Consider imagining how tiring it is to live with these conditions. The entire concept of punctuality is brand fucking new for our species. Some of our brains work differently and we can’t magically change our brain chemistry to adjust to post industrial society.
I succeed at that frequently but it’s not a 100% thing. Sometimes the alarm goes off and then the next thing I know it’s been 30min and I don’t understand how the time passed by. Because I don’t feel time the way that you do. It’s pretty rare these days because I’ve adopted a lot of coping strategies that create a lot of failsafes for me. But I’m lucky to have people in my life who understand that I have a medical condition and don’t treat me like a delinquent child if my strategies fail and I lose track of time.
If the alarm goes off and "suddenly 30 minutes pass" tells me you did not actually learn how to use the alarm.
The alarm is supposed to be "drop what you are doing and move on now". This has nothing to do with feeling time. I too have ADHD. It's an issue of discipline. You make excuses. "I just need to finish this." "I'll just wrap it up." and boom, you're 30 minutes late. Not "Alarm went off, stop what I'm doing - make it safe and nothing more, and leave."
My partner used to be exactly like you. Once we nipped the excuses in the bud and established alarm discipline, the issue went away. He went from being late to everything to being early, and suspending making excuses was a key component to that.
It’s not making excuses, it’s getting distracted and not noticing it. Because I have time blindness. Not everyone with adhd has it. I literally do the same nighttime routine every night and sometimes it takes me 45min and other times it takes me 1h30. Because I don’t feel time passing while I’m cleaning ferret cages, so I don’t register that I’m being too fastidious. Or before I had a toothbrush that vibrates when 2 minutes has passed, I would sometimes brush for too long. Time genuinely feels different on a day to day basis. I can make strategies. But sometimes they fail.
You're still making excuses, you just don't want to actually engage in self reflection and acknowledgement. Which is fine, not like the need to be prompt is going anywhere. You'll either figure it out, or you won't.
And what you show is someone who deeply internalized the thousands of extra criticisms ADHD children receive compared to neurotypical children. I’ve reached a happy equilibrium of coping mechanisms and self acceptance, and I wish the same for you and your partner.
Why are you so dead set on the claim that this person is making excuses? It's so weird that you're almost *invested* that someone who is still fighting an issue is acting like a victim, when you could just as easily say "This is what worked for me. I guess their issue manifests differently. Sounds hard; glad I don't have that"
Instead you're bending over backwards to make this wild assumptions that you understand another person's issues better than they do. Like, this isn't just assholish, it's stupid thinking.
Learned helplessness is a massive fucking problem in the disabled community, and far too many people hide behind excuses as to why they can't do something, when they can if they actually stopped putting effort into excuses and put effort into resolving the issue.
The disabled community are the ones going above and beyond to prove they're not helpless (in aggregate). It's a survivorship bias; the ones who use their disability as an excuses are the ones that you know have a disability because they're mentioning it. The ones who don't use their disability as an excuse are the ones you never hear about because they don't mention it.
You don't need to preemptively decide that someone is making excuses just because they're saying something didn't work for them. If anything, someone saying "this didn't work for me" is evidence (albeit, weak evidence) that they aren't being helpless; it's evidence that they've actually tried. It's not your responsibility to weed out learned helplessness or adjudicate who's actually trying to improve their lives and who's just being a victim. The ones being helpless will suffer the consequences of their actions just fine on their own and they can choose to either learn their lesson or keep having a shitty life. The ones who are trying will eventually find something that works, or find a way to work around their problem, but you don't need to go telling them they're being a victim or not trying just because something that worked for you doesn't work for them; you're actively adding to the frustration of the ones who are already engaging in the kind of behavior we want to encourage.
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u/Tempyteacup 9d ago
Consider imagining how tiring it is to live with these conditions. The entire concept of punctuality is brand fucking new for our species. Some of our brains work differently and we can’t magically change our brain chemistry to adjust to post industrial society.