u/ProbablyHarvey

TLDR; I'm looking for y'alls weirdest/strangest tips to managing your focus and motivation.

My mom has been.....not great to me. She's always said she'll never be like her mom, a bipolar abuser, and instead she's become another beast. Ever since I was 12 I KNEWWW something was wrong with me on a brain functions typa scale. She denied this adamantly, because she was a teacher, and "oh there's nothing wrong with you, the kids in my class are awful and you're nothing like them" was her biggest reason. Because of her very black and white thinking, all of my concerns had been, and still are, dismissed and are even still dismissed after my diagnosis. On top of the dismissal, she's also done a lot of gaslighting and pulled the "well others have it worse" card, which left me insanely insecure about any symptoms or behaviors exhibited, and in turn left me with no way to manage them. I was screened once for ADHD in eighth grade, but because I was still battling severe depression at the time I was behaving completely differently than I normally do. The results came back as "lol ur kids not ADHD they're depressed", and that just cemented my mom's belief, and therefore I never had any type of help with managing any ADHD symptoms I did have at the time in therapy, because why would I need help with that in therapy if I don't have it? Spoiler alert, I have ADHD. It shows far more as inattentive than hyperactive, but I have my hyperactive days. I'm entering my junior year now, and I've been struck with the fear of God because: Woah, I can hardly do a basket of laundry without getting distracted and ending up petting my cat in the basement. How am I supposed to be a functional person if I can't even be a moderately functional person on a good day? I genuinely don't know what to do to manage myself, and with graduation approaching far too soon for my liking, I desperately need help. I'm looking for strange/weird tips to help manage symptoms, as I've tried so much of the textbook guidance and it hardly works, which is why I'm here, asking my fellow neurodiverce friends for help.

Thanks ahead of time, from a desperate highschooler 🥲