I was having a conversation about Simon and school work, and the other person suggested that he wasn't motivated to do it. For a few years, I also thought that this was the problem, until it was explained that ADHD has a nasty habit of causing the brain to constantly try and decide what to pay attention to. Motivation isn't the problem, it's locking down on the thing that you have to do.
And of course, I know exactly how that works. Acknowledging my "thought spirals" is a fairly recent development, but I deeply understand it from experience. I remember my senior year of college in particular how difficult it was. I remember having to read in American Literature, and write about it, and I can tell you that I was motivated because without it I'd be one credit short to graduate (and also not establish the double major). But I was constantly bogged down in things large and small, whether it be gaming out my next career moves after graduation, or figuring out what the hell I was gonna eat because I was so poor and living off-campus. That book couldn't compete.
This seems abstract and foreign to people who don't experience it. Some people even claim to have no internal dialog, which seems impossible. I can only imagine how well I would sleep if I didn't have that. But it's real, and it affects everything that I do.
Where Simon and I differ is that I've had decades to develop coping strategies, and he has not. These are not deliberate plans, mind you, but rather behavioral action that largely comes out of necessity. High school and college, it was bad. Work requires you to, uh, work, so you can keep your job and get paid. The stakes are different, so you internally find ways to focus on the things. When I was actively writing code, I was not turning out work as fast as my peers, and it was partly because the work happens on a computer connected to the Internet, and also because my skill level made it harder to get to the desired outcomes. Motivation had nothing to do with it. I had an iPhone back then when it first came out, but fortunately you couldn't really do anything with it. I didn't really develop coping mechanisms until I managed more people.
I have two things fueling some degree of focus, my coping strategies, though it's certainly not the hyperfocus I enjoy on certain things. The first thing is that my general empathy for others means I feel a responsibility to them. At work, this means that filling out some simple form for some administrative purpose could be slow going, but a task that benefits a colleague I try to get done as quickly as possible. The second thing is that my anxiety doesn't like me to be overwhelmed, because then I just stop doing everything. The key to combat that is get it done as quickly as possible. That's why I'm inbox-zero most of the time. This translates to home life sometimes, too. When I cook, I wash dishes as I go because I can't deal with the pile. Conversely, I haven't cut my documentary because I don't owe it to anyone, and frankly I'm already overwhelmed by the volume of footage. Motivation isn't the issue.
The point is that you can't assume that someone with ADHD isn't motivated, because there's more going on than you can obviously see. Unfortunately, people still don't like to acknowledge it or get tested as an adult, so you may default to thinking a person is unmotivated. We've gotta change that.
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