Feel Like You're Just Lazy?

The Neurodivergent Narrative

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The Narrative

Imagine you’re a kid, and you know you’re really smart, and everyone tells you you’re really smart. But when you look around at the world you see lots of other people, even other kids, doing stuff, and you know you’re just as smart as those kids but for some reason you can’t seem to get yourself to do stuff. Then the adults in your life come to you and say, “Oh you’re so smart if you only just applied yourself you would fulfill your potential!”

Diagnosis

Does this narrative sound familiar to you? If it does, then you may be neurodivergent. Now before we dive into what the significance of this narrative is, how it affects you, and what to do about it, let’s first talk a little bit about diagnosis. If you think you may be neurodivergent it may be worth seeing a doctor to get a formal diagnosis. It also may not be. Why? Because diagnosis is good for two things:

1. Treatment: If there is some treatment that is available for what you are suffering with and you can gain access to that treatment by getting a diagnosis it can be a tremendous boon to your life. To use a very clear-cut example, if you get a cancer diagnosis you can then get access to chemotherapy.

2. Validation: Sometimes a diagnosis can feel extremely validating. If you have struggled your entire life and you get a diagnosis that explains why you’ve struggled so much it can feel like an incredible relief. You’re able to stop blaming yourself because now you have an understanding of what was making things so hard.

All that being said, sometimes if there aren’t treatment options that you want to pursue, and you don’t need the diagnosis to accept and understand why life has been so hard for you, then a diagnosis may not be valuable for you. And finally, let’s say that you really relate to a lot of narratives and struggles that I talk about here, so you go to get a diagnosis and they say “Nope! You’re not neurodivergent.” Know that the way diagnosis works is some old guys sat around in a room with some data, put together a list of symptoms based on that data, and then said, “Okay how many of these symptoms does a person have to have in order to be neurodivergent?” And then they arbitrarily decided on a number (and don’t even get me started on all the biases in their data because they don’t account for how something like neurodivergence manifests differently in men vs women. I talk about this kind of gender bias in A Woman’s Guide to Empowerment). So even if you don’t have the right arbitrary number of symptoms to have the label of neurodivergence, it can still be valuable to understand how people have learned to deal with similar symptoms to what you experience.

What Does This Narrative Do?

Now, returning to the narrative that we talked about at the beginning—the smart kid that couldn’t get themselves to do things. What do you think that this experience teaches a kid? If you know you’re just as smart, if not smarter than everyone around you, but everyone else can do stuff and you can’t. If all of the adults tell you that you’re wasting your potential away. You learn the lesson that you’re at best lazy and at worst broken in some way. So you go through the rest of your life having this assumption get reinforced over and over and over again as you try to brute force your way through life—masking. And what do you think that does to you? I’ll tell you—it breeds a festering ball of shame. You feel like you’re just the runt of the pack.

Now imagine for a moment, that there’s a fish and this fish gets put on land and told to walk and breathe out of the water. The fish would fail miserably. Would you consider that fish lazy or broken? Of course not! We have an understanding that the fish is just being asked to act in a way that is not compatible with the way that it works. But boy, if someone would just take the time to put that fish in water, they would see how beautifully it could swim. And this is what is so tragic about the narrative of neurodivergence. You’re the fish! And you’ve spent your whole life being told that you’re supposed to walk on land and breathe outside of the water. No one ever took the time to try putting you in water.

Substances

So what do you do? You’ve come to the conclusion that you’re lazy or broken and you feel incredibly ashamed. Just getting through a mundane day is painful (like a fish trying to breathe out of water)! You need some relief! Then you try something like marijuana or alcohol, and for the first time in your life you feel normal. God, what a gift! And so you become very attached to your substance of choice, reliant on it. It feels like you need it to be able to function—to be normal. What feels so tragic about this is that it is a fundamental denial of your identity. It is trying to change and mask who you are with a substance so that you can be more acceptable to society. Not to mention, substances often lead to their own slew of problems (that’s a whole other topic). So now you feel like lazy/broken, you feel incredibly ashamed, and you’re addicted to a substance. This sucks!

So What Do We Do About It?

The good news is that there is actually quite a lot you can do about it, and in working with clients I have seen people make incredible recoveries—the equivalent of a fish that feels broken and suffering with addiction, getting clean and starting to swim for the first time in their life. So here’s some of the things you can do.

1. Get In The Water: You’ve actually already started. By simply recognizing this narrative in your own life, you have recognized that you’re a fish and all you need is some water. What does “water” mean outside of the analogy though? It means finding out the way that your mind naturally works. Think about the things that you are able to actually do, the things that feel natural and intuitive to you, the things that you feel like you’re good at. The idea is to then take what you’re good at and examine what is it that makes those things work for you. Often times, neurodivergent minds like what I call shiny things. Things like solving puzzles or bright colorful things. How can you make things that you do day to day more shiny? As you do this you will discover that your neurodivergence can be a superpower rather than a curse. Now be careful, because as you think about these things the shame may rise up.

2. Process The Shame: As you try to get in the water, or find the shiny things, or whatever analogy works for you, you may find that you have thoughts like “But I shouldn’t need to do that I should just be able to do it myself.” or “I don’t deserve the water.” This is the shame talking. IMPORTANT: Don’t try to fight it! It won’t work. You may be able to beat it once, but it will be an eternal battle. Instead we are going to validate the shame. I know that sounds crazy! “I don’t want to validate my shame, I want to get rid of it!” Remember that validation is not the same as agreement. When you validate something you are just saying that it makes sense not that it is right or wrong. You can see how to effectively validate yourself here. By validating the shame it helps that part of you to feel heard and understood. Imagine if that little kid that felt lazy/broken had someone say to him “Hey it makes sense that you feel ashamed because you’ve been trying really hard and it seems like no matter what you do nothing seems to work.” You’re being the adult that kid needed. Keep in mind that this shame has had a lot of time to build up and processing it is going to take time. It can be very challenging to go at this process alone. If you’d like help I work with clients on this sort of thing all the time. Sign up for coaching.

3. Use External Hard Drives: A common experience for people that are neurodivergent is that it can feel like they have a whole bunch of tabs open in their mind all the time. This is actually part of the super power of a neurodivergent mind. They have much higher “RAM” than a typical neurotypical person and therefore are able to keep a bunch of tabs running at the same time. The struggle comes when they try to save any of those files and write them to their hard drive. Typically once the tab is closed it’s like it never existed. So to supplement this we’re going to use “external hard drives.” Things like calendars, reminder apps, notes, etc. These things take the place of a hard drive so that you can safely close a tab and not lose it forever.

4. Meditation: In neurodivergence the brain’s frontal lobes are typically not as developed and this is what causes things like executive function and switching tasks to be challenging. Meditation has been clinically proven to strengthen frontal lobe function. You may rail against this idea because meditation hasn’t worked for you in the past and that’s probably because you were meditating in a way that doesn’t work for you (sound like a familiar narrative?). So try out some different meditation techniques and see if you can find one that works well for you. Here’s one that works for a lot of neurodivergent minds, but your mileage may vary.