Executive Dysfunction

actuallyclintbarton:

So this was originally a comment on a post about depression and so forth, but it actually occurred to me that it might be more helpful in a tag somewhere where someone might see it, rather than buried in 68k notes.  So here’s the thing: I’m not great at explaining what executive functioning problems ARE, but I tried to explain what they feel like.

Looking at a dirty litterbox and a sink full of dishes and going “fuck this noise” and going back on tumblr feels a lot like laziness, even if you are feeling kind of like crying just looking at them. But it can also be your brain being currently incapable of putting together the steps you need to take in order to DO those things, you can’t quite put together that cleaning the litterbox is:

1. Get a trash bag
2. Get the litter scoop
3. Get clean litter
4. Open trash bag
5. Move litterbox to accessible position
6. Crouch down by the litterbox
7. Scoop out poop and clumps
8. Tie off trash bag
9. Add some clean litter to box
10. Put litterbox back in its original position
11. Put litter scoop away
12. Put clean litter away
13. Throw away trash bag

When you’re having executive functioning issues, you look at the dirty litterbox and even if you don’t realize it, you can’t work out those steps, you just see the dirty litterbox and know that it needs to be clean and all those steps are mushing together into one big ball of overwhelming stress and you can’t quite figure out where to start, and it takes a LOT of mental and emotional momentum to start, and when you’re depressed or overwhelmed or whatever it can be next to impossible to GET that mental and emotional momentum.

This isn’t the best explanation of executive dysfunction, probably, but it’s the best I’ve got, and it can be awful, and it can make you feel like a lazy useless person when you’re nothing of the sort, and it’s so insidious, because when you’re NOT having these issues it’s the easiest thing in the world to subconsciously put all those steps together and get from “dirty litterbox” to “clean litterbox” without any conscious thought.

This can happen when you’re depressed, if you have ADHD or autism, if you have anxiety… there are a lot of reasons you might run into problems with your executive functioning.  It can be simple things like cleaning the litterbox, it can be things you do (or try to do) regularly like your math homework, it can be something like going to the gym or cooking dinner or getting out of bed in the morning.

But the most important thing to take away from this is that there is a huge difference between “I could do this but I really don’t want to” and “I cannot do this”, and when you learn to recognize the difference, you can begin to stop calling yourself “lazy” and “useless” and “worthless” during those times when you CAN’T do this even if you want to.  

Yeah, autistic people, people with depression, or ADHD, or anxiety… we can all be lazy sometimes.  And that’s okay, it’s normal to be lazy sometimes.  And we can still have issues with laziness.  But the difference is real, and important, and I feel like not enough people outside of the autistic and maybe ADHD communities realize that this is something that they might be struggling with.