP it's never a lack of caring. it's too much caring, pointed at too many things, with a brain that won't cooperate and an emotional system that takes everything personally. someone's tone of voice in a meeting. a text that felt slightly off. a creative project i haven't touched in four months but still feel guilty about every single day.

the guilt is load-bearing. it's doing a lot of structural work in my life and i'm not sure the building is sound.

i think what makes this combination particularly weird is the values piece. INFPs tend to have this deep internal compass, everything gets measured against it. and ADHD means i will completely forget to do the thing my compass is pointing toward, then feel like a bad person for it. not a forgetful person. a BAD person. that's the jump. that's the one that gets me.

it's not "oops i spaced."

it's "what does this say about who i am."

(it says nothing. i know that. i'm still working on believing it.)

i don't have a solution here. i just needed to say it somewhere that wouldn't make me explain the whole thing from the start.

Okay so hear me out before you close this tab.

I spent two years being the person with the color-coded notebooks. Highlighters sorted by subject. Tabs. Little sticky flags. The whole aesthetic. And I was pulling Cs on exams while looking incredibly organized doing it.

Turns out I had confused the performance of learning with actual learning. (I know. Took me embarrassingly long.)

Here's what happened when I stopped:

1. Lecture becomes active listening instead of transcription

The second I put my pen down in class, I had to actually process what the professor was saying in real time. No more mindlessly copying slides word for word while my brain went somewhere else entirely. I started mentally summarizing, questioning, connecting. My hand stopped being a stenography machine and started being a last resort.

2. The note dump after class

This is the actual replacement. Within 30 minutes of a lecture ending, I'd sit somewhere quiet and write everything I remembered from scratch. No slides, no textbook. Just raw recall. Some sessions it was three paragraphs. Some sessions it was two bullet points and a vague dread. Either way, what I could retrieve was what I actually understood. The gaps were information. r/ADHDerTips honestly introduced me to this idea in a different context and it was hard to unread.

3. Confusion became visible

When you're writing everything down live, confusion hides inside your notes. It looks like information. When you do the post-lecture dump, confusion shows up as a blank. A literal empty space where understanding should be. I started keeping a running "I don't actually know this" list from those blanks and reviewing it before the next class. Changed everything.

4. Spaced repetition hit differently

Because my notes were already recalled once, the material had already been processed more deeply before I even hit Anki. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve was working with me instead of against me. I was basically doing the first rep in class without realizing it.

Results after one semester:

Grades went from mostly Cs with occasional Bs to mostly Bs with occasional As. Not viral transformation numbers, but genuinely my actual grades from my actual classes.

More importantly, I stopped leaving exams feeling like I'd read the material but never learned it. That specific awful feeling. Gone.

My notes are ugly now. Incomplete. Sometimes they're just questions I wrote to myself. But I reference them constantly because they represent things I actually struggled to reconstruct, which means they're the things my brain flagged as unresolved.

The pretty notebook is still on my desk. It's a prop at this point. (Who am I.)

Has anyone else tried killing the in-class note habit? I'm genuinely curious if this lands for other people or if I just got lucky with the subjects I was taking.

I want to request this subreddit because it is unmoderated and I can grow it well, I have ADHD and use clonidine