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It's so beautiful that autism guy and ADHD guy are being so supportive of AuDHD guy 😭😭😭 sometimes we just need that kind of non-judgemental support 💖

"i see the mess and my brain stops" yep

The "I missed one day and now the schedule feels broken" hits so hard. For me it's medication. I miss one day and suddenly it's been a month since the last dose because "well now I have to wait until next week" (it's a weekly injection)

My room is divided in two sorts of spaces :
The ones where everything has a specific spot that was decided.
And the piles of stuff whose place hasn't been decided yet, and won't be decided for a few months.

For me, at some point, the pile just becomes part of the space and feels like it belongs there, that that is it's space and I can't move it. It's frustrating.

"That's all?"
"That's all."
"It felt like more"
I FELT that

As I'm watching this there's a pile of stuff on the coffee table. I started going through it an hour ago, sorting papers, recycle from garbage. Then I picked up a catalog, got lost in it. Started another video and just realized while listening here that both piles are still sitting there. I WANT it clean, but I can walk past the same mess for a week or more and not even see it.

This and so many of your AuDHD videos resonate so hard with me, I can't get over it. I thought I was just kinda uniquely broken, which made it easy to just give up. Now I know I'm not alone.

About cleaning specifically, I basically require to have people coming over before I can seriously buckle down and clean more than a chunk at a time, but when I've got people coming over it suddenly gets weirdly easy.

I had a weekly thing going on for a while where a group of friends would be over, and I told them I was genuinely glad because it gave my brain an excuse to get over the hump and clean the place regularly. Which was WAY EASIER than waiting a month or whatever until there's so much to do that I can't even figure out how to start.

Funny how knowing that doesn't make it easier to clean on a schedule without an excuse.

A tip for hard things: Take a picture of the space you need to clean. While you sit on the couch and watch a series, look at the picture, and make decisions. Does the trash need to be gathered? Any items to declutter? Any items to clean? Items that belongs somewhere else? By doing this, it feels way less straining, and once you start, it takes less time and effort, because you made all the decisions beforehand. It is a great way to support executive function. ☺

Looks to the pile on the left
I can move a few zippers and shirts.

Thank you for telling me that I don't have to do everything at once.
Small steps.

Edit: Holy shit, I found 300 bucks in an envelope, buried in my laundry.
Thank you once again.

It's really hard not to judge yourself.

'I stare at it until I feel guilty enough to clean one spoon', is my whole process in a nutshell. Unfortunately it turns into, oh maintenance is coming this week. I need to clean now or they'll see the mess. If they see the mess they'll judge me. Worse, the mess is something that gets reported and then the mess becomes "Clean this or get fined and eventually evicted". Like clockwork, every three months. Do I do anything about it until the very last minute? No. Should I? Yes. Do I start out with the best intentions and try to keep on top of things? Yes. Then I miss a day. The system breaks and feeling like I've failed the whole system slides into apathy and chaos.

My cat gets fed on time though, every day at the same time. The bowl gets cleaned every day at the same time. Water topped off, same time every day. Litter, scooped every day, same time. Refreshed every three to four days depending on how much litter is scooped out. Changed completely once a month. My cat did nothing wrong and doesn't deserve to suffer. Me on the other hand, I made the mess.

I need the deadline, I can only clean if I have people coming over. There’s probably something to be said for cleaning for yourself but this works better than letting it get big enough that I get overwhelmed and stop inviting people because I’m overwhelmed at the thought of having to clean…

Also it's okay to ask for help. Paid cleaning services exist. Often times friends and/or family are willing to help. Neither of these are failures, they're reaching out and sharing resources.

0:17 - "I need the room clean to start cleaning the room" I literally had to put my phone down for a second. I've never had it put into words like that, but that's exactly how it is...

1:06 - Oh my god! This too! I could be doing the same thing consistently for literally months, but I miss one day and then it all derails and I never go back to it again. Because clearly it "didn't work" so why would I do it again? /s 🙄🤦🏽‍♀️

Still haven’t unpacked the moving boxes because I’m scared of everything ending up on the floor. (There’s already other stuff scattered across the floor.)

I hate executive distinction so much because when I see I need to do something I'm like "I gotta do that thing" but I just can't figure it out for the life of me but I know that until I do it it's going to urk me that I haven't done it yet but usually I'll forget about that exact thing I need to do so I just end up laying in bed unable to fall asleep because that thing wasn't done today and I have no clue what that thing was.

From the time I was a small child, I had to CONSTANTLY tell my mother (who is a clean freak like no other) that my stuff might be messy, but I know EXACTLY where everything is, and it works perfectly. It was everyone else who had the problem, not me. I refused to conform to another person’s idea of how my life should work

Apart from executive dysfunction, some of us are crazy organizational so for example: We'll have a messy room, but when we want to Re-Organize our closet, we'll take already folded clothes out, and refold them so we can have our clothes where we want and/or need them to be. But by doing this: we have a tendency to create a bigger mess than needed, but we like things being organized in a very, very specific manner/way. An example: I have objects at the bottom of my closet floor & for semi longer length dresses that I own, I cannot stand it when the edge of those dresses legit touches the objects on the floor below it - my own brain/mind cannot handle that at all.

The thing w/crazy organizational individuals like myself who have a messy room currently is b/c we're assessing & have a vision of what clothes should go where & where we want them (e.g. transferring my shorts/skorts to my main closet while like "hiding" winter clothes) since the weather is warming up a bit. Putting some long sleeve tops in the back of my closet (and other long sleeves on the other side to hopefully help w/some like "even weight distribution" type thing for the pole I have. We're messy due to our creative visions/organizational ideas & it's not easy putting that into perspective esp. when ur closet is pretty full and then it's like "wait, where can I put these extra clothes now?"