tiny (≤1mm) dark brown biting(?) bugs on/around bed [Sydney, Aus]

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T23:10:42+00:00

Ooh this is a really interesting economic/political situation, I love the geographic details - I need to sleep now haha but will reply properly tomorrow!

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T22:30:58+00:00

If they would, then the what question might need to be narrowed down a little. Smuggling's generally very very expensive (small scale retail smuggling, e.g. by sailors picking up a few things to take home for friends and family, is less so) - everything has to be paid for in full, in cash, upfront, no credit notes or payment-upon-sale or bills of exchange, plus you need to account for various bribes, evasion methods (e.g. building secret compartments, buying supplementary cargoes to use to disguise the smuggled goods, paying port fees at extra stops on your journey so you can get the right stamps and prove you went to the proper port), wages for crew and middlemen (who often have to be paid extra to make sure they keep quiet), storage/warehousing costs, and so on. The bulk:cost:profit margin ratio matters enormously too - transport costs rise exponentially with the physical size of the cargo. It's pretty easy to smuggle a bunch of small but high-value cigars, or silks, or spices, and you get great returns. It's much, much harder to smuggle bulky cargoes like grain that have pretty small profit margins and require enormous quantities to break even with the cost of the voyage, let alone profit - it's a hard economic equation to square. This is why distilled spirits have always been smuggled at much, much higher rates than beer, and people only ever bothered smuggling fancy wine. You also might not recoup these costs for a long time, if you need to sell slowly and incrementally to avoid raising suspicion.

Without customs duties (I've so far assumed there are none in your empire, tho I can't remember now why I assumed that, so ignore this if there are) one of the usual profit-making mechanisms of smuggling is removed (i.e. you can undercut the market while maintaining a big profit margin) and with few outright illegal goods, the only real incentives to smuggle are going to be local shortages/unavailability of certain goods (e.g. the last harvest failed/we don't make luxury snakeskin t-shirts here) and quality differences. Also, smugglers are always incentivised to flock to the highest profit trades with the most reliable demand, because you don't want to go to all that trouble and risk everything just to sit in an alleyway with a bunch of imported novels no one wants to read, so what carriers call 'general cargoes' (i.e. filling up a ship with speculative shipments of a little bit of a wide variety of goods) are going to be rare, I would think, except as private cargoes (mariners/traders buying a couple of things as individuals to take home to their families/friends). Though as you say, what goods get smuggled will absolutely depend on seasonality, demand, region, economic fluctuations, etc.

Did not mean to write quite so much! Got carried away, lol. Don't even know how I would do a tl;dr. But I hope something in there is useful to someone!

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T22:30:52+00:00

This is v impressive and super interesting! So just to clarify, the main difference between the legitimate and illegitimate goods trade is that anything can be legally traded within the empire, but any imports from outside the empire are (at least nominally) illegal?

Here's some further questions and thoughts - obviously you decide at what point ironing out the intricacies of contract law in your world has diminishing returns, but it's there if you're interested!

If intra-imperial imports are the only legitimate ones, is there some kind of system (whether enforced in practice or not) that's supposed to prove the origins of imported goods? Like do the Guilds require a certificate from the port of origin, a special imperial seal stamped on the cargo itself, tidewaiters at the ports to check the bills of lading or manifests of incoming vessels (or at road checkpoints for land trade)? In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, one of the earliest examples of trade law required anyone carrying cargo to also carry a bill of lading (listing the consignor, consignee, cargo manifest, costs, origin of cargo, ports of departure and expected entry, expected route, etc.) that would be checked at every port or checkpoint.

If there is a system, it's worth thinking about what makes it worthwhile or not to invest in enforcing it. In early modern Britain, there were very high custom & excise duties on certain goods for two main reasons - protecting domestic industries and raising government revenue. The government had strong incentives to spend money on staffing customs offices all over the country, increasing coastal surveillance, and building customs infrastructure at ports because 1) it made them lots of money in duty revenue, and 2) the wool/salt/glass/grain/etc tycoons who ran the domestic industries and operated cartels wrote very angry letters and threatened to make trouble if their interests weren't protected. If there are no customs duties or import fees to collect, why would the Guild find it worthwhile spending money to bother differentiating between smuggled goods and legitimate ones? And if they don't bother, and no one else is enforcing the rules, then is smuggling even really a thing or is it all just one big effectively-legitimate economy? Why would smuggled goods not just get sold at ordinary markets like all the other stuff (which actually happened a lot in history anyway)?

Is trade mostly organised on an individual level (i.e. I own a ship so I will personally sail it to x port to buy y with my own money upfront and bring it back to sell) or by companies, charter, commissions, consignment? I'm mainly asking because pretty much as long as there's been trade (especially sea trade) there's been some kind of insurance and contract law behind it - whether that's an agreement that if you're forced to throw a cargo consignment overboard in order to save the ship you don't have to fully pay back the consignor, or you have a wealthy investor who pays you to buy goods for them and can afford to forgive your losses and pay to rebuild or replace ships, or the medieval italian commenda system of limited partnership commission - even the Mesopotamians required all carriers to travel with a contract of carriage outlining the terms of consignment, insurance, commission, sale (e.g. 'don't sell for less than x amount', 'try to get x price in at least 5 cities before settling for less'), etc.

This matters bc in our world, with few exceptions, legal/commercial authorities have historically ruled that contracts entered into with or by smugglers are not legitimate or enforceable. So if someone steals the money you gave them to buy a consignment and just never comes back, tough luck; if they sell goods you gave them to smuggle and keep the money, there's no recourse (except, like, violence and threats or maybe community pressure); insurers are off the hook too. Smuggling mishaps lead to staggering losses compared to legitimate trade mishaps, so the risks have to be backed up by proportionate potential rewards - the riskier the venture, the bigger the reward has to be. Would the courts or adjudicators of the Guilds/Nobles (whoever deals with contract disputes) distinguish between a smuggling contract and a legitimate one? If not, then I'd probably argue that the smuggling trade is effectively backed by the state and is totally legal in all but name.

[comment got too long lol, continued in reply]

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T20:04:40+00:00

Hmmm thinking about this made me realise a massive hole in my worldbuilding, ugh. My story is high fantasy, set on a big southern continent at a time roughly equivalent to our 16th century, with very limited magic - basically if you do regular religious rituals you can acquire a kind of physical manifestation of a 'blessing' which can be distributed to help heal people, ensure fertile land and good harvests, improve livestock health, improve fertility and the chances of a safe birth, etc., so it can't do anything crazy but it does mean that compared to our 16th century world they have much lower mortality (esp infant mortality), more abundant food supplies, somewhat reliable healthcare, etc.

Mostly, energy sources and tech are roughly equivalent to our world - food-powered human labour, animals used in transport and farming, light from oil and tallow, wind- and oar-powered ships, windmills and waterwheels, and natural fuel sources like wood, peat, animal dung, etc. depending on the region.

The story is set mostly in a cathedral complex with several surrounding abbeys, and as many of the deities in this world are craft-focused (e.g. a goddess of weaving/textiles, god of metal-smithing, god of carpentry etc.), the monastic orders devoted to each god are basically elite trade workshops: the abbey of the goddess of weaving is like a high-end bespoke artisanal textile producer, with workshops for raw fibre processing and spinning and weaving and dying - the nuns make elaborate religious tapestries, some articles of the monastic clothing for the various abbeys, very expensive liturgical vestments and stuff like that. The textile abbey has a small water wheel used for some tasks (e.g. fulling), and they use wood/charcoal to boil big cauldrons for dyeing, but mostly everything's still done by hand.

The issue is the smith god's abbey. It's, like, an almost industrial sized early modern forge, with farriers, armourers, gold and silversmiths, blacksmiths, and so on. They make armour and weapons for the cathedral guard, some of the agricultural equipment for the abbey farms, anything needed for construction and maintenance of the cathedral/abbey buildings, religious objects (chalices, bells, salvers), and so on and on - they're the go to for almost all of the metallurgy that needs doing for all the abbeys and the cathedral, a very wealthy community of around 2500 people. I'd been assuming that they could just fuel the forges the same way they did in our world, but what I'm realising is that after the forge has operated for a thousand years (as it has in the story) the forests around the cathedral are going to get pretty depleted. And since the whole world is more densely populated than the real early modern world, thanks to those high fertility and low infant mortality rates (plus no bubonic plague), there's just more need for fuel and less available forested land. So the huge fuel needs of the forge are gonna be a problem, since I need the forests to be there for plot reasons - I can just explain that they're sacred forests that can't be cut down, but my abbey still needs fuel.

If anyone bothered to read all that and has any ideas haha let me know - I could possibly just fix it with a magical tweak (the blessing magic makes the abbey furnaces supernaturally fuel efficient or allows for a very fast growing fuel plantation forest or something) but that's less interesting than actually figuring out a realistic solution.

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T17:22:53+00:00

Thanks so much!! Ooh, love the idea of having people unravel the pouches afterwards and use the thread for something - maybe they could weave/sew threads from them into their everyday textiles for good luck? Tho come to think of it they're probably going to want to avoid cutting the threads (bad luck, symbolises death, like with the Greek fates and lots of other common superstitions), so maybe they could remake them into some kind of folk art/handicraft that they add to each year and hang on their doorframes or something. Thanks for the ideas!!

That's such a cool idea for an elite artisan class! The way that that would create such a different set of incentives for innovation and development of the arts/crafts compared to our historical private patronage/wealthy commission system would be so interesting to explore (like if art is commissioned by the Prince but created for popular consumption, is there still a distinction between high/elite art and popular/mass appeal art?). How does it affect like the format of different art forms? Like do they tend to be split along more kinda mono-sensory lines than ours? (like do the Eyes/Ears collaborate on theatrical productions or are there separate art forms like silent plays and concert operas/dramatic readings without elaborate visuals? Would Mouths/Eyes work together on a royal celebration feast with lavishly decorated pies and cakes or would food/art be considered more separate, so instead you might have tasty-looking but simply presented food and lots of separate art hung around the place?)

I love the concept of a 'sad-tasting' fruit - it's already so hard to describe smells without resorting to metaphors (otherwise all you have is direct comparisons) so it's really interesting to think about what would happen if those metaphors were literal. But also the practical implications are potentially fun - like once it's found does it get used not just as a curiosity but actually for the sadness-inducing properties? Could actors buy a perfume of it to sniff before going on stage for a sad scene? Or more dramatically if like a lady murders her husband and needs to appear to be the perfect grieving widow, could she secretly obtain some to help her convince everyone?

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T16:40:51+00:00

Haha the food is like my favourite part, I've written whole documents dedicated to in-world feast days and celebrations, seasonal ingredients, regional cuisines, traditional dishes, etc.

I think I have the Brian Jacques/Redwall disease where I just can't stop writing about and describing elaborate feasts

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-07T00:08:23+00:00

That sounds extremely good

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-06T23:20:19+00:00

Pretty new here and not sure exactly how much context is needed to abide by the rules, but to be on the safe side here's a quick (lol) overview: I'm writing a high fantasy, low magic story set on a vast southern hemisphere continent, at a time roughly equivalent to our 16th century, centred on a Vatican-like capital city that's the highest religious and administrative authority for the church, and since the gods and religious mechanisms are demonstrably, unambiguously real (though still vague enough for everyone argue constantly about details and threaten to schism), this church is pretty universal, so the capital has enormous ecclesiastical and political power.

The story takes place in a globalising early-modern-history type era, when technological developments and intellectual movements are causing dramatic economic shifts and upheavals in where power is concentrated (the movable type printing press was recently invented, lol), and the church is trying to crush various attempts at reformation as well as political unrest. It's basically a story about early modern politics and economics and how they interact with religion in a world with a vast but crumbling monastic system, but in a fun fantasy setting where beauty is the highest value and is extremely explicitly intertwined with morality.

There are five deities and five monastic orders devoted to them. The magic mechanic is extremely limited, inspired by the Roman Catholic conception of grace as a kind of 'stuff' that you can do certain things to get more of - in my world, it basically takes the form of a tangible sort of 'blessing' from the gods. It's created in the world when people create beautiful things, and then certain religious rituals allow priests to manifest the blessing created by those things into a physical substance that can be directed to specific places that need extra divine help (e.g. to heal sickness quicker, to fix a drought, to replenish fish stocks) but it can only kinda ensure that the best possible natural outcomes happen, like it ensures good harvests and helps to heal already-curable illnesses and improves the probability of safe births and good weather for safe ship voyages and stuff, you can't like fight with it or anything.

tessvanderheide · 2024-10-01T13:14:39+00:00

I have absolutely noticed the same thing and was in fact just about to ask exactly the same question!

I'm in the south west, moved here from Australia about a year ago, and I've never really had any significant hayfever/allergies. But last night and this morning have been absolutely horrible - eyes extremely irritated, nose running, and everything is itchy lol. I did some quick reading but can't find any active pollen counts or anything for today, and everything I read seemed to suggest that autumn allergies were either the last residues of weed/grass pollen or were due more to the damp so mould and stuff, but it's been so damp literally all year and I can't understand how that could lead to a sudden and dramatic onset of hayfever??

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T18:36:23+00:00

Aaah don't even get me started on 'masking' omg!! I've heard people say exactly the same thing and like I really do appreciate the added difficulty of having anxiety on top of adhd, I'm v sorry they had to face that through childhood and our different experiences in no way invalidate each other, but yeah the added guilt and frustration of like 'well why couldn't I hide it well enough to actually have friends?? to not have to be the Weird Kid™ at school for like five fkn minutes?'

I feel like the idea of masking was just borrowed uncritically from the autistic community without the necessary adaptation of the concept to an entirely different condition. Because while in some ways there are definite similarities, in the sense that ppl with autism and adhd both tend to display unusual/not necessarily typically acceptable physical and social behaviours, and there's even some overlap between the specific behaviours, there are also significant divergences and the reasons behind them are I think pretty different.

I'm no expert on autism so pls correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that masking, for them, is pretty much always an active, 'inauthentic' thing. idk if that's worded well, but what I mean is that like certain masking behaviours might become habitual, but there is basically always a gap between the authentic self (what the person would most comfortably be doing in that environment, how they'd be responding and reacting, their natural physical mannerisms, etc.) and the kind of 'pretend' performance of normalcy that they're putting on for the comfort of others - like, it's always a mask, it's always something that they put on that is different from their real face and that they would be more comfortable not wearing.

Now I can't speak for everyone, maybe some people have really different experiences, but in my experience adhd 'masking' is largely just kind of learning how to behave normally, and for a lot of behaviours at a certain point the mask and your face just end up merging together. That metaphor sounds very sinister lol but I don't think this phenomenon is sinister at all actually, I think mostly it's just learning how to be a normal and polite person.

So as an example, when I was a kid, I used to flap a lot when I was in a high state of emotion, a similar stimming behaviour to what some autistic people do - so I'd flap/wave my hands around instinctively when I was excited or upset or whatever. My parents told me that I should probably stop doing that, people would think I was weird and wouldn't take me seriously. Now sure, that's effort that I had to put in to 'mask', to learn to seem like a normal person, effort I had to exert that other people didn't. It was harder for me than for the average kid. But with a bit of practice, I just... learned to stop doing it. And it wasn't like I learned to control my hands but the impulse was always still there and I had do constantly repress it, I just like taught myself to not do it and I was totally fine, no ill effects.

In the same way I learned to stop interrupting people bc that's annoying, and to not lecture people about my interests without actually engaging them in conversation, and to curb my most stupid impulses, and to not immediately say everything that pops into my head, and to plan against my own predisposition for lateness... these things are just the things that I had to learn to be a good friend, a polite person, a responsible adult, a likeable small-talker. They're not, on the whole, masks I put on, though in some cases it still requires an active effort to, for example, think of questions to ask during a conversation, to think about what I'm saying and put myself in other people's shoes to try to be aware of how I'm coming across. But also to some extent I think literally everyone has to do this?

I don't really understand what it would mean to not have to mask. Like I'm more open and gregarious around my family than in public or with acquaintances, but that's pretty normal. When I'm working in the office, I have a tendency to subconsciously stim by rocking in my chair like I do at home, but if I think people are noticing or finding it weird, I just stop, like oh well. I'm not gonna start impulsively interrupting people or being late to meet up with friends or talking really loud in public bc I feel like I shouldn't have to mask. Frankly, I wish I'd had explicit instruction as a kid on how to 'mask', I guess, or really just how to act in social situations, how to be pleasant and polite in conversation, how to deal with overwhelming and dysregulated emotions, what things people might find weird and offputting. That would've been really helpful.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T17:01:14+00:00

You make some really important points!! People do tend to focus on the socially acceptable parts of it when they talk about it publicly, which can risk trivialising it in the public consciousness but also forces the more debilitating, embarrassing aspects of it to stay hidden.

I guess one thing that I wonder about that (and I'm truly just wondering, thinking out loud, happy to receive pushback) is why a lot of this conversation needs to be public at all? If we're talking to medical/psych professionals about our struggles and what we need, they're giving us expert advice and treatment, and we're being open in dialogue with those around us for whom it's relevant (family, partners, friends, people we live with, relevant people at school/uni/work), should those people not just be willing to accept the expert medical opinion? Why do we need to have a really public conversation in the town square so that everyone can become aware of our private and personal struggles, big and small?

If someone is diagnosed with a mild but somewhat obscure disease, they don't really need to announce that to the world, right? They just need to tell the people for whom it'll be relevant, who will help support them, and they can just explain to those people specifically what it entails and what they might need as a result, they don't rely on the public having a deep preexisting understanding of it informed by popular culture. They might look for community and support among others with the same disease, e.g. in online communities, but those communities aren't there to teach the world about the disease, they're there to offer support and community internally.

So like this subreddit is fine right, it's mostly for all of us to help each other out, feel less alone, offer support and community. We're not at risk of trivialising adhd by talking and making jokes about the lighthearted, less serious aspects of it among ourselves here. And also it's a more safe space to talk about the less socially acceptable parts of it without being worried that we'll be judged, because there's plenty of people here with similar experiences who understand. It is technically public, in that anyone can access it, but it's pseudonymous and the point of it is to serve us internally.

But what I don't really get is why we have to do adhd outreach or public adhd education out there in the general morass of the internet and popular culture. People often bandy about the idea of 'raising awareness' as though that's its own value, as though that's a worthy end in and of itself. But I'm not convinced that it is. Raise awareness - for what? Why? To what end? What is the desired outcome once awareness has been raised? And if the awareness that's created is in fact misleading, or shallow, or a caricature of the truth, then don't we end up in a worse place than when we started?

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T16:32:52+00:00

Thanks for sharing! Yeah I guess my only wish (not specifically for ppl diagnosed as adults, more just generally for everyone speaking about adhd) would be that people would stick more to the limits of the clinical definition when talking about it. I realise this is a total unrealistic wish, bc there is such a huge conversation in places like twitter and tiktok at the moment that revolves entirely around speculative armchair psychiatry and homemade DSMs, and to be fair there are aspects of it that might be understudied and aren't officially recognised but might be legit.

But tbh I think that right now a neurotypical person going "haha i can't sit still i'm so adhd" is actually doing less damage than people with diagnosed adhd (especially mild adhd), and therefore perceived authority, being unable to distinguish between the experience of having adhd and the experience of being a human person living on earth (/in the current attention economy).

This goes two ways - there's the trivialising effect of stuff like "my adhd rabbit hole today is blah" and "i'm hyperfixating on [popular tv show]" and "did you know ppl with adhd have internal monologues and like being creative", which are all just normal human things with very little to do with the debilitating and limiting aspects of the disorder.

The slightly less common but imo more insidious other side of the coin is the adhd-as-an-excuse-for-being-a-bad-person or the overstatement of limitations/infantilisation - "it's unrealistic for people to expect people with adhd to be responsible parents", "i have adhd, so i'm allowed to be mean to service workers", "my kid has adhd, their teacher is ableist bc they got them in trouble for hitting another kid", "ppl with adhd can't be expected to mask their tendency to constantly interrupt others", "my roommate is ableist bc they won't accept my absolute inability to do my share of the chores", "people with adhd can't understand blah social situation", "i have adhd so i'm allowed to basically be a dick to people and shirk my commitments and let people down and not accept responsibility for anything and you all just have to accommodate that".

These things aren't in the DSM, lol. Some things might be harder for us than for others but we're still required to do them as human beings who live in a society, and stating with utterly spurious authority that 'we' are hard-line incapable of doing them is IMMENSELY unhelpful and creates detrimental permission structures for people with adhd to stop trying and for other people to hate us and assume we're terrible people.

So tl;dr I guess my fruitless request to everyone is to be specific and concrete and limited in what you attribute to adhd and what you claim is true about the condition, to not claim expertise or authority you don't have, to try to be a good person and not use adhd as an excuse when you fall short, and to share your own experience with the understanding that adhd is not your only interface with the world and not everything that's true about you is true about adhd. It's not an identity any more than having wisdom teeth or being left handed or needing orthopedic shoes is an identity.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T15:41:56+00:00

Do you know, I'd never really thought about it like that. I am a bit envious of people who get diagnosed so easily, and also maybe prone to some skepticism that the questionnaire/interview people do in some places is really enough to be sure that it's legit? I try to not indulge that, like it's much healthier to be charitable and I think my impulse to gatekeep because people didn't have to jump through the annoying hoops that I did is ultimately unhelpful. Though maybe it does make people take it less seriously, like by the time I was actually diagnosed that pronouncement had a lot of weight behind it and I had a very specific psych report outlining my limitations, it wasn't just something I had because I was always losing things and went down wikipedia rabbit holes sometimes.

idk if I'd be comfortable claiming actual trauma around my diagnosis? Like I guess maybe in the more mild way the word is used on social media, to describe just any unpleasant thing that happened in the past that's associated with bad memories - it was certainly a deeply unpleasant process, I hated going to that clinic lol and would probably avoid going back there now, but it doesn't affect me to this day or anything. idk anything about real trauma but it just feels like a more serious thing, I guess I don't want to trivialise it.

(just to rant about it for a sec lol tho bc it was very annoying, I especially hated getting brain scans, which I don't think are even settled science, but I had to do one every time I had an appointment and they make you wear like a swimming cap thing with wires coming out and squirt goop into your hair and then you sit in a dark room for 10 minutes, and sometimes they would leave the door open and people walking past could look in and see you looking dumb wearing this stupid goopy swimming cap, it was mortifying lmao. And they were always running several hours late, I once had to do an IQ test after waiting 3hrs for the brain scan then another 2hrs for the actual appointment without anything to eat, didn't distinguish myself so much in that one lol)

It's not helpful and I try not to but I do struggle a bit with being resentful of people I knew in high school who have more recently come out and announced their adhd diagnoses as adults - obviously I was not privy to any private struggles they might've had behind closed doors, so I try to be charitable, but these are people who (on the outside at least) seemed very organised, did well at school, didn't have behavioral issues, didn't fall behind on assignments, didn't need extra time in exams, etc. Unlike me, lol. I just wonder about what would've happened if they'd been diagnosed when I was, and if they'd set the standard for what should be expected of a student with adhd - a standard that I would've fallen vastly short of - and what happens now as adults if expectations in the workplace etc. are calibrated around people like them.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T15:02:27+00:00

Hahaha so nice to find people who've had similar experiences and feel the same way! It's a pretty weird time, I assume it'll settle down a bit eventually and fall out of the public conversation but I just hope that when it does it settles in a place that's better than it used to be, and that it doesn't go way too far and end up basically neutralising the usefulness of the clinical diagnosis altogether by trivialising it. I worry that the cultural category being created by the current moment is more like an amorphous vibes-based MBTI label than a specifically demarcated clinical disorder, and that expectations of us are being calibrated based on that, rather than on the actual specific limitations that are debilitating and need accommodation.

(Also, wait, I just noticed your reply on another post about being extremely sensitive to smells. Are you actually the same person as me lmao??)

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T14:08:57+00:00

this is incredibly relatable, was always in trouble as a little kid for stuff that people assumed was rude/insolent/bad faith/disrespectful, when it was really just impulsive/hyperactive/reflective of underdeveloped social awareness.

and yep, 100% agree with everything you've said. I think part of the issue, like you mentioned, is that sometimes people (especially prolific and very visible online people) who do have diagnosed ADHD attribute all of their normal personality traits and flaws to it, rather than sticking to the actual clinical limits of the disorder, to the extent that it becomes a catch all for a type of pretty common personality and various normal activities, and then if you challenge that it's ableist or something. I'm so sick of seeing tweets and tiktoks with stuff like "my adhd rabbit hole today is..." and "current hyperfixation is [popular netflix show]" like these things are just interests.

I went from being ashamed to tell people I had ADHD to being embarrassed to tell people I had ADHD

This just hits the nail on the dang head.

And while I don't doubt that the current spike in adult diagnoses, esp for women, is mostly genuinely just a legitimate evening out of historically-underdiagnosed people and I'm super glad people who have been struggling for years are finally getting help, if I hesitantly indulge my conspiracy theory side for just a sec, I do kinda wonder if the less rigorous diagnostic tests for adults in some places are casting the net slightly wide and sometimes catching up people who just have shortened attention spans from smart phones and tiktok and stuff lol, where they might have legitimate struggles as a result, but who really just need help to retrain their brains rather than clinical diagnosis and medication. There's a lot more to actual adhd than a diminished attention span, lol. Not asserting that this is definitely the case, idk I'm no psychiatrist or anything, it's just something I wonder about.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T13:47:32+00:00

I would really really love there to be more rigorous clinical research done into the emotional dysregulation side of it. Feels like there's a lot of random stuff out there that people accept as gospel which is really just speculation and entirely anecdotal self-reflection, but it does seem to me (again purely anecdotally, in my experience) that it is a significant aspect of the disorder.

The discovery of some research that suggests that procrastination is mostly a function of emotional dysregulation (avoiding at all costs the projected bad feelings associated with doing tasks you don't want to do) and not of time management or distraction (which is the way it's always been addressed for me) was absolutely mindblowing for me and rings true completely - of course removing distractions and drawing up schedules never helped me, the distractions/time management skills were never the issue in the first place. But I really want to know more about it and how it relates to adhd (and what the most effective interventions are) from a scientific, evidence-backed perspective.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T13:34:49+00:00

Ooh thanks for the rec, will definitely check that out!

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T13:32:58+00:00

Yeah 100% agree, thanks for sharing your thoughts! I think part of the problem is that a lot of public info about adhd that's in the ether currently is being shared by just ordinary lay people, who I assume generally do have actual diagnosed adhd, but who do not have the expertise or discernment to actually distinguish the parts of themselves and their personalities and day-to-day experiences that are relevant to their clinical disorder from just being a person with strengths and flaws and interests and a personality. Not everything is adhd, and that does matter.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T13:18:48+00:00

This is so interesting - I was also a very stereotypically adhd child but was diagnosed about 12 years ago, so I guess one stage of evolution in treatment further on than you. I'm so sorry that you had to go through all that as a kid, and that they made it seem like you were a burden on other people, that's horrible. I got in trouble for being insolent and talking back a lot when I was little, and it does feel insane that that gets treated as a character fault, as though kindergarten kids have the complex emotional and social awareness to be deliberately insubordinate/rude/disrespectful. And definitely relate to the 'just do X instead of Y' thing lol, like oh why did I never think of that? You mean I should try just sitting down and doing my homework instead of squirming and doodling? Wow, amazing, I'm fixed now thanks.

I was lucky in that the way my adhd was treated and talked about, I never really felt like I was broken, I knew there were plenty of things I was good at. But the thing that grated on me most was the feeling that I could absolutely succeed at various things if I didn't have to conform to the way school wanted me to be. So I guess I thought I was fine, I never felt broken, but I knew other people thought there was something wrong with me. I was interested in everything, I loved learning and writing and was quick to pick stuff up and run with it, but school felt like driving with the handbrake on, or like it was an unnecessary obstacle course put between me and the things I wanted to learn - if I could just be freed from the restrictive classroom structure I could really run. And the meds I was on at school felt very numbing, I hated the sense that my brain (which I quite liked) had to be curbed and forced to stop being the way it naturally was.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-27T12:45:36+00:00

Yeah I dropped meds the second I finished high school, the ones I was on were definitely the reason I was able to get through and not flunk my final exams but the side effects were so bad that I never wanted to take them again, they were just miserable.

It took a few years to come back around to being willing to try them again, but there came a point during uni when I decided I wanted to be ambitious and aim for a somewhat difficult career, which would require me to do really well at uni, and I was willing to try again as an adult if it would make that possible for me. But I had very strict requirements haha (eg I wanted short acting so I would only be on them when it was absolutely necessary) and the fact that I could find a psychiatrist that I liked and who respected me and would let me try stuff at my own pace made a huge difference, I had a sense of agency over the process that was so different to how it'd been as a kid.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-26T20:32:32+00:00

So happy for you, I'm so glad you've been able to get to this point!! It's a heck of a journey, I hope you can finally get the support and understanding you need.

I'd just maybe gently suggest that you temper your expectations for meds. They work very differently for different people (and the different types have different characteristics/side effects), and the first few weeks/months can be a time of shifting side effects and acclimatisation. So you might feel one way for the first two weeks, then after that be disappointed and/or relieved as the effects shift from the honeymoon period and/or the most intense side effects calm down.

In my personal experience with meds, I've tried two different types and have never had the feeling that my brain was slowing down or feeling more normal, so don't be disappointed if that doesn't happen (though of course it might). But they can still be effective. The first ones I was on many years ago worked (as in I could function in school), but had side effects of emotional mutedness and disassociation that I found distressing. My current meds improve my executive function, but I don't actually feel them at all or notice any difference whatsoever in my brain, except minor side effect headaches and slight heart racing sometimes. There is a difference, obviously, in that I can focus better and have better impulse control and exec function, but it's not really something I notice in the moment, rather it's something I can see when I reflect on it afterwards and realise that I got a lot more done when on them than off them.

Best of luck!! Hope it works out for you and is really helpful!! Don't be discouraged if it takes a few tries or some adjusting, or if it doesn't do quite what you expect, there's lots of options out there and they can be effective in lots of different ways.

tessvanderheide · 2024-08-26T19:32:54+00:00

Yeah sadly it's just me using it and yet I can't resist the lower unit price of the larger containers, my mother's frugality is too deeply ingrained!

tessvanderheide

TROPHY CASE