Mm

... or is it a not legitimate reason? Because we have this idea in our head that people who have legitimate reasons for not being able to do something deserve compassion, and people that don't have legitimate reasons, that are just using cop-outs.

I think that the most important part is recognizing that even if you're in what you think is the category of, like, okay, I guess I'm able, but I can't figure out why I'm not, it's still true that the best way to motivate yourself is compassion, is self-compassion.

You still deserve kindness regardless of why you are struggling with something.

We all deserve compassion from others and compassion for ourselves, and that is actually the best way to begin to move ourselves into a place where we are figuring out what are sort of the ch- the tips and the hacks that can make me experience more motivation, experience more energy, experience adaptive ways to get this task done.

There's this one line in the book where I talk about how I had tried a lot of different self-help things to try and, like, get my life together, but I was always viewing, quote-unquote, like, getting my life together as some sort of atonement for the sin of falling apart in the first place.

I think it's important to also talk about the fact that if you don't have children, you can still be struggling with this, and these can still be just as hard.

I think it's probably the f- the number one question I get asked about my book, which is, you know, "Will this help me if I don't have kids? Is this just a parenting book? Is this about, you know, having children and that making life hard because I don't have kids." I live by myself in an apartment, and I still can't seem to stay on top, quote, quote unquote, "of the dishes." That's why I make it a really, a big deal to be explicit that in some ways care tasks got more difficult after I had children, and in some ways they got easier.

Right? And this works really well for you.

Yes.

So I realized that it's really overwhelming to me to look at a sink full of dishes that I really dislike from a sensory perspective, putting my hands and having to get the utensils from the bottom where they're, like, mixed with all the yucky water, and that, um, I couldn't use my sink.

Like, I couldn't get a pot underneath to turn the water on.

And so I thought, "Okay, well, I would really like a way to make some of these things easier for me." And so I got this dish rack, and what I started doing was whenever I had a dirty dish, I would stick it on the dish rack dirty.

But what happened was at the end of the night when I would go to my sink, not only could I use my sink all day, but I'm looking at this very organized dish rack where it's like plate, plate, plate, plate.

Oh, this is all organized.

If you, if it's the evening and you're like, "You know what? I don't really feel like doing these dishes right now, but I know in the morning it would be really great to have an empty sink, so I'm gonna do something to make that happen."

So what makes an organizing system actually sustainable for neurodivergent people, uh, in particular, 'cause that's, you know, the specialty that we're talking about in this segment, but really also for anybody?

Well, we tend to, as ADHD people, we tend to hyper-focus on things.

Like we love a new project.

And so I think all of us have fallen into the trap of deciding that organizing is gonna be our new project, and we buy all the organizing things, and we read all the organizing books, and we just, we get everything organized, but we're not actually thinking about the day-to-day systems that work for us.

And so, you know, we step back and it's been 48 hours and we haven't eaten enough or slept enough, but we have this beautiful new closet with all of our shoes in individual shoe boxes, and we never really stopped to realize that the labor and energy it takes to like pull a shoe box out and take shoes out and then put the shoes back in and put the...

Like that we're not realistically going to do that every day.

And so it's really better to look at the way you're already living.

Here's a question from a listener who writes, "Can you ask your guests about what to do when you're a woman who is being judged by other women, especially in the workplace, about being disorganized? I find that the judgment comes very heavily from people who don't struggle with this as a problem and pass severe judgment on you to the point where it's detrimental to your career, even when you really try hard if you're not able to keep up." Does that sound familiar to you?

Mm-hmm.

... thinking this time the conversation will end differently with them changing.

But it won't.

And so instead of focusing your efforts on how do I change her, now you focus your efforts on how do I care for myself as I'm meeting my responsibilities to her 'cause I do wanna continue to see her.

But now I know that I need three days after I have a therapy session where I talk about this.

We want a solution for how badly it hurts, how much it sucks, and the grief that might be there forever, but it's actually about building our distress tolerance and knowing that, like, this is a normal part of life and we can use our efforts to care for ourself and be tender with ourselves and to give ourselves the kind of compassion that our inner child needs that-

Okay.

You breathe in for four (inhales) hold it for four, breathe out for four (exhales) and then hold it out for four.

Oh

...

the term care tasks.

Um, and I did that because, you know, language can be really powerful, and there's a lot of baggage around terms like chores, um, housework, things like that.

And I really wanted to sort of reemphasize that these tasks are not about performing.

They're not about being a good enough mother or wife or adult.

They are not about maintaining perfection or validating anything.

Yeah

Mm-hmm.

... thinking this time the conversation will end differently with them changing.

But it won't.

And so instead of focusing your efforts on how do I change her, now you focus your efforts on how do I care for myself as I'm meeting my responsibilities to her 'cause I do want to continue to see her.

But now I know that I need three days after I have a therapy session where I talk about this.

We want a solution for how badly it hurts, how much it sucks, and the grief that might be there forever, but it's actually about building our distress tolerance and knowing that, like, this is a normal part of life.

And we can use our efforts to care for ourself and be tender with ourselves and to give ourselves the kind of compassion that our inner child needs that-

(laughs)