[nonbirithm]

Similarily, I found that having mental health diagnoses have reframed my already negative tendencies to merely assign concrete reasons to my failings that sound more justifiable to me.

So many decisions and feelings in my life have become framed around statements like "that was because my attention was lost," or "my attention is probably not going to hold up for another hour if I try that," or "I just wasn't paying attention." Every accomplishment and every mistake is colored though a lens of attention, or my lack of it.

The fact that I procrastinate is no longer because "I'm lazy," but "I have a debilitating lack of executive function." It sounds reasonable, and it can be useful to understand the reasons to find better ways of dealing with them. But merely changing the reason from a less specific to more specific one doesn't ultimately solve the problem of procrastination.

It can be tempting to indicate the diagnosis as revealing the one major problem interfering with a normal life, but for me that isn't the case. It provides me with an easy distraction from the problems with how I carry myself and my usual thought patterns.

If I try learning to draw, and reach for learning materials focused on drawing skills, almost none of them will go out of the way to state: your attitude may prevent you from making progress on this lesson. Someone who's in pristine shape and someone who can barely find the motivation to get out of bed each day could read the same book with the intention of learning how to draw and have significantly different outcomes without any explicit indication as to why from just reading the book alone.