{"id":14183,"date":"2021-03-14T19:13:09","date_gmt":"2021-03-14T11:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=14183"},"modified":"2025-07-28T01:20:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T17:20:15","slug":"constructive-adhd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/constructive-adhd\/","title":{"rendered":"constructive ADHD"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>this is a placeholder blogpost that will be updated with all my ADHD content<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m a fan of the phrase &#8220;constructive ADHD&#8221;, more so than say &#8220;productive ADHD&#8221;, because it makes me think of building things. lego. minecraft. cathedrals. skyscrapers. elaborate, byzantine, complex mindcities. learn to use the machine-gun mind effectively. Here&#8217;s an ongoing wip ebook I&#8217;ve written that lots of people have liked: <a href=\"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/constructiveADHD\">Constructive ADHD<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Constructive ADHD\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SH1Hmxrn9eg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>sometimes when people ask me something like &#8220;how do you deal with your ADHD&#8221;, they&#8217;re really asking something like, &#8220;how do you live a normal life despite your ADHD&#8221;, but the true answer is &#8220;I don&#8217;t live a normal life&#8221;. I&#8217;ve chosen\/designed a life around me, not the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A newer friend once said something like &#8220;I like how Visa says he&#8217;s going to do something, then immediately does it.&#8221;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was quite funny for me to hear, because\u2026 it&#8217;s actually an ADHD coping mechanism. if you ask my friends from my teenage days, they&#8217;ll tell you that I was extremely unreliable, full of shit, and you simply couldn&#8217;t trust anything I said. And they were right! This was true for me both internally and externally. I was a bullshitter by default. I would just say whatever words I needed to make things go away, and then I would forget what I had said. At some point this&nbsp; got me into several tangled webs that led to people getting angry and upset with me. Which was entirely my fault, andI hated myself for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This problem took me *years* to fix. And the way I \u201csolved\u201d it wasn\u2019t pretty. My attempted solution was overkill \u2013 I tried to impose tyrannical order on my chaotic whirlwind self. I did make some material progress, and I also made myself utterly miserable \u2013 which I felt like I deserved, because after all, wasn\u2019t I a lousy person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A thing I understand intimately\u2013 which people who are still struggling are often surprised to hear, because they tend to assume that I&#8217;m a natural\u2013 is that when you&#8217;re wack, your mechanism for fixing yourself is also wack. It&#8217;s like looking for your glasses when you can&#8217;t see without your glasses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The broad question of &#8220;how do you rebuild trust that is lost?&#8221; I had to deal with that, internally. After all, I had a long history of betraying my own trust! There&#8217;s evidence! So how can I trust myself? I don\u2019t know. I beat myself up over every failure, then wrapped that in jokes and apathy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think in retrospect I&#8217;m lucky that underneath ALL of that, in the core of cores, I did still have a love for literature and music. I say earnestly that I&#8217;d give my life for musicians. I would. I think that&#8217;s the light that saved me \u2013 the non-coercive, shining spirit of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But okay, even if I believe that there&#8217;s a light at the end of the tunnel, I still have to walk my way out. and the way to do that, when you have zero sense of balance, proprioception, muscle control, blah blah, is to put one foot in front of the other, firmly, and then do it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what that looked like, for me, is announcing, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to drink a glass of water now,&#8221; and then drinking it. Hey, look, I just did 1x thing that I said I was going to do. &#8220;I&#8217;m going to do 10 pushups now.&#8221; Hey, that&#8217;s 2x things. And I earned my trust back, 1 step at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This process had all sorts of second-order effects. It&#8217;s like how you might &#8220;just&#8221; wanna play basketball with your friends, then you end up quitting cigarettes, eating healthier, sleeping better, etc, all to boost your game. And then you realize that, actually, living healthy feels great!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, a cute vestigial remnant of this whole process is that I still announce what I&#8217;m about to do before I do it. It&#8217;s like a little ritual I have for myself. Every time I do what I say, I build trust in myself, I build self-respect (which I didn&#8217;t have until&#8230; 25? 27?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It still actually surprises me a little bit. When something I say will be done, gets done. When you&#8217;ve spent a lifetime making shit up (it all started with &#8220;I will do my homework&#8221;), it starts to seem like magic. What I say will happen, happens? It&#8217;s like magic. I&#8217;m a magician! \ud83d\ude02<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, I still make mistakes. I underestimated how long it would take me to get my ebooks published and updated. But I no longer think &#8220;ah, fuck, I&#8217;m a fucking bullshitter and nothing I say has any meaning&#8221;. I now think, ah, I made a mistake, I must recalibrate &amp; renegotiate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I&#8217;m finding is that there&#8217;s a sort of &#8220;economy&#8221; to it? For example, even as I write this, my ebooks are currently &#8220;in the red&#8221; with regards to my projections. But that&#8217;s okay \u2013 because my youtube videos are coming along beautifully. I&#8217;ve been publishing 1 every single day for almost a month. Joy to the world!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I guess this is just to say, if you feel like you don&#8217;t trust yourself, I feel you. I know how wrong it sounds when someone says &#8220;well, just start believing in yourself,&#8221; like b*tch, you have evidence that you&#8217;re not to be trusted!!! I know!&nbsp; The thing is to build the tiny wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My #1 \u201cproductivity tip\u201d for fellow weirdos and aliens with ADHD or ADHD-ish minds is &#8211; don\u2019t suppress your mind, support it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the start of every work session, write down what you intend to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end, when you have deviated wildly, don\u2019t despair &#8211; write down what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The meandering mind is a feature, not a bug. IMO, it\u2019s a sign that you have a stubborn curiosity within you that refuses to follow orders. This can be a great thing, actually, once you learn how to work around it. But few have the patience to teach this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have a pretty severe case of this myself and I used to subconsciously beat myself up over it. But over the years I\u2019ve learned to see that it takes me to interesting places. Thing is to non-judgementally go along for the ride, and <em>report your findings<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While it\u2019s true that there are an infinite number of things to get distracted by, it\u2019s also simultaneously true that most things are connected &#8211; and it\u2019s all part of the same whole. So write it down. You\u2019ll find patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Da Vinci was clearly one of us, by the way. Check out his wonderfully idiosyncratic todo list. He didn\u2019t have Twitter, so he used notebooks. Thousands of pages of notebooks. Write. Your. Shit. Down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The writing takes extra effort, but it builds you up tremendously. And without it, you\u2019re left scattered, incoherent, lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Note-taking is the Iron Man Suit for the meandering mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>couple of old 2014 posts when I first started considering that I might have ADHD: <a href=\"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0139-adhd\/\">part 1<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0140-adhd-pt-2\/\">part 2<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>this is a placeholder blogpost that will be updated with all my ADHD content I&#8217;m a fan of the phrase &#8220;constructive ADHD&#8221;, more so than say &#8220;productive ADHD&#8221;, because it makes me think of building things. lego. minecraft. cathedrals. skyscrapers. elaborate, byzantine, complex mindcities. learn to use the machine-gun mind effectively. Here&#8217;s an ongoing wip [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1171],"tags":[1266],"class_list":["post-14183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs","tag-ebooks"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>constructive ADHD - @visakanv&#039;s blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/constructive-adhd\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"constructive ADHD - @visakanv&#039;s blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"this is a placeholder blogpost that will be updated with all my ADHD content I&#8217;m a fan of the phrase &#8220;constructive ADHD&#8221;, more so than say &#8220;productive ADHD&#8221;, because it makes me think of building things. lego. minecraft. cathedrals. skyscrapers. elaborate, byzantine, complex mindcities. learn to use the machine-gun mind effectively. 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