The Best Parts of Life are Hard
Yeah, ADHD makes life harder in many ways. That doesn't mean it's bad.
When I first became a mom, I made a mistake of thinking that it would be important for me to shield my daughter from suffering. That she could have the idyllic happy childhood I didn’t have, as long as I made sure nothing sad or disappointing came her way.
I was a depressed kid. A tale as old as Millennial time: gifted, but “lazy” (so, undiagnosed ADHD, duh), social anxiety, and an adolescence spent so depressed I couldn’t imagine why anyone could possibly be happy. Self-harm, cigarettes, emo music. It was the 90s. You get the picture.
When I became a parent, I thought this is my chance to undo those things and raise a happy, carefree kid.
As it turned out though, I have realized it wasn’t the hard things I experienced growing up that made me depressed.
It was the idea - the misguided hope - that things should be easy. Life seems so easy for other people. I must be the only one who finds life hard.
I only wish I had discovered much earlier on, that just because something is hard, doesn’t mean it’s bad.
In fact, almost all the good things in life are hard; nothing makes me feel worse than things that are too easy.
Overstimulation vs. Understimulation
Slow living is apparently a popular thing that I hear many people1 are finding helpful.
The idea of “doing nothing, intentionally” however, sounds deeply stressful to me.
There is a misconception I think that all ADHD people are constantly overstimulated. Much advice directed toward parents of neurodivergent kids emphasizes slowing down, avoiding over-scheduling, being aware of - and avoiding - what ADHD kids find overstimulating. The idea being that hyperactivity and/or acting out are a result of too much going on, and that ADHD kids would chill out if they had a more chill environment.2
However, an occupational therapist once explained to me that sometimes what appears to be overstimulation in ADHD may actually be caused by chronic understimulation. The reason my daughter was constantly wanting to move and yell and run and spin and climb more than any other kid I observed was because her brain felt starved of stimuli. The absence of efficient dopamine provision and utilization made her brain seek stimuli in a way other kids didn’t need.
When this was explained to me, a lot of aspects of my life made more sense. My entire life I have been confused why people find watching a movie relaxing. You mean I’m just supposed to….sit there? For like 2 hours? And pay attention to one thing? Even the most exciting movie isn’t interesting enough for me to sit for multiple hours to watch it.
My husband would pause the movie every time I got up despite me telling him not to - “but you’ll miss the movie and then it won’t make sense” - but that’s never happened. I can put together a storyline despite having missed 1/3 or more of it and not feel any need to go back and watch any of it. If there was a way to watch like 5 minutes of the beginning of a movie, 5 minutes of the middle, and the last 20 minutes, that’s pretty much all of the movie I need.
If we are going to watch TV, I reserve the right to fold laundry, crochet, and/or read a book while I watch the movie, because just sitting like a lump3 watching something makes me feel so itchy I can’t stand it.
I actually pretty much hate watching TV and movies. It’s not just for me.
Incidentally, my favorite way of relaxing is some sort of entertainment + some sort of project. Listening to a fiction podcast or audiobook while cleaning or doing laundry is exactly the zone of relaxation I need. Anything where I have to sit still just makes me feel like I’m rotting.
Accommodations Should Set the Stage for Growth - Even When It’s a Struggle
In addition to ADHD, my daughter has a sensory processing disorder. She has always hated clothes or feeling her body constricted. When she was little it was like, ‘haha, she just wants to run around in her diaper, lol she hates clothes’ but now that she’s in grade school it’s become a bit of a battle - especially over trying things on.
She plays a sport that requires somewhat uncomfortable uniforms. Every time we need to size those uniforms up, it’s a whole thing. “I HATE trying things on.” But if we don’t try things on, we reason with her, you’ll have to wear something that doesn’t fit for entire practices or games, and trust me dude, you’re going to hate that way more.
I can make some accommodations. I don’t take her clothes shopping every weekend or push her to find that enjoyable. I measure her and then buy a lot of her regular school stuff based on size charts, and make sure to get mostly stretchy, seamless kinds of things.
But - she needs to be able to try on clothes. That is a thing people do in life. I can’t accommodate her to the point that she never tries things on.
So, while my accommodation is to reduce trying things on as much as possible, she needs to grow in her ability to tolerate the discomfort of trying things on when it is truly necessary. We’re working on it; it’s not getting better overnight. The goal is for her to try something on with zero whining, and to stay regulated even when uncomfortable. If it’s uncomfortable, she can just take it off and say “that one doesn’t fit” or “that one is itchy” and away it goes. But she still needs to build the skill and tolerate that discomfort.
And this is all part of a larger lesson I’m trying to teach her - yeah, things can be hard. That doesn’t mean we avoid them. That doesn’t mean that we can’t work at things to make them less hard. And that work - even though it’s hard - feels good while not working toward anything feels bad.
And most of all, it doesn’t mean that hard things aren’t worth it. “The point of life,” I told her recently, “is to learn to do hard things until we are so strong, they aren’t hard anymore. Once it’s easy, it’s boring and you don’t need to think about it much anymore. And so you find something harder to work on next.”
In my experience, no one is more resilient and full of life than an ADHD person who knows that stuff is really flipping hard and is doing it anyway.
Because when things are easy, it feels like things are rotting. When things are hard, as long as you don’t give up, growth may be hard to see - but you can be sure the rot isn’t preventing you from doing hard things.4
I suspect mainly middle-class, comfortable people. Growing up working class / on the edge of poor as I did, the idea of ‘slow living’ would have sounded to me like a good way to get evicted. Then you can live as slow as you want…under a bridge.
I know many ADHD / neurodivergent people do feel this way. Overstimulation is real and it sucks.
No shade to sitting like a lump, I actually wish I could do this and have it feel restorative.
I’m not making a moral argument or trying to advance some kind of toxic hustle culture. For many people, what has lately been called ‘rotting’ could really just be described as ‘resting’. And if that is beneficial for you, by all means, please feel free to rot! After all, to extend the metaphor, things literally grow best when buried in quality rot (i.e., compost).