Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I'll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It's not.
Ok, I'll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It's not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it's been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I'm praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it's some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I'm even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying "nice work" when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there's something going on with me that's making it hard to cope with the demands of life but "atleast he's trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude".
ADHD makes you work 2-3x as hard all the time about everything you care about so when compared to a regular person we are fucking superstars at working our asses off just to get along.
Unfortunately nothing is measured in effort and caring alone. So until you also get good at whatever it is you're doing, you don't get any notice. So we appear from the outside to go from okay to amazing at things pretty quickly and faster than other people, but it's really because we're either working 200% or not at all.
Don't sweat the grade. You've now burned into your memory this failure and you will have an easier time remembering to stop and check your files for that kind of error before submitting. I've been in the workplace 20 years now and I have 1000 past disasters whispering in my ear every time I do something so my work is exemplary compared to my coworkers and I look like I have a superpower. I just have a lot of experience failing first.
The book ADHD 2.0 calls this out. It’s like “you may hear that ADHD is a superpower. It is not. Anything that you can do with ADHD can also be done by neurotypical people. Thinking like this makes it harder for people with ADHD to accommodate their limitations.”