The most valuable thing I learned doing a Masters degree with depression, anxiety and ADHD was to change my “things I’m bad at” list to “things I can’t do on my own.” Stop thinking of them as things I could do if I tried hard enough, and accept that I can’t accomplish them by effort and willpower alone; they’re genuine neurocognitive deficits, and if I need to do the thing, then just like a blind person reading or a mobility impaired person going up a storey in a building, I need to find a different method.
I’m “bad at” working on long-term projects without an imminent deadline or someone breathing down my neck? Okay, let’s change that: I can’t work on long-term projects without an imminent deadline and someone breathing down my neck. So let’s create an imminent deadline and recruit neck-breathers. Find a sympathetic prof who will agree that 3 weeks before the due date they expect me to show them my preliminary notes and bibliography. Get a friend I trust to block off an hour to sit with me and keep asking, “Are you working on your project?” Write a blog post about my progress. Arrange to trade papers and proofread them with another student.
Accept your limitations and learn to leverage them, instead of buying the neurotypical fairytale that they’ll go away if you just try hard enough.
I’m sorry. Just like the disabled people you speak about finds a different method to help them, you should too, try a physical calendar, or even the calendar on your phone to set your own deadlines. If you need help reminding certain things use a notebook. Sitting there pushing the responsibility off onto someone else is wrong. Forcing someone to be a nag and enforcer is wrong. There are steps you can take, gadgets to help. That’s just my $0.02.
Take em back, I don’t want your shitty pennies.
For the record, given our relative physical sizes and temperaments, @star-anise‘s ability to force me (as one of the friends who has done this) to do anything is about nil.
I mean I’m literally not sure she could force me off a couch. I am just saying.
This week I tried to emotionally terrorize a squirrel who kept coming and stealing food off our picnic table. It was not much of a success.
More seriously, for anyone reading who might need some clarity: none of us MIND. The only thing that would be wrong is if @star-anise actually did push “responsibility” off on us – that is to say, blamed us if that day the strategy didn’t work, or she didn’t get things done, or we didn’t spontaneously read her mind and know she needed nagging, or even if she pitched a fit or made it our fault if on that day we have something else important to do.
That is what “pushing off responsibility” would actually be. “@violent-darts couldn’t nag me on Tuesday so it’s her fault that I didn’t get my project done!” See how that works? Mmmkay?
Otherwise, frankly, given the personalities at play, she’s just giving useful boundaries within which we can do something we’ve almost all had to break ourselves of the habit of doing unsolicited anyway. Remembering to go “oi you, work on the thing” every hour or so is hardly onerous.
Also seriously I’m pretty sure we’re all bigger and meaner than she is.
AND THIS HAS BEEN TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF FEATHER-OVERCLARIFIES-A-THING. THANK YOU AND GOOD EVENING.
Another instance of a busybody attempting to police behaviors of someone else that do not and will not affect them. Cause trust me, if you’re this vocal about Do It Yourself And Don’t Ask Anyone To Help You Because That’s Cheating, you’re already on the list of people not to ask under any circumstances.
Kimchi and Justice 