Notes
tl;dr
- Honor your limitations and don’t feel shame for them
- Don’t let others prioritize for you and don’t feel shame for your priorities
- Allow for your transgressions, like spending too much time on a task because you got distracted
- Allow yourself time to relax
On Cooking
- This On Cooking anecdote reminds me of my experience trying to eat from a meal plan. It took a ton of effort and is what led me to try Soylent. Now, I spend seconds making a meal, and I love it!
- It’s an issue of priorities. I’ll take a very long time and spent lots of effort on things other people don’t care about. My parents throw all waste into the trash. I will break down boxes, tear off any mailing labels (for privacy), and recycle them. I’ll even drive them across town to recycle them. That’s something I value and feel is worth the time.
On physics
- This seems to misunderstand what is meant by “make time.” It never means to manufacture time. People are making a point that you would have time if you prioritized the task in question.
On Laundry
- Is procrastinating something you don’t want to do really an ADHD thing? I thought it was just a human thing.
- This is why I don’t get haircuts that require maintenance. I just won’t do it.
What Time Is Made Of
- Now we get the reveal that she actual does know what “make time” means
- “other people don’t know your priorities better than you do”- This reminds me of the time I was scolded at Pike Place market for making a video on my phone because I should be enjoying it. I was taking a video for my daughter who couldn’t come with me. Maybe that still wouldn’t have been good enough for the person, but it was good enough for me. Calling me out was judgey.
- So identify with going down the research rabbit hole and turning a simple project into three hours of research. I’m in that now on ordering some N95 masks. Could have just done it, but I got paralyzed by the options and put it off instead after a good bit of research.
Article
True story. I already had the first part of this drafted when I saw neurodivergent Twitter explode in the best way, taking apart the concept of laziness. I wish I could take credit for my timely response, but I assure you, this was entirely accidental.
Regardless, this is the patented Doctor Fancy Pants take on the subject.
On Cooking
I don’t particularly enjoy cooking.
I mean, I sometimes enjoy cooking.
Well… I don’t hate it? Usually?
By contrast, I have a lot of friends who love cooking. They’re really good at it. They’re fascinated by it. I have friends who get right into the science of cooking. I have friends who have built it into an art form. Sometimes it derives from a long-standing joy or happy kitchen memories, sometimes from a desire to be frugal, sometimes from a restricted diet that demands a good deal of additional attention in the kitchen to make it work.
They get a real kick out of it.
Me? I cook so I can eat, and I’ll be honest, my food preparation practice probably shouldn’t be called cooking. More often, Husband cooks so that we can both eat.
I will take any shortcut I possibly can.
I’m medically low carb, so I have cruised the fancy supermarket aisles searching for the least-carby pasta sauce I can find (pro tip: the imported Italian stuff has a shitload less sugar on the whole), because once I have found it, I have found a new and glorious shortcut. It’s a victory for me.
But when you’re a person who takes a lot of shortcuts, you can end up feeling like you’re less worthy than people who take the extra time and effort, and you conclude very quickly that you’re doing a half-arsed job and they’re doing it properly.
It starts to become a sore point. You start to hear convenience being used as a dirty word.
“Fuck,” you think to yourself, “I’m so lazy.”
I internalised that heavily, and I would speak like that, too; “Ah yeah, sounds great,” I say to a friend who is trying to tell me how easy it is to make pasta sauce from scratch, “I’m too lazy to do that, sounds good though…?”
Now, it’s true that practice is the ingredient that magically transforms a difficult task into an easier task. I could put the effort in, and I could get the practice, and I could spend the time learning how to do all this from scratch, and then it will go from being “too hard” to “real easy” (though it would still take significantly more time than the way I do it now, which involves two minutes in a microwave).
But I don’t do that. When it comes to household tasks, I generally only put the effort in to learn things where shortcuts are not available, or where my brain has decided (albeit randomly) that this would be an interesting thing to learn (see also: disassembling the dryer when it started making a funny noise). Otherwise, I simply do not make time for it.
And in spite of what I have been saying to myself and to my friends and to the universe at large, it is not because I am fucking lazy.
On physics
I used the phrase “make time” up there, and I used that on purpose, because it’s freaking awful. If I say I haven’t had time to do something (like go to gym this week, or keep on top of some house work or yard work), and someone shakes their head and says disapprovingly, “Kate, you should make time,” I have to bite my tongue on the following statement (which I have made many times in person, and also on this blog):
“Gosh. I really should. If I do manage to make time out of nothing, I’d be up for the Nobel Prize in Physics. That would be quite the feather in my cap.”
Time is an issue for ADHD people and the many ways in which it is an absolute disaster deserve a blog post of their own (that, too, is partially drafted). What I will say here is this: time is a finite resource.
With ADHD, since we don’t perceive time passing, we have a habit of ignoring this fact and trying to fit more into any given time block than will actually fit. We have a basic instinctive assumption – flawed and deeply misleading – that time is somehow elastic, and it’s like packing a suitcase, and if we just punch everything down really hard and sit on the lid we can just manage to get the zip done up.1
We break the zip. Every time. That fucker’s done. The suitcase will not close. There are clothes and toiletries everywhere and we still have to pack for our trip and now we don’t even have a suitcase.2
So when people tell us to make time, it hits that part of ourselves that is aware that we are constantly fucking up time, that we are late for things, that we miss deadlines, that we try to do too much, that we hyperfocus for hours on things that aren’t productive or relevant (I mean they might be fun but pfft, fun’s not important, right?3).
And in spite of the fact that we are, apparently, trying to create additional time in the same manner in which we were trying to create additional volume in the suitcase, and we are very obviously not managing to do that, we will feel bad and we will look back at our week and all the mistakes and forgotten things and missed deadlines and hyperfocused distractions and think, “shit, yeah, we should absolutely make time for that.”
And we think that we’re lazy, because we haven’t.
When in fact all that this means is that we are subject to the same laws of physics as everyone else – we just don’t see them as clearly in the relevant moment, and that makes things harder.
So when people tell you to make time, your response should be:
“Great! From what?”
The raw material of time, no doubt. But we’ll get back to that.
On Laundry
Husband is in charge of the dishes and keeping the kitchen clean, and I am in charge of the laundry. My approach to laundry is “survival of the fittest.” If an item of clothing can’t survive a delicate cycle in the lingerie bag and a cycle in the dryer on low heat, then it does not deserve to survive in my house, because that is generally the kindest I am willing to be. Tough love, dammit.
Unless there are new jeans or sheets involved, I don’t separate colours.
I not only don’t iron – ever – I have an ironclad rule about not buying clothes that need ironing.4
Compression running gear, high-end sports bras, and pricey bikinis that I expect to last for several years are all spared the dryer – but generally, one load of machine washing = one load of machine drying.
An electric dryer is an energetically demanding device. I consider this probably the greatest of my carbon sins (possibly the ducted gas heating, but that’s one reason that we’re installing the underfloor insulation), and this is why I tried for so long to resist this.
At the Mountain Fortress, we don’t even have a clothesline. If I put one up in the back yard, I risk Amos eating our laundry.
He has a weakness for socks and has proven multiple times that, while he is very clever in many areas, he is not very good at distinguishing “food” from “not food”. He eats rocks. ROCKS. See this mournful expression? THAT’S WHAT A DOG THAT EATS ROCKS LOOKS LIKE.
Now, maybe the back yard is an obvious dog problem, but what about the front yard? Sure! Except that, if I’m honest, I run a very real risk of bringing my laundry in and having it be full of spiders.
I live in an actual forest. There are a lot of spiders in the trees. Any object that is outside for more than six hours is liable to have an anchor strand affixed to it. If it’s twenty-four hours, it will be a gothic nightmare. While installing the underfloor insulation, I loudly marvelled that the sheer thickness of the cobwebs under the house didn’t confer insulation properties.
This is my front yard. This is like a housing estate for arachnids.
I believe that includes scorpions, although to be fair I have only found those in the carport.
The people who lived in this house for three decades before us never had a clothesline, either. I am thinking that there was a very good reason.
Plus, I’m hypermobile and my shoulders are a mess, and I have low blood pressure with orthostatic intolerance and sometimes if I put my arms above my head I get dizzy and my vision goes dark. Hanging out washing is a terrible idea.
But listen.
All that is true.
These are very real reasons.
They are contributing factors. They make me feel a little better about the dryer.
They are not the primary reason.
Here’s the primary reason I don’t hang washing out to dry:
I just won’t do it.
If you have ADHD, and are well versed in the ways of executive dysfunction, you may have nodded sympathetically just now, or stroked your chin sagely in a moment of empathic wisdom; if you are not familiar with this problem, this looks like a weird flex. Bear with me.
Believe me, I have tried. I didn’t have a dryer until 2012, so I hung clothes up to dry on clotheslines in sharehouses, and I used an indoor clotheshorse when we lived in a flat. I managed.
(see, Kate? You can do it!)
(ahahahah. Keep reading)
I managed very, very poorly. I would forget that I had put the washing on, often until a housemate came to me and informed me with exaggerated patience that I had left it in the machine again. “Again.” Yes. Sometimes I would remember well enough at first, and fully intend to hang the washing out, but I kept putting it off because I hated doing it (we’ll get to that) and then I would forget.
My laundry very frequently underwent 2-3 additional rinse cycles because washing gets manky as hell when you leave it all scrunched up and wet in the machine overnight.
This is not a request for solutions. Anyone trying to advise me on how I really can change my ways and stop using the dryer is going to be on the receiving end of my extreme displeasure.
In the end, when I finally had access to a dryer (when we first moved out of the city, but before we bought a house in the forest), I mostly tried not to use it. It wasn’t until I moved to the rainforest that I used it just about all the time (yes, we still own that indoor clotheshorse, but it’s on extended loan to a mate with a much more severe shoulder injury).
I thought, “It’s all very well to say that I should hang the washing out. I should remember. I should put in the effort. I should make the time.”
I thought, “But I’m in my thirties now. It’s pretty fucking clear that ‘should’ doesn’t do jack shit, and it’s just as fucking clear that I’m not going to do this. I’m just not going to. What I’m going to is waste energy and water on freaking rinse cycles and mental energy feeling like a failure.”
I decided to stop beating my head against the brick wall, and laundry is now a much more efficient and straightforward process. I even fold laundry, now. That’s new, as of the past few years.
Because if I decide to hang out the washing in some sort of spider-free fashion, that will require time and effort and planning. If you don’t have ADHD, you might not grasp how exhausting a simple “adulting” task might be. That’s why we feel shitty about ourselves even if we’re really good at other things. That’s why we feel ashamed.
But yeah, that basic shit? Is fucking hard.
And even fellow ADHDers will sometimes struggle to understand, because they have differing areas of difficulty, and to them it might be absolutely absurd that I won’t hang up the washing or just use fresh tomatoes to make a very simple from-scratch pasta sauce. It’s sometimes worth a reminder – and hey, I have to remind myself as well! – that we might all be on the same obstacle course, but we are going to have trouble with different hurdles. These are mine.
Now, we get into this issue of physics again: if I am going to make time for hanging out washing and for more advanced cooking, what am I going to make time out of?
Let’s talk about the raw materials of time.
What Time Is Made Of
If you’re hoping for some Stephen Hawking level brilliance from me on this issue, you’re going to be disappointed.
As far as we’re concerned, time is made of one thing: more time. It works purely on a one-for-one trade.5
That means that if I make time for this, I have to take time away from that.
It seems obvious, right?
This is what people mean when they say “make time.” They don’t actually expect me to create it from nothing. They’re implying that whatever-it-is must be a higher priority than literally everything else that I do (or at least one thing, which occupies a similarly sized slot, though they do not specify what that is. They just assume I’ve got some time that I’m spending in a less valuable way).
And as people with ADHD, who get distracted and miss deadlines and lose track of things, we tend to privilege other people’s opinions on this shit over our own. We tend to assume that we have messed up our priorities – because, bluntly, we probably have done that in our lives – and so we assume that the other person is probably right, then we internalise this implied judgement, and then we feel shame.
We assume that we are being lazy, but – fun fact – the missing time is not made of laziness, it is still only made of more fucking time.
We can’t just presume that we can knit this extra space in our lives if we harvest the raw material of laziness and spin it into a fine yarn.
Firstly, and most importantly, laziness is a bullshit cop-out concept. It’s a shitty shorthand for a lack of empathy, a breakdown in communication, other unseen barriers, and mismatched priorities. There’s a great essay on that here, and that essay contains links to further information. It’s an established area of research.
Secondly, it’s important to understand that other people don’t actually know your priorities better than you do. They are going to judge your priorities (or what they know of your priorities) through their own preferences.
They don’t know that you’re trying to make sure you have time with friends who are going through rough times, time to spend with your loved ones, time to work on personal creative projects, time to manage those basic (exhausting) household tasks, time to prepare and eat food, time for hygiene, time to run essential errands, time to do the shopping, time to exercise, time for medical appointments, time to walk the dog and play with him, time to play with the cats, time to work—
And then someone says “oh, you should make time.”
And I look back at my week and think, “Yeah, I definitely spent too much time on social media, and I did play video games a lot on Saturday.”
I forget that my social media is how I stay in touch with people, because most of my friends live a fair way away from my mountain fortress. I forget that a big part of my drive and fulfilment in life comes from communicating about things that are important to me, and that Facebook posts and Twitter threads are genuine outlets.
I forget that sometimes I need to stop policing my brain. Just to give it a bit of a break. Even if that means I end up spending an hour reading “Am I The Asshole?” on Reddit.
I forget that we need downtime. Our brains need to play. Yes, I write stories, and that’s a crucial outlet, but it’s not an actual break. We need to not be productive. I almost never actually watch TV, by the way. I read a lot, and then there’s the social media.
I forget that probably the people who have successfully “made time” for whatever-the-fuck it is this time… have their own ordered set of priorities, and those are different to mine. That doesn’t necessarily make them better or worse.6
Just different.
If I want to fit something in, then something else has to go, and remember that we ADHD folk have to factor in all the slack time of “I got stuck down a research hole reading about conference room microphones”7 and “I got stuck in a decision loop about shipping costs vs the minimum spend for free shipping and something that should have taken three minutes to order has turned into twelve open tabs and three hours of additional research.”8
Because if I don’t factor that in, shit will go sideways fast.
I’m Not Lazy and Neither Are You
I don’t cook anything from scratch, unless I absolutely have to (because, well, restricted diet). I eat processed low-carb snacks because they’re there, and they’re easy, and I don’t have to think about it, because I am already thinking about a whole lot of shit and there is. no. room. for more.
I don’t hang out washing, except bikinis and running clothes which get hung up in the bathroom and the spare room respectively (the latter over wardrobe doors). I don’t iron. Yes, all my bras (except the expensive sports bras) go through the dryer. They are fine.
These are two areas in which I take shortcuts, both areas where people get shamed for doing so. To be fair, these shortcuts do have costs, and it is worth considering those.
I am not saying that it is never worth the time to learn a new skill. I am certainly not devaluing the love that people have for cooking, or sewing (god, if I even have to factor in how much a fabric stretches, I am sunk), or- look, so far I have not found anyone who exhibits a deep love of laundry but there are stranger things in heaven and earth, Horatio, so get scrubbing.
For every single area of life, there is something that you could learn to “do properly”, and something where you “should make time” (in quote marks because I detest “should” and “make time” about equally), and it’s worth noting that if you do that, you have to get rid of something else.
I am not too lazy to make sauce from scratch. I am uninterested in making sauce from scratch and the time I spend on that has already been spent on something else. I am not too lazy to hang out laundry. I hate hanging out laundry (it’s physically painful), and the time I would spend on that has already been spent on something else.
And there is an upper limit of what you can do. Not everything can be equally urgent. Not every priority can be perfectly addressed.
And that does not make you lazy.
You were never lazy.
explanatory note: I thought I might try to save words from the body of a lengthy post such as this by slipping some of my wisecracks and derailments into footnotes, which are very much an optional commentary and it works because the body of the essay is in fact less than 3,300 words and this is a victory, just let me have this.
FOOTNOTES
1. To be fair this works for me, because I am badass at luggage Tetris. I’m also very good at getting more cardboard into the recycling bin. Husband says “yeah, that bin is full,” and my immediate response is, “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED” and off I go. [](https://fortifiedsandcastle.wordpress.com/2020/12/20/1046/#fnref-1)
2. Outside of the metaphor, this doesn’t happen for me (see previous footnote). Having said that, in my early years – my younger, innocent days – maybe adolescence – I definitely overloaded cheap school backpacks and had the comparable experience offered in the metaphor. This, I believe, was my proving ground; the blood-soaked sands on which I fought, and lost, and in that losing, learned. 
3. This is sarcasm. It might seem obvious that it’s sarcasm, so obvious that it’s not worth a footnote, and indeed if you’ve read anything I’ve written about either ADHD or fun, you’ll pick up on it, but since so many of us are constantly battling a deeply held and toxic belief that fun is a waste of time, it seems worthwhile to belabour the point. If it takes me challenging Thor to an arm-wrestle and cheating severely in the process, just so I can borrow Mjölnir to hammer home that point, well, that fucker is going down. Also, that kinda sounds like fun.
4. I AM WHAT I AM, DAMMIT.
5. We can probably complicate this relationship if we nominate variables for “time invested in learning a skill” and “time invested in practicing a skill” – i.e., a basic learning curve – and try to relate those to differing values of “time invested in performing that skill” at different time points relative to the position on the curve. I mean, I’m not going to do that, but I could. Ultimately, though, the time invested along any of these parameters is still drawn from the same limited resource pool, and there is also an issue of diminishing returns or an asymptotic effect above a certain point. i.e., it doesn’t matter what a whizz bang chef I am, it is still always going to take longer to make a red sauce from scratch than the two minutes in the microwave (which is, to be fair, leveraging someone else’s learning curve and investment and paying money for the privilege).
6. Although given that I do read a lot of “Am I The Asshole?” on Reddit, I feel qualified to say that hell yeah some people’s priorities are fucking worse than mine.
7. Apparently, this is a technically intractable problem, and I’m mad about the other things I could have done with that hour.
8. If anything, I am understating the length of time involved. Under lockdown, when I ordered every damn thing online and thus had to do a profound “free shipping minimum” dance every freaking time, this added up fast. On one memorable occasion, I wanted one pair of really comfy fleecy tracksuit pants from Target, because I had a pair and they were great and it was winter and I lived in these fucking pants, and I added them to my cart, and then threw in a pair of slippers, and a jumper that was on sale, things that I could use but wasn’t really shopping for, just so I could get the delivery minimum, and it took SO LONG for me to find things I could justify spending so that I wouldn’t end up “wasting” a delivery charge, and I felt SO GUILTY about spending the money, but I had to wash these pants some time, and then – then – I got an email from Target apologising that they didn’t have stock of the tracksuit pants in their warehouse, so they were refunding me the cost, but not to worry, they were sending everything else with free shipping, that is I was definitely getting all the items that I only ordered so that I would qualify for free shipping. My friends, I unleashed a torrent of horrific profanity so foul that my very utterances likely caused the paint to peel in churches three suburbs away. After all that, if I find a store that has a flat shipping rate and no free delivery options, it is actually a relief.