October 8th, 2025
Finished therapy a month ago. Now I have the autistic and ADHD labels. Of course, it's not a surprise. I don't think they tell a lot about who I am as a person, though; these are simply words to describe that I tend to be overwhelmed by sensory information easier, I have to manually think and plan the way I communicate, and I need to create elaborate setups to be productive. Having a name for it makes it easier for me to look up ways to improve my life.
I probably spent most of my life tuning out what was happening around me. I had little control over my life as a kid and couldn’t remove the things that caused me discomfort. I only knew how to manage most things in my life by dissociating from them to some degree. Now I finally have the ability to organize my environment in a way that benefits me rather than makes things harder, and I no longer need to detach from my feelings. But that meant I had to relearn how to do a lot of stuff without tuning out. There's no autopilot anymore — little things that used to be automatic now require conscious effort.
I also feel like I matured a lot since the past year and horrors beyond comprehension suddenly became comprehensible. And despite everything in my life improving day by day, relearning how to function and being exposed to aspects of life I'd never considered before has been exhausting, overwhelming and intense. Which lead to severe anxiety and panic attacks, as described in previous blogpost, and going to therapy for that.
Right now I feel like I'm at my best point in life. Anxiety still somewhat lingers, but it's mostly gone and I easily manage what's left of it. Besides teaching me how to manage anxiety, my therapist also did neurodiversity skills training with me. For me, it focused on structuring my environment so that staying productive doesn't rely on constant effort. The environment itself acts as a set of rails — even when I'm at my lowest functionality-wise, I'll still be able to function on the base level of those rails.
The biggest thing therapist helped me with was to design a morning routine that'd include studying. If someone told me I'd be able to study every single morning without any protest and it'd be happening naturally, I wouldn't believe them. I always barely had a couple hours of productivity a week, and it took a herculean effort from me. Now it happens on its own and these 10-30 minutes of studying every morning are enough to deal with all of my responsibilities. Which is crazy and sad — both that I could've avoided so much suffering if only I'd been taught this earlier, and that my responsibilities are so minimal that just ten minutes a day would be enough to manage them, and I still struggled.
A year ago I wrote:
Here lies the fundamental conflict I have with the world: I hate doing things, but the world revolves around that. It's so hard to force myself to do stuff I'm not interested in — when there's some chore I need to do, I have to perform several rounds of mental gymnastics to convince myself to do it, even if it's something really small. I'd bargain with myself, sugarcoat it, gamify, come up with additional rewards like putting a cute sticker into the planner. It's a constant exhausting mental battle, and the perspective of living like this for the rest of my life is depressing. My studies are a train wreck, am I destined to have all of my life this way? I just wish me starting the thing wasn't so far from me not starting and thinking I should start.
Now I know that no, it doesn't have to be that way. Executive disfunction is battled by automated routines and habits. It stops being a problem when you shift the responsibility for starting tasks from the dysfunctional part of the brain to the unconscious, automatic one. Habits are helpful for everyone, but for adults with ADHD it's a matter of performing on a bare minimum level.
I’m very lucky that the first routine I tried to implement actually worked. I don't think I could’ve designed something so well thought-out on my own without the help of a professional trained in this.
I also wrote this:
I'd definitely prefer a digital productivity setup over a paper planner, but none of the programs I've tried have satisfied me. I guess I'd only ever be satisfied with a digital system if I wrote my own software, so for now my setup consists of a paper planner and a whiteboard.
I actually found a program that satisfies all of my needs — Obsidian. It works for me because it's extremely modular and has so many user-created plugins that you can shape it into whatever you want. It’s basically like building your own software from its components.
If you're thinking, 'But what about Emacs?!' — Obsidian has a neat mobile app and is both easier to learn and prettier. Cloud sync is behind a paywall, but I set up my own synchronization with Syncthing — all plugins and files are stored in one Obsidian folder, so I just sync this folder between all of my devices.
The backbone of my system in Obsidian is daily files for task management and a weekly planner plugin, which functions much like Google Calendar. Here's a screenshot of how it looks. I have a bunch of additional tools I also use, but these are the main ones. I'm glad I spent a year using a paper planner first, because it helped me better understand what I need from a productivity system.
Planning on paper worked for me, but I struggled to stay consistent with task management. I kept most of the tasks in one place, and the sheer number of them scared and saddened me. Now I organize tasks into clusters, and each day I pick the ones that catch my attention and add them to the daily file. Focusing on the scope of one day is much easier than looking at everything at once.
I also didn’t write down really small tasks before, because I didn’t feel like grabbing a planner, a pen, and wasting paper on things like "have breakfast". With obsidian, I can start writing down a task even before the person has finished talking to me, since my phone is always with me and opening Obsidian takes just a second. And because I'm not wasting any paper, I write down literally everything. Every evening, I write down the sequence of actions leading up to going out and what I'll put in my bag in the morning. I wouldn't forget these things otherwise, but just blindly following the plan takes off so much mental load. It also works like a progress bar, showing how close I am to being ready, which helps me be on time.
And... I don't know, life feels so easy now. It's my forth month using obsidian as a daily driver and I successfully stuck to the morning routine with studying. Planning and sticking to routines have helped my ADHD immensely, and these are not the throwaway life hacks I used to cycle through in desperation, these are robust, sustainable systems.
Life is good. Things I used to struggle with don't nearly cause me as much suffering anymore. I dealt with all of my academic problems. Nothing looms over me. I find so much meaning in doing my hobbies and spending time with people I care about. Future is bright.
