Before ADHD diagnosis: "Why do I have $500 worth of crochet gear I never used?" After: "Oh. Buying the supplies gave me Dopamine. Doing the hobby requires Executive Function. Mystery solved." 📉
High thought moment:
Your skull is supposed to have your teeth touching, like equally
But everyone i know has an underbite
Is this just evolutionary change? Is there a societal reason? Am I crazy?
@ziontree Please help
Movies where a character embarrasses themselves are worse than getting shot. I genuinely have to pause the movie to do a lap around my living room so that I don't jump off a building. Second-hand embarrassment is agony untold.
Can we start normalizing platonically loving your friends again?? No i dont want to date all of my friends i just love them and want their attention cause im a dog let me live my life bro
emotional abuse indicator (conditioned to assume that knowledge of your interests will be used to hurt you by denying you access to your interests, mocking your interests, sabotaging you, etc)
the important thing about the ides of march is that they didn't *need* sixty senators to kill caesar, but the whole community came together and I think that's just charming
You know that sick feeling when your phone lights up and instead of “oh, someone thought of me” your whole body goes “run.”
It starts stupidly small. A friend texts “how are you?” You see it instantly. You think, cool, I will answer properly in a minute, I want to give them a real reply. Then work pulls you, or a tab, or a random thought. Ten minutes pass. Now it feels weird to just send a quick “good, you?” because you told yourself you wanted to be thoughtful. So you wait until later when you have “more energy.”
Later never comes.
Now it is three hours. Then a day. Then the message sits there like a glowing accusation. Every time you open your phone, your chest tightens for half a second when you see their name. You click into other apps around it. You answer emails. You comment on some stupid meme. You absolutely have the capacity to type. You just cannot make your thumbs move on that specific thread. Your brain turns one blue bubble into a live wire.
This is the part that nobody sees when they call you flaky.
From the outside it looks simple. “Just text back.” From the inside it feels like trying to walk through an invisible force field. The longer you leave it, the thicker it gets. At some point you are not avoiding the person anymore, you are avoiding the shame you feel about not answering them. You tell yourself they are mad. They hate you. They are talking about how unreliable you are. You rehearse apologies in your head like speeches. The more anxious you get, the more impossible it feels to just send “hey, I am alive, my brain is doing that thing again.”
So you do nothing. And the nothing eats your life.
Here is the part you do not have to be ashamed of: this is a very real pattern of anxiety and executive dysfunction. Your brain has tagged “respond to people I care about” as a high difficulty task. It stacks perfectionism on top of fear on top of guilt. It tells you that if you cannot answer perfectly, you should not answer at all. It turns kindness into an exam you keep failing.
You are not bad at loving people. You are stuck in a loop.
The loop goes like this:
see message - want to respond “properly” - postpone until later - time passes - shame grows - message becomes symbol of failure - avoidance increases - relationship feels threatened - anxiety spikes - more avoidance.
You do not break that loop with more self hate. You break it by making the smallest possible move that insults your own perfectionism.
You do not owe anyone a novel. Start practicing replies that are ugly and honest and short. Stuff like:
“Hey, my brain has been really jammed and I have been weird about messages. I care about you. How are you?”
Or even:
“I saw this and could not get my brain to answer. That is on me, not you. I am here now.”
That looks terrifying in your head. On the other side it reads as relief.
You can even pre-empt it with the people you trust. On a good day, when your nervous system is a little calmer, say something like: “Sometimes I disappear in texts not because I do not care, but because my brain freezes up and then I get scared to come back. If I go quiet, please know it is anxiety, not disinterest.” It feels vulnerable to say that once. It makes it a thousand times easier to send a tiny “thinking of you” later instead of ghosting out of shame.
Also, you are allowed to lower the bar for what “counts” as a response.
A heart reaction can be a response. A “listening, will reply more later” text can be a response. A 20 second voice note from the kitchen can be a response. You do not have to sit down at a metaphorical wooden desk with a candle and craft a letter every time someone asks how you are.
Right now your brain has rigged the game so that anything less than the perfect, fully present reply is failure. You have to actively disrespect that rule.
Try this as a tiny experiment: pick one person, one message. Set a timer for 2 minutes. In those 2 minutes you are not allowed to think about how late you are👇