What happens when we make mistakes?

Something Shiny: ADHD!

David asks: what about brushing your teeth and things that don’t have immediate gratification, necessarily, but you have to do them over and over again? How do you motivate yourself to do them? It’s preventative-you don’t see what you save, you don’t know what Past You did for Future You when you’ve brushed your teeth. David’s answer is to outsource a lot of decisions that he doesn’t want to make to ritual, and the world of pain is part of everything we have to do. He just does it because it’s the routine (like getting up) even though it is so hard, so very hard, to do the things we don’t want to do. The fact that we can feel this much pain helps us want to prevent other’s pain, makes us think creatively. David might be willing to bet that a lot of technology and innovation that makes things more efficient and helps us skip the boring tedious parts is perhaps invented by folx with ADHD. For folx with ADHD, you are tested in fire all the time, and it does things—there is negative stuff (sucks experiencing rejection, sucks making mistakes, sucks not being perfect, sucks being found out)—but our ability to think outside the box because we’ve had to struggle our whole life is something he doesn’t want to surrender. Isabelle names that it feels that David saying that expressed compassion to the part of her that didn’t get that before. She thinks about how in trauma work there’s this mythology around the trauma making you stronger, but also—you could’ve been great without the trauma, thank you. Isabelle didn’t really give herself credit for the strengths, and often assigns the strengths and things that she has achieved to good fortune or luck, while taking full ownership of the blame, shame, and mistake-making parts. It has taken her a long time to not just jump straight to “I got so lucky!” And recognize that maybe she had something to do it with—and wonders if she’s the only one? David names that this is so relatable—it is so hard to acknowledge that our strengths are coming from the same place our vulnerabilities are. It’s so easy to say we got lucky or it was chance, because we don’t get to refine the skills to know we did more than get away with something. We don’t fit in the Normal Rockwell image of how things appear and so we don’t think about doing things the same way others do, either. David names how a part of him would be ashamed about getting ready for a school presentation in ten minutes—instead of practicing every night for twenty minutes, like he thought he should. Never mind that he still got an A, was able to speak with great energy, that the fact his tone of voice was a little more engaging—all of those things are ADHD. David is just thinking he got away with it, because he’s not counting all the times he thought about doing the thing and then didn’t, because they were ‘dumb anxious thoughts,’ never mind that he got it done and got a good grade, he was still a fraud because he was different. Now he can look at it in a balanced way, it’s all ingredients to who we are. In the real world, you’re not in trouble if you get it done too fast. Isabelle convinced herself people would think she cheated if she was honest about how she did something. We encounter so much pain, we don’t need any help seeing the fault of our actions, David is really good at that—but we all need someone to remind us of what we’re really good at. Folx with ADHD are used to calling out ADHD behavior when something is not going right; getting use to calling out ADHD behavior when things that are happening that are excellent, and would not be happening if not for a person’s ADHD. There’s so much pain, let’s honor the great things. Isabelle thinks about how she was at the park with her kid on a playdate and had a snack bag and thermos with tea. She proceeded to leave this tea everywhere and put the tea everywhere, on slides, wherever, forgetting she had it, circling back, and meanwhile, her kid is playing and pushing their amazing boundaries. She always thinks someone has come in and moved something, like the realization in the film A Beautiful Mind that someone’s hallucinations are so real to them they feel like reality. David calls Isabelle on calling this a delusion: somebody did move it. It was you. And you don’t remember it because you didn’t make a memory because you were busy doing ten other things. The whole thing is accurate. Isabelle laughs so hard and thinks she might need to get that tattooed on her: “Somebody did move it, and it was you,” Memento-style (see below). Isabelle notices that over time she is much more open and discloses more quickly that she has ADHD, in an attempt to normalize it and make it a safe conversation for the other person, too. And she notices that in the past she would maybe make it more of an apology or an explanation—don’t mind me not keeping track of the tea mug, my working memory is shot—but she realizes this added dimension, that while she is beating herself up inside for losing the tea mug so often, she is also really relaxed and happy and playing with her kid, and that’s an ADHD strength. David asks how often she will be upset with people for making mistakes? Isabelle names never, and may even be forgiving to a fault, it takes a lot for her to take a mistake personally. David asks: do you realize that is an existential superpower? We make more mistakes before breakfast than other people do all year; if I can make you feel better about the mistake you just made, I feel better! If I make a mistake, I’ll beat myself up, but if you do, I’ll find every way to preserve your self esteem and integrity. Isabelle wonders if existentially, this resonates with so many traditions and theories around the idea of not taking things so personally, witnessing the thing instead of personalizing the thing. And David names that it cannot be to a fault, you’d never knock someone for having such a worldview. And our ability to remove pain in the absence of more information is impressive. David names that our superpowers often connect to how ADHD works in us. For David, he can’t remember what he just said (working memory) but he retains something he saw on a screen once that was a fun fact…forever (did you know most polar bears are left handed? That coca-cola’s original color was green? That Hong Kong had the most Rolls-Royce’s per capita in 1992?). Some people can recite whole movies verbatim to the character. To not have the delay in gratification skills and response cost awareness to really recognize the consequences of someone’s failure, and instead be the healing they need by being understanding: this is a magic. We’re good at creativity, problem-solving (not good at avoiding problems, but good at solving them), adaptability. David goes down a tangent of Kierkegaard, a philosopher who wrote a lot about anxiety being complex and connected to how much you know yourself, the more you know yourself, the more you know what to do in life. But more than that, he also named that freedom means having lots of choices at all times—something that someone with ADHD can relate to—things I can do in a given moment, how can I pick what to do? Paralysis by analysis, being stuck by so many options, how the heck do you pick something? In order to pick, when you have a lot of options, is a leap of faith (he means it more religiously, but David means it more colloquially)—leap of faith based on who you are. For example, I don’t like hurting people, I like laughing, I don’t like inside all the time—I might have 30 options in front of me, but only four fit that criteria. And even more than that, how do you pick amongst the four? Take a leap of faith, because you only get to know yourself through the decisions you make, not the de...