Unless something else happened, it has to do with the sign stealing scandal

The internalized sense of failure because you cannot maintain friendships with (most) neurotypical people is honestly kind of a cancer until you figure it out. It’s one of the most damaging things that happened to my psyche as a result of having ADHD.

It’s one of the reasons why I so strongly advocate for everyone getting tested if they have any suspicions. The knowledge that I wasn’t wrong, and the disconnection I felt from others was not (necessarily) a result of my own failings was really freeing and lifted a lot of weight from me. I hope getting tested can help others by either preventing them from internalizing similar feelings, or giving them a path forward to working through those feelings.

And also rejection sensitivity, plus the common “ride alongs” like anxiety and depression.

Quick test: Do you have friends with ADHD?

More than 1? Ask them if they think you have ADHD.
More than 50% of your friends? You have ADHD.

It’s a scarily accurate meme that ADHD folks flock together.

For a more considered approach, I’d recommend getting started here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/tests/health/adhdattention-deficit-disorder-test

It’s non-comprehensive, but doesn’t require a login or email to see your results, and it gives you a starting point to talk to your doctor.

Depending on where you are in the world and how badly this is impacting you or the state of your local health system, you may want to investigate alternative diagnosis options.
In the U.S., it was a 6-month wait for a traditional psychiatrist. I resorted to an online option as my ADHD discovery coincided with long covid and depression (I needed a quick turnaround before it impacted me professionally), but there are now some chain psychiatry operations that, well, I don’t like their business model, but they offer fast turnaround if you’re willing to be a part of the enshitification of yet another profession.

Editing to add: That’s more a pointed comment at myself than anyone else. My regular doctor was not really getting my depression meds right to the point it was becoming an emergency, so I wound up with a company called LifeStance. They’re the McDonalds of mental health providers.

Yes!
My wife and I order breakfast once a week from this local place. They’ve undergone some changes and transitions over the years and in their current phase they partnered with another business (a coffee shop) where they use they kitchen space that came with the building and the coffee shop plays to their strengths.

We can’t make as much small talk as we used to with the owners of the restaurant when we go to pick up our food (ordered online 99% of the time), but there’s always a sense of connection in being recognized by the restaurant staff, who will pop out of the kitchen to hand me my order if the baristas are busy, or when the baristas see me and just grab my food from the order window and call my name before I’m halfway through the crowd of customers. I’m a big fish in a very small pond!

He’s a sweet guy. … Mostly. Very much in need of a lot of attention. Sometimes he just sits next to you on the couch and puts his paw on you if you’re not giving him enough attention.

Here he is posing with his sister as a prop:

This made me laugh so hard one of the dogs came to check in on me.

I was quite sure I didn’t have ADHD, too.

Not feeling a sense of accomplishment is not normal. You deserve better. Just check into it, okay?

Oh, snap, bringing me the magic I need, but didn’t know to look for.

I’ve been refusing to update because of video station. Looks like I’m saving your comment for later.

The advice I needed and have not been able to find. I could kiss you. Or at least give you a fond nod.

Yeah. No. I get that.

But the thing is - if they actually view your work as good, both in terms of quality and quantity, then the disjoint is the result of a comparison between your real self and some iteration of your ideal self.

Feeling bad about that is just an exercise in self-abuse. Minimally, you do enough that they see your value, and that’s enough, innit? Although, ideally, it shouldn’t matter at all what they think, but that’s easier said than done.

This might make me sound kind of shitty, and I don’t care, but I lie about my productivity.

Can’t harness the ADHD superpowers for a project that has a 4-month timeline until the last two weeks, then bang it all out to perfection in a frenzied mania?
Every status update is ‘I’m making steady progress. I have x, y and x done, but I’m having struggles with this part of it, etc.” I don’t lie or misrepresent the actual state of my progress, but I do downplay how much work I get done while riding the rocket of ADHD productivity. And I also play up how much work I do while I’m stuck trying to squeeze some dopamine from the rocks in my head.

If I bang out a project early, I guesstimate what should be done when, and reveal those parts at status updates along the way.

Sure - I still know that I’m inconsistent, and perhaps not living up to my actual potential in every situation, but I also know that I can outperform everyone I work with when the fire has me. So rather than show the gaps, I mask and don’t deal with the guilt.
Personal belief - work is about value extraction from you. If you show that you’re not maximally providing value at all times, you could be subject to judgement. So, show that you’re working steadily and avoid the judgement.

In other words: Set the expectation and roll with that expectation. But let the ADHDemon loose a month before evaluations come due. Your boss forgets too, but the demon likes raises and will definitely give you dopamine for that prospect.

At work I use tab groups to keep them organized by project, so I can tell just how far behind/how overwhelmed I am with a given project by the count of tabs in a given tab group.

It’s a highly effective way to quantify my work-related anxiety.

A warrior uses every tool at their disposal to vanquish their foes!
Self care is an honorable and righteous pursuit. It makes you a more effective foe in battle.

I took my antidepressants FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE!

My wife received a sticker of the Gadsden snake with the words “Gargle my balls” under it as a gift from one of her cooler family members yesterday.

Not a fan of the Gadsden imagery in general, but this one gets a pass.

But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”

I wish I had approximately double the hours in a given day, and also vastly more coding skill to help in meaningful ways.

It seems sort of odd that comments or messages reported for spam don’t offer any tools. Even a simple url pattern match that gives mods/admins the ability to click a checkbox to remember the link and take some predefined action in the future would be a rudimentary but effective option.

I mean, heck, it’s the fediverse. In my fantasy implementation of an anti-spam approach, it would be possible to federate these lists of untrusted links and assign consensus-based confidence scores for links generated from moderator actions across instances. (With options for instance admins to tailor their own trust scores of other instances, so that each instance can choose for themselves who they trust, just in case a couple rogue instance admins try to poison the spam filter.)
Same concept can be applied to banned accounts, although in that circumstance, I’d suggest they find a way to mask the email address when sharing it. Not that folks won’t just spin up a new email. But, you know. Something is better than nothing.

Hopefully that makes sense. I’m losing my mind with sleep deprivation.

I had to look that up, but that’s a top quality reference.

What happened to his feet?