[OptionOfT]

This is exactly what I experience, and for me, this is a huge issue when it comes to 'selling myself', whether it is in an interview, or writing a self-assessment for a review.

And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved, until someone pointed out a moment where I did something they would call an achievements.

Now, at that moment I have the right references. It is still hard to talk about it as an achievement, but at least the recollection is there.

And just like the author, I have an excellent spatial memory, remembering roads and direction, and the ability to use that to recall other details.

I wonder how much of this is related with having ADHD, which often makes things feel like you're merely a spectator in your own mind. While I was never hungry as a child, and had access to a good education, the situation with between my parents had a lasting impact on me.

[catskull]

I have a very very strong episodic memory.

I have a very hard time "selling myself". I've added solid stuff to my resume in the last year simply recalling what I've done from an outsider's view. From my perspective, I was just messing around. From another perspective, I was building "impressive" "successful" things.

Learning to give myself credit for my accomplishments is what I think made me the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer, as silly as that sounds.

[strogonoff]

The trick to jump from the “messing about” to the “impressive” perspective lies in big picture view and a few rounds of “why”. Ideally, you do it before you start (when it comes to the innermost whys you may encounter resistance, bad faith answers, or answers you don’t like), but if that ship has sailed you can still do it as a post-mortem.

[steve_adams_86]

As I read this I thought “this sounds a lot like having ADHD”. Sure enough…

Feeling like a spectator in your own mind is a very difficult phenomenon to deal with and to explain to people who don’t experience it. In a sense, sometimes it almost seems like other peoples lives are more real than mine, because I experience my own from such a peculiar lens. The experience of others seems much less adulterated by that interference. Of course, this is far from true, and only another illusion produced by my weird brain.

Like you I can’t sell myself at all. Not only is the recollection poor, but I give equal weight to my success and failures. I’m far too objective about myself in settings where I’m not supposed to be.

[tomrod]

I think it is about adopting the right framework. A mix of Clayton Christiansen and 5 whys works for me (similar issues).

I start by writing down the big things: In this year I worked at/for/with ....

WHY was I there: I think about the major projects I did.

WHY was I there: I think (and try to verify) the impact #s/%s those projects had.

WHY was I there: I think about the technical and soft skills needed to make that happen.

WHY do I care: I consider if there is any configuration of things that would make me consider doing the project again.

Having to track past performance as a business made this much clearer -- I adopted the above approach to expand out CV, then developed a similar approach for business development templates to explain recent past work.

I sometimes will drop these templates into an LLM and have it work with me to define or identify ways to better communicate.

[sReinwald]

I can relate to this very strongly. The difficulty in 'selling yourself' by recalling specific achievements for interviews or performance reviews is a challenge I know all too well.

Like you and the author, I have aphantasia (and possibly SDAM), but through self-reflection and quite a bit of therapy, I've come to believe this specific issue lies more firmly in the domain of ADHD. For me, the problem isn't just an inability to recall achievements, but a failure to feel a sense of achievement for almost anything in the first place.

A very recent example from my own life illustrates this perfectly: For context, I struggled through university for about 12 years without a degree before receiving my ADHD diagnosis. Afterwards, I decided to switch careers and applied for an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration, essentially a helpdesk/support role. Because of my self-taught skills, I was hired directly, skipping the apprenticeship. Intellectually, I know this was a very good outcome. In the 8 months since, I've taken on tasks far beyond my initial role - automating reports, working on internal tooling and a local AI solution, and developing customer-facing tools. Just yesterday, I was officially promoted to Test Automation Engineer with a 50% salary increase.

And I know intellectually that going from applying for an apprenticeship to an engineering role in 8 months is a significant achievement. But I don't feel it as such. My dominant feeling is that, at 35, I'm finally just starting to catch up to my peers. To an outside observer, that probably sounds absurd.

My working theory for this is that it's a mechanism very similar to the common ADHD experience of misplacing keys. The issue isn't a failure to recall the memory of where you put them. The problem is that the memory was never properly encoded in the first place, because your attention was already split between several other thoughts at that moment. You can't retrieve a memory that was never saved.

I suspect something similar happens with achievements. If an event doesn't register emotionally as an "achievement" at the moment it happens, the brain doesn't file it under that tag. It just gets stored as another factual event - 'a thing that happened' - which makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve when a prompt like "tell me about a time you solved a hard problem" specifically asks for something from the 'achievements' file.

[packetlost]

... huh.

This makes a lot of sense to me in a not good way. Thank you for writing it.

[sReinwald]

That's pretty much what my therapist said when I first expressed this to him, so you're in good company there.

I thought about this more on my commute home from work, and I'm starting to suspect that "SDAM" might essentially be the long-term effects of alexithymia or interoceptive blind spots, which are fairly common in neurodivergent people with ADHD, autism, or both.

For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.

You can likely relate to being so deep in a flow state that you don't notice how badly you need to use the restroom, or how hungry you are, until the feeling becomes so overwhelming it finally breaks through your focus. That's an interoceptive blind spot in action.

So, to further elaborate on my theory: If alexithymia raises the required signal strength for an emotion to be consciously recognized as significant, our brains - which strive for efficiency - will only tag and store memories that cross that unusually high threshold of "important." All the "little things," even the nice ones, get dropped because they never registered with enough emotional weight at the moment they happened.

The brain prioritizes emotionally significant information for memory storage. If an event doesn't trigger a sufficiently strong or clearly identifiable emotional response at the moment it occurs - because your baseline emotional processing is affected - it might get stored as just factual information rather than a rich, emotionally resonant autobiographical memory. It becomes "a thing that happened" rather than an "experience I had that affected me emotionally."

This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.

It's like having a filter that's calibrated too conservatively - it's protecting you from information overload. Perhaps that's why it's so common in neurodivergent people, both ADHD and autism heavily affect how we take in and process external sensations. If there's any positive spin to this theory, that I will agree with you, makes sense in a not good way, it might be that. But, unfortunately, it's also discarding experiences that others would naturally encode as meaningful memories.

[packetlost]

> For context, alexithymia is a significant difficulty in recognizing, sourcing, and describing one's own emotions. Interoception is the sense of your internal bodily state.

Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.

> This explains my memory pattern perfectly: I remember most big family holidays - Christmas, birthdays, weddings - because those come with heightened emotional anticipation and distinct social components. But I'm already struggling to piece together what we did on Easter this year, and have absolutely no idea what we did last year. The quieter, more routine positive events apparently don't meet that higher "emotional importance" threshold for deep encoding.

I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.

On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.

It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.

[Ancapistani]

> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.

I've been 100% immersed in AI all of 2025, and I think it's impacting my communication skills -- especially the way I write.

Wouldn't it be amusing if after the disruptive period of AI's rise is over, people with ADHD end up being highly sought after for our ability to communicate clearly with them?

[sReinwald]

> Oh yup. The way I've always described myself is I have extremely "muted" emotions, bordering on none the overwhelming vast majority of the time. I only very rarely feel extreme emotions of any kind.

I remember infuriating my mother almost every day after school when she'd ask "How was it?" and I would just shrug and say, "I don't know."

She thought I was being evasive or something, but I was being completely honest. I genuinely didn't have an answer because my internal state was, as you describe perfectly, muted. Most of the time, I just felt... like a neutral, warm grey. Well - still do. There was no data to report.

> I don't remember hardly anything about my own past outside of factual information, and that tends to fade rather extremely with time. Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of, just the fact that it happened, sometimes not even the cause.

I think remembering the fact of sobbing but not the feeling is the perfect distinction between semantic memory ("a thing that happened") and autobiographical memory ("an experience I had"). The factual data point was recorded, but the emotional qualia wasn't encoded for retrieval.

> On the other hand, I have extremely good factual memory about random shit and can usually build up a solid approximation for how something works from first principles on demand for an extremely broad array of things. Trade-offs, I guess.

I wouldn't even necessarily call it a trade-off so much as a logical consequence. If the brain's system for storing rich, first-person experiential data is impaired, it makes sense that it would rely on and strengthen its system for storing third-person factual data. The "what" gets stored efficiently because the "how it felt to be me when it happened" isn't taking up much space on the hard drive.

> It's what I imagine being an AI would feel like from the perspective of the AI.

Sounds about right to me. I feel the same. I have access to the facts, like my I'd argue objectively fairly impressive achievement I described above, but I don't seem to have the emotional data. So, I can reason myself into knowing that I achieved something - but I'm not feeling it.

[vonunov]

> Even times when I was quite literally sobbing I don't remember the emotional impact of

This is possibly touching on the problem I'm trying to navigate lately. Someone will display observable emotionality while denying the subjective experience. I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm not trying to cure them or anything, all I want is to get them to understand that their lack of internal experience of emotion doesn't improve things out here, where I'm still dealing with an agitated person yelling at me about how fine they are. Does this seem to align or does it sound unrelated, you think?

[leche]

I have (self-diagnosed) aphantasia and SDAM. I do not relate to your belief that SDAM is related to the emotions felt. I don't believe I have ADHD nor autism. We don't currently have a scientific understanding of the mechanisms that cause these differences in experience, so everyone forms their own ideas of what's going on based on their own grab-bag of internal experiences and qualia.

[sReinwald]

That's fair criticism, I'm obviously coming at this from my personal perspective and that is shaped by how my brain experiences the world. I should've been more precise, I didn't intend to suggest that alexithymia is the only pathway to SDAM, there are likely multiple aspects or pathways that can contribute to or cause it.

However, I would challenge the premise that SDAM is entirely unrelated to emotional processing. It's important to distinguish between the conscious feeling of an emotion and its subconscious role in the mechanics of memory formation. There's significant evidence that emotional salience is a crucial part of how the brain tags and consolidates strong autobiographical memories. A disruption to this process doesn't have to be a consciously felt emotional deficit; it can be a mechanical one operating below the level of awareness.

We can look at this as two distinct points of failure in the memory pipeline:

Failure at the input stage: If the emotional signal required to "tag" an event as important for rich autobiographical encoding is never met, the memory is formed, but only as a semantic fact ("a thing that happened"), not a re-experiencable episode. The processing can't happen because the right input was never provided.

Failure at the retrieval and re-experiencing stage: For someone with aphantasia but no issues with alexithymia (like you, I'd assume), the initial emotional tagging might function perfectly well. The disruption happens later. The core deficit of SDAM is the inability to "mentally time travel" and re-experience the past. Aphantasia, by definition, removes a primary tool for this: visual imagination. The brain processes and integrates emotions by revisiting them. If you cannot truly "re-live" a moment because the visual data is inaccessible, then the episodic, first-person quality is lost.

This second point matters beyond just losing access to nostalgia. We process and regulate emotions by mentally revisiting experiences, integrating them into our broader life narrative. If you have greater difficulty "re-living" moments of joy, achievement, or connection because you lack the tool of visual imagination, your ability to extract meaning from them and build emotional understanding is compromised.

Both mechanisms effectively lead to the same subjective experience: a past that feels like "someone else's life" that you know facts about but can't emotionally (re)connect with. The specific pathway might vary between individuals, but I now strongly believe that the underlying issue remains the disrupted relationship between emotional processing and autobiographical memory formation.

Does this potential explanation align more with your personal experience?

I might have to spend some time over the long weekend to explore this a bit more, and to properly back it up with studies.

[leche]

Thanks for the follow-up. I find this stuff quite interesting.

I feel my emotions strongly as I live through them(as much as one can say, we can't feel others' feelings), but feel them not at all when I relive them (because I cannot relive them). My emotions are a guide for me, but after the initial feeling of them, they guide me semantically (why was I feeling anger during a particular conversation? maybe I need to reconsider my position).

Incidentally, I generally think of this as being able to "let go" of emotions/grudges/etc that I might otherwise spend unnecessary time worrying over. It does set me up for being an "especially boilable frog" in that I can quickly acclimate to conditions that others might have trouble with.

[protocolture]

>This is exactly what I experience, and for me, this is a huge issue when it comes to 'selling myself', whether it is in an interview, or writing a self-assessment for a review.

I wonder if this is genetic. I have had a significant number of interviews with people from a couple specific geographic regions that cant relay to me details of a situation where they did XYZ. But given the question simply tell me how they would deal with it.

It made me super curious, because you could see in their job history that they definitely had those experiences but could not recall them.

[dmos62]

This made me curious, I too have difficulty sharing experiences. What's the region?

[sausagefeet]

I do not have ADHD but also struggle to "sell myself". It's something I had to work on. My view is that the industry can be kind of obsessed with these kind of stories. It's kind of like the "great man of history" world view, but in the small. A common challenge for me is in companies that have a "cultural" interview where they want you to talk about some conflict that happened and how you resolved this, either I'm incredibly naive or I just don't see conflict in this way that makes it a story. I just try to treat people with respect, I try to talk to them in a way that makes them feel open to talk to me. If I have hit conflict it didn't strike me as a moment where I had to think about it in that or it never escalated to being a problem. And it can be the same for programming. I don't have a cool story about the "hardest bug I ever solved" because it's just the same iterative process as any other challenge I have and it feels the same to me in the moment and after, just sometimes it takes longer. And I am no way trying to imply this represents some exceptional behaviour on my part, it's just by nature or nurture how things work, I didn't choose it.

[sensanaty]

The way I've interpreted conflict in these contexts is more of a "You have ticket X, but it can't be done because Y. How did you communicate about that to your PM/Team/Manager/Relevant Stakeholders?", not literally "How did you handle a fiery argument in the office". It also doesn't hurt to ask the interviewers directly to define "conflict" for you, though.

I think using the word "conflict" is idiotic, but it helps to rephrase it. Because indeed, like you, I've never in my life had "conflict" with anyone in a work setting, I've had plenty of disagreements though and that's just part of the job/life.

I tend to just make something up here on the spot honestly, because as you said, I'm not keeping a book of grudges where I record every single disagreement I have with a colleague. I'll say something like "On Project X (which I've been talking about during the interview) we had a disagreement on how to do Y. I resolved this by gathering the facts on the pros and cons of method FOO vs method BAR, and we sat down as a team and discussed the approach we preferred to take". The anecdote is usually completely made up, but there's been enough situations during my career where the approach has definitely made sense.

[vonunov]

I really hate some of these questions too. I'm going to talk at the hypothetical interviewer a lot so "you" isn't you.

Name a time I had an angry customer? Lol, like, all the time forever? I almost feel like this one must be a trick question designed to catch people who can't deal with the job. I forget about such customers as immediately as possible. As a matter of fact, over the years I've relied on my ability to not reflect other people's temperature or allow their demeanor to take up a lot of space in my field of attention in the first place. I'm not sure if anyone with good chances of coping in this line of work [IT/support/sysadmin was the context when I originally posted this self-quote elsewhere] should really have any honest answers to this question readily available.

I can only name one time I had an angry customer, but obviously I've had countless angry customers. I can name that time because he left a voicemail like four minutes long ranting about how unacceptable it was that we had a full call queue and that he was asked to leave a voicemail, and demanding to be put in touch with various executives. I keep that one in the toolkit because it's easy to twist into inspiring stories about above-and-beyond customer service, or taking ownership, or whatever.

How do I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms? It's not just me, is it? These seem patently ridiculous, like if they had bothered to do some kind of trial run or think for 30 seconds about how they might answer them, they would have realized...

Or is it just me? Does everyone else have an overt methodology for doing this that they can articulate on demand? I would probably come off like some kind of idiot in that interview. Uh, I dunno. I guess I, like, you know, use the context of the interaction so far to gauge their likely understanding of the salient points? And I audit the explanation for unnecessary tangents and jargon and opaque concepts? I then tailor the explanation to what they need to know and what I think they'll understand in the most useful way in that context? So I guess, in a nutshell, I would say that I explain something technical to a customer in simpler terms by just, like, doing it. This is, like, a bespoke service, sir, perhaps you should try the TJ Maxx down the way.

How do I deal with different personality types? I just, like, do it? This feels like another one where having an answer is a red flag. I've never needed to handle this overtly/consciously either, and I think that's a good sign.

Can I give an example of a situation where I had to go above and beyond for a user? No, and I don't think you grasp the core concept of "above and beyond". If you want some stories about times I didn't have to, let me know.

Edit: Actually, you know what, I do have one of when I "had to go above and beyond" but probably not in the way they're hoping for: https://i.vgy.me/7ZAwjj.jpg

Where do I rate my office suite skills on a scale of 1-10? I'm terribly sorry, I must be in the wrong interview, have a nice day

[alexjplant]

> And just like the author, I couldn't answer questions about hard problems that I've solved,

I have a giant Markdown-formatted list that I occasionally add to that has all of the random technical junk I've done in it. I add to it occasionally and reference as necessary.

[drcongo]

Aphantasic here and this article describes my experience perfectly too. I've wondered a lot about why my brother is able to recall entire sequences of memory from our childhoods and I've got, at best, snapshots that aren't exactly mental images, just stuff I think I know happened.

[klysm]

In the same boat, also with ADHD.

[zellyn]

Ask people you worked with who have a good impression of you for a list. Better yet, book an hour of video chat and talk through it with them. They will have a lot of examples. Write them down.

I mostly blundered my way through this through this recent round of tons of interviews, and by the end of it, my "Tell me about a time when…" doc is actually what it should/could have been at the start!

[antihipocrat]

Before leaving any job, or when updating the CV. I look at my sent folder (comms app) and completed tickets.

List everything and grab the high level doc/ticket summary for each. Remove any business strategy and now you have a list of achievements that can jog the memory

[frereubu]

If you have excellent spatial memory, have you heard of memory palaces? Might be interesting to try and construct an "achievements" memory palace for when you need to answer similar questions in the future. (This isn't a problem for me, just thought it might be an interesting avenue to pursue).

[kordlessagain]

You were LABELED with ADHD by people without our condition. "Having" it is accepting the label and it's definitions. The school system (counselors) tried to label both my kids as having ADHD and suggested medication. Instead of giving my kids amphetamines, I told them to stop trying to force everyone at the school to learn using methods that require memorizing images, which neither one of them do.

Our brains are workhorses of indexing things. Of course we have varying attention, especially when we already "get" what was shown to us. When others have to practice it over and over, we just "get it" and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing). Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism is going to affect our ability to form good indexing habits.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

>and move on to something more interesting (and worthy of indexing).

I have had an ADHD diagnosis in the past and I am 100% on board with this. Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.

>Taking medication to "address" this active attention mechanism

I also noticed that when taking medication I became really good at boring, non-creative work, but I struggled with deep or innovative thinking. I decided I'd rather be good at deep/innovative things, even if it costs me my ability to do some mundane things for hours at a time.

[pesus]

> Maybe the things I can't pay attention to aren't worth paying attention to and I should be working on something else.

When these things are vital things like feeding yourself, going to work, of driving, this absolutely does not apply. Without treatment, I often cannot even get myself to do things I want to and are fun. ADHD isn't "I can't pay attention to a boring movie", it's executive dysfunction.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

>When these things are vital things like feeding yourself

Need data one this one. I don't believe anyone has starved because they didn't have the executive function to feed themselves.

[GuinansEyebrows]

well, that's a pretty dramatic take on what GP said.

there's a world of difference between literally starving and being unable to break focus on something to feed yourself and maintain a healthy weight and ensure that you're getting all the vitamins and nutrients your body needs to operate beyond a minimal level (especially as you age). i've definitely skipped multiple meals before while caught up in something and it ruins the rest of my day, my sleep, and impacts me moving forward beyond that til i can reach more of an equilibrium.

edit: i see from your other comments that you're not really willing to accept that some people have issues with their brains that make them behave differently from the idealized version of yourself that you hold in your head. so whatever. i hope you grow some empathy for others.

[kordlessagain]

There is a difference between personal preference of taking a substance that changes focus by changing the way the brain works, and doing whatever work is required to use the brain to change itself. That's not to say taking a substance for all of one's life for focus is bad or good, or sustainable, nor is it to say that everyone has the ability or willpower to change the way their brain works.

Substances help in the short term, but they can't be the thing that "solves" the problem, no matter how it is presented (starving vs. good nutrition through attention to what one eats and when they eat). It can't be that a person can ONLY function with a substance dependence for mental phenomenon.

While mental health is a sensitive subject, I don't think it is a "protected" status given many humans suffer from bad mental health from time to time, or constantly, depending on their experience. We've all been in contact with some type of mental health issue with ourselves or others, and we should always approach it from a standpoint of empathy when dealing with others directly. Having empathy online is tricky, and usually involves just not saying anything as opposed to speaking what we think is the truth (for ourselves). Too many people fish for empathy online in my opinion, and real empathy is likely only delivered (well) in a person to person context. It is literally responding physically to another's emotions, as well as understanding why we should have empathy for their emotional output (and doing something besides crying with them in the moment). That is compassion.

In terms of my comment, it was based entirely on my protecting my children from being put on a drug that probably isn't good (or useful) for those of us that don't visualize, long term. There is ZERO evidence that taking amphetamines for long periods of time is good for you. Google lists this as one side effect of ADHD substances: "While some studies suggest positive effects on brain development, other research indicates potential negative impacts on the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain related to motivation and reward."

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Skipping meals isn't a disability. If you're not doing it to the point of harm then it's just skipping meals, which is not actually anything

[pesus]

This is blatant misinformation. There is ample evidence that ADHD exists and is detrimental to all aspects of life. It is not some quirky different way of thinking, it's a disability. My life was made significantly harder without medication, and it's the only thing that allows me to function on a day to day basis. Your kids may end up resenting you down the road for preventing them from accessing one of the only proven treatments that can help with this nuerodevelopmental disorder.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

This is honestly wild to me. It's not a disability, it's probably not actually even real at the scale that it is currently diagnosed (15% of boys!). Certainly should not be so heavily medicated at that scale

[Ancapistani]

> It's not a disability

I understand where you're coming from -- but you should also know how crazy it is to read this about ADHD as a 41-year-old that spent from ages 19 to 22 unable to function as an adult due to executive function disregulation.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

We're about the same age. I too made a ton of dumb decisions as a 19-22yo.

Can you give me more info about being unable to function? Were you truly unable to live or did you just make a ton of bad decisions that you now regret?

[Ancapistani]

I couldn't make myself get up and wash a dish so I could eat something. It was horrible.

[pesus]

It is legally a disability, and you can get accommodations in college for it. I'm glad it hasn't negatively affected your life, but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect others. Believing it isn't an issue won't magically make that true, and only prevents people from getting the help they need.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

>you can get accommodations in college for it

this isn't a real standard

[pesus]

This is a late response and I know you don't care about evidence and have an axe to grind, but to anyone who may read this later: disability legal regulations and standards are absolutely a standard. Denying this won't make it any less true, the same as denying climate change won't make it any less true.

[cml123]

It's perhaps not a disability. But, it is a disabling disorder. It imposes much greater challenge for many tasks that are straightforward for others. I barely graduated high-school on time, I was suspended from a community college for having a 0.6 GPA, and I've failed countless courses I've taken. None of my failures were due to an inability to understand the information; they resulted from challenges with the processes and procedures inherent with formal education.

Although I was suspended from community college, I had no problem teaching myself linear algebra or diff eq. I eventually was able to get a job as a software dev, it took me until age 28, when someone else perhaps could have reached it right out of college. I'm now trying to finish a dual math and comp sci degree in my spare time, and even now I've still failed trivial courses.

I was among the brightest students in my class growing up, but willfully chose to stop taking my ADHD meds in 8th grade. I was a stellar student until then. I've resumed them only very recently, but I have complete confidence that had I chosen to remain on the meds the whole time, I wouldn't have faced all the same challenges.

I don't think the evidence aligns with your understanding.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

>it is a disabling disorder....they resulted from challenges with the processes and procedures inherent with formal education.

So it's not even a disabling disorder. You struggle with formal education (me too!), so maybe formal education is the problem. "Formal education" as we know it today is not a solved thing. We don't actually know the best way to spread knowledge, we just happen to be doing it this way at this moment in history.

If you want to take medication to be good at that, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE you to do so, and I'm very happy for your current successes.

It is a terrible standard by which to create a medical diagnosis and feed children medications.

[mrguyorama]

It is a difference in function, ability, and physiology that our society does not accommodate naturally.

>An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.

People with ADHD have all sorts of recorded impairments including things like being more likely to cause traffic accidents.

It's currently popular in some progressive circles to insist that neurodivergencies are "not disabilities" and I don't like it.

Sure, the accommodations are pretty simple: Stimulants, awareness, some help with forming good habits and training on project management and life management. But it exists.

My friend is a dwarf. His chemistry accommodation is also simple. It's a stool, and an understanding that he won't be lifting large, filled flasks anywhere. He does very good chemistry other than that, and most of his work time is spent doing statistics on the chemistry he does. But pretending he isn't different is doing him a disservice. (He also dislikes "little person" and prefers dwarf because he's a LOTR fan).

>it's probably not actually even real at the scale that it is currently diagnosed (15% of boys!). Certainly should not be so heavily medicated at that scale

This is FUD. Worse, it's the exact FUD that is the reason I was not diagnosed as a child ("he's doing well in school, can't possibly have ADHD, we can't be giving kids stimulants, they'll bounce off the walls!) and why my sister was "tested" for ADHD in the 90s and found to "not have it" despite very definitely having it and being trivially diagnosed decades later.

Your disbelief that psychologists are able to do their job is responsible for the exact spike of adult ADHD diagnosis that people point to as "can't be real".

Meanwhile, giving stimulants to children with ADHD is demonstrably effective and has lasting, proven effects on long term life success. There's even evidence of physiological improvements in brain development.

US numbers are in the same ballpark as other countries. Even countries like South Korea with a significantly more regimented and constricted view of society.

Why is it so surprising that actually, human brains arrange themselves in very different ways? The idea that the "normal" brain is actually normal is just a wrong assumption. Neurodivergencies are significantly inherited, so it's more like "There's a couple lineages of humans whose brains are wired differently and have different ways of working. The percentage of people with neurodivergencies are just the percentage of the human race descended from those lineages.

My brain is built different man, stop insisting that smart people who have demonstrated that shouldn't be trusted about dealing with that. The only people you hurt are the exact people who have to go through hell to get very necessary medication that improves their lives because people like you cast us all as pill seekers even though stimulants do not have that effect for people with ADHD and a tiktok self diagnoses is not even close to enough to get a prescription for medication! Pushing amphetamines on anyone who contacts you is exactly what got a bunch of pill mills shut down during COVID, and also got BetterHelp slapped and it's still controversial to advertise them.

Understand, getting medicated requires jumping through hoops like keeping several appointments. It's harder to keep a stimulant prescription than it is to keep an Oxycontin prescription even after the opioid epidemic.

[krzat]

I don't quite get the connection between ADHD and feeling like a spectator.

[keleftheriou]

If you don’t mind me asking, what was the situation between your parents?

[neRok]

I've only just clued on to how my ADHD-PI has actually affected me. It was hard to tell because I'm evidently "smart enough" to work around the issues. Put simply, my "executive function" sends me a ton of inputs that I manage to juggle, but it takes effort, and so I look for ways to reduce my effort. So I'm not too good at recalling things like jokes, because I've put 0 effort in to remembering them. Part of the reason why is because I've been "shy" since childhood (because if you dont talk then you cant say something dumb or be rude - so problems solved), and so if I'm not talking, then there's no point in knowing jokes (and thus, potential effort is avoided). Just this afternoon I had a worked out that the reason why I don't "listen" to lyrics is likely because it requires "focusing" through the music, but I like the music, so I just listen to the vocals as if they were an instrument (and every now and then I'll just randomly hear some words, which gives the jist). I actually embody most of this meme: https://ifunny.co/meme/the-nooticer-the-37-year-old-nooticer...

Anyway, no more about that. Below is a very fresh "nooticing" — straight from my brain to ChatGPT to you;

Child 1) Me, male, left handed, ADHD-PI, aphantasia, strong spacial ability. Child 2) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery, dyslexia, long time smoker. Child 3) Female, right handed, ADHD-PI, good mental imagery.

That's all of us, born around late-80's. I didn't dump that all that in to chatGPT (more of a drip-feed), but a pattern emerged quickly regardless; FYI: ADHD is in the Prefrontal Cortex (front of brain), whilst Dyslexia is in the Left Temporal Lobe (~mid left).

> Some studies suggest that fetal development could influence handedness. The position of the baby in the womb and the amount of hormonal exposure (such as testosterone levels) may have an impact on whether a person becomes left-handed or right-handed. Some theories propose that exposure to higher levels of testosterone during pregnancy may increase the likelihood of a person being left-handed.

> Spatial abilities are often tied to the right hemisphere of the brain, which might explain why some people with ADHD-PI (especially left-handed individuals) can develop enhanced spatial reasoning skills, even though their challenges with focus and attention are more prominent.

> Aphantasia, the inability to create mental images, has been linked to differences in how the brain processes and integrates visual information, particularly in the right hemisphere, which is responsible for spatial and visual processing.

> ADHD-PI and Dyslexia often co-occur, and research has shown that people with ADHD are at a higher risk of developing dyslexia or other learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia.

> Testosterone plays a critical role in fetal development, particularly in sexual differentiation (deciding whether a fetus develops as male or female). However, higher-than-normal levels of testosterone exposure during pregnancy can influence brain development, potentially affecting handedness, as well as behavioral tendencies (like aggression, risk-taking, and cognitive development).

> Elevated testosterone levels in utero have been linked to prenatal androgen exposure (often associated with more male-like traits), which may influence cognitive abilities and behavior: - Some studies suggest it could lead to enhanced spatial abilities and higher aggression. - On the flip side, it may increase the risk for neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD or dyslexia, depending on how it affects brain regions involved in attention, language, and executive function.

> There are a few reasons why a mother might have elevated levels of testosterone during pregnancy: - 1. Maternal Health Conditions (e.g., Polycystic Ovary Syndrome - PCOS) - 2. Stress During Pregnancy: Stress—especially chronic stress—can increase the levels of certain hormones, like cortisol. However, there is also some evidence suggesting that stress can lead to altered hormone balance, which might include an increase in testosterone levels. - 3. Maternal Obesity - 4. External or Environmental Hormone Exposure: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are substances that can interfere with the body's hormonal systems. Some EDCs mimic or disrupt normal hormone functions, potentially leading to higher levels of testosterone in the body. These chemicals can be found in a variety of products, from plastics to pesticides.

Testosterone is the common thread there, and so the question is: why did mum have so much? She was both a stress-head and smoker, but I can't ask her any specifics, because she's dead. So in hind-sight I would say that she had ADHD as well, and so she must have been internalising many things that would then lead to overthinking, which would cause stress and anxiety ("over-worry" sort of thing).

Her and dad also smoked cigarettes forever since I can remember, but they would always go outside. I'm not sure if she smoked whilst pregnant, but I would have thought so, because the advice to quit may not have been common? My sister reckons she didn't though - so I don't know. Regardless, dad would have been smoking, but even when smoking outside, it's well known that 2nd and 3rd hand smoke can affect kids.

So I already suspected the smoking link (the nicotine to dopamine connection), but I didn't realise my left-handedness, spacial reasoning and aphantasia would all be implicated.

[CMCDragonkai]

Maybe try writing things down?

[sensanaty]

I genuinely hate to be that guy lol, but I've found LLMs great for this.

I've been updating my resume lately and I've had some LLMs create scripts to call Jira + Linear APIs to fetch all tickets I've had any involvement in and to analyze it. It hallucinates details all the time of course, but I can at least get a rough idea of the things I worked on, cause I'm the same as you and forget immediately what I worked on last week.