#me When I Am Possum #and It Is Night

mike's hard carapace

As someone recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, one thing that’s been helping me grapple with the intense shame I have over all my “wasted potential” is accepting that potential doesn’t exist and never did.

This sounds so harsh, but please bare with me.

I procrastinated a lot growing up. I still procrastinate today, but less so. And yet, I got good grades. I could write an A+ paper that “knocked [my professor]’s socks off” in the hour before class and print it with sweat running down my face.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to!

And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

If ANYONE could make their top speed/most productive setting the one they used all the time, anyone could do anything. But you can’t. Your top speed is not a speed you’re able to sustain.

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

So all of this to say, I’m not wasting a ton of potential. I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

And if you have ADHD, I mean this from the bottom of my heart: you do not have limitless potential confounded by your laziness. You have the good potential of a good person, and you can access it with practice and work, but do not accept the story that you are choosing not to be all that you are or can be. You are just a human person.

crossfaded off of birdsong and a ray of sunlight

David Lynch, Cannes Film Festival (2002)

feels so wrong that itll be 2025 soon. fake year. science fiction year

disgusted with the service i was offered today. i went to the linux distro store asking them to show me a straight one and they simply were baffled saying stupid things like "ma'am this is not a physical space how did you do this" and "ma'am in order to get here you have to have made several incorrect assumptions about not only linux but also the nature of reality" "ma'am where am i" "ma'am there's no such thing as a linux store" and most infuriating of all "what the fuck do you mean a straight one". So unprofessional!

THE MATRIX (1999) dir. The Wachowski Sisters

As a blanket statement, I enjoy things that are warm and soft