I Just Thought About That One Time In Middle School When Two Girls Tried To Bully Me By Telling Me That

adhd executive dysfunction sucks bcuz im just sitting there and my brain is like

YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME YOU ARE WASTING TIME

no work done no rest gained. literally no point of this at all

(to everyone who reblogged, donate and share @olagaza's initiative!)

And now for something completely different.

This is the ADHD Teapot. I made it in a ceramics class a few years ago. I use it to explain executive dysfunction to people who haven’t come across the term before (and those who think of ADHD mostly as Hyperactive Eight Year Old Boy Syndrome).

So, most people’s brains are like a regular shaped teapot with a single spout. Let’s say that your time, energy, focus etc is the liquid you have in the teapot. Your executive function is the spout, that directs the tea into the specific cup you want to fill-aka the task that you’re meant to be doing. Spills happen occasionally, but generally most of the tea goes in the right cup.

If you have executive dysfunction, (a symptom of ADHD, trauma, autism, schizophrenia etc.) you have multiple spouts going in different directions. You can try pointing one of them at your chosen cup and you will probably get some liquid in there, perhaps you will even fill it right up (finish the task). But meanwhile, tea is also pouring out of several other places and not going where you want it. If you have another container nearby, perhaps some of it will end up in there. But quite a lot of it is going to end up on the floor and accomplish nothing.

And at the end of the day you’ll have filled one or two cups ( or sometimes not even one) compared to the five or six that somebody with the same sized teapot (but only one spout) has filled, and everyone wonders why you’re so bad at getting tea poured, and why you make such a mess in the process.

One day I’d like to spend more time learning pottery and create a really technically good fucked up little adhd teapot. But that’s a long way off since i currently live in the outback and the nearest pottery workshop is some 400km away. But I figure that for now, it might be a useful or interesting metaphor to somebody even in its rough draft form.

This post is the cup I filled instead of cleaning my house btw.

Hey. Your brain needs to de-frag. Literally it needs you to sit there and space out.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

Give your brain a Daily Dose Of De-Frag.

I like stories like this to remind people that SCIENTISTS ARE HUMANS AND THEY CAN BE STUPID

So I was once actually collecting data in a frozen river, and another guy fell in, filled up his waders and everything. He was wearing cotton (we were floored), and I had the car keys so I was like “alright, I’ll walk you back to the car to make sure you’re okay. Then you can strip down in there and get the heat going. There’s a blanket to wrap up in.” And he looked at me like I was insane. He said, “what? I’m fine.” I informed him that actually, if he stayed outside in subzero temperatures, soaking wet, in cotton, he was Licherly going to Freeze To Death, and he was like, “it’s not the 1800s lmao.”

And then while the guy in charge Forced him to go back to the car and strip, I had to stand there in a frozen river absolutely bewildered by the implication that a Wildife Biologist thought hypothermia is like, an old timey disease that people stopped getting at some point.

i'm a biology student. i'd take the animals please

i want. a cicada on one arm and a crayfish on the other

i think one of the most depressing things about having severe mental illness is that i spend so much of my life observing, but not participating. i watch people get better jobs, join clubs, make other friends, go on outings, and cultivate hobbies. and what do i do exactly?

i rot in bed and scroll online even though i don’t actually like the internet that much. i’m too scared to leave the house regularly because i feel unsightly. i have no pictures of myself to look back on, and nothing that really marks the passage of time except which classes i’m taking that semester.

i wish i had a completely new brain.

lmao me

I was being attacked by a giant stag beetle and my cousin (who is a biologist irl) kept telling me cool facts about it instead of helping.

I had an amazing Biology teacher who we all assumed was a failed scientists.

He was OBSESSED with mushrooms.

He once randomly whipped out a bunch of champignons that he bought at the supermarket next door and continued yapping about them for 30 mins straight.

Our chapter was the processing of optical signals.

Paleontologist: I became a paleontologist because dinosaurs are cool

Astronomer: I became an astronomer because space is cool

Chemist: I became a chemist because explosions are cool

Archeologist: I became an archeologist because Indiana Jones is cool

Mycologist: I. Fucking. LOVE. Mushrooms.

Paleontologist: Uh…

Mycologist: IWillLiterallyMurderYouJustSoICanWatchFungiBreakDownYourDecayingRemainsDon’tTestMeBoneBoy

Sex is a spectrum and it is influenced by SO many genetic, hormonal and environmental Factors

Source

Want more info? Here ya go: 

This Biology Teacher Disproved Transphobia With Science 

ALSO:

Sex redefined

“The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

More on anti-trans arguments as bad science

So i'm a biology student, and a lot of the time, the technical language is actually so that the scientific research is understandable to a WIDER audience.

For example, in chemistry, there is a verry specific system in how you name molecules. To people who are not scientists, it will sound like wordvomit. However, to other scientists its 100% understandable. And because everyone around the world uses the same vocabulary, research papers can be uses by everyone to help with THEIR research, so its way easier to educate yourself AS a scientists and to find evidence supporting your work (or showing that its wrong).

If you're not a scientist and you care about the research, that's what science journals are for. They take the research and put it into common words so that you dont have to have a degree in nomenclature to understand whats going on.

The whole “scientists use big words on purpose to be exclusive” is such a bunch of anti-intellectual bullshit. Specific and concise language exists for a reason; you need the right words to convey the right meaning, and explaining stuff right is a hugely important part of science. Cultures that live around loads of snow have loads of words to describe different types of snow; cultures that live in deserts have loads of words to describe different types of sand. Complex language is needed for complex meaning.