Like autistic people get to be autistic. That’s a word, and it has meaning. Someone can be autistic because it’s a type of person (spectrumy type). In my opinion, ADHD sucks as an identifying term. It’s 3 letters, one repeated. It means nothing as it is spelled and can’t be owned as an identity because they’re letters, not a word. “I’m adhudd.” The initials include “disorder” in it. That sucks. Autistic people don’t go around saying, “Hi, I’m austically disordered,” cause that’s not accepting. Is there a term that is smooth and not judgmental for ADHD? Maybe we can take Aspergers since it got dropped, but add the ‘d’ to get “Adspergers”. Nah, that’s stupid af. What about multibrained? I feel multibrained because I act like I’ve got multiple brains running in my head doing their own thing all at the same time, and I bounce around them based on who knows what.
What? Oh, yes…I’ll have the spaghetti bolog-knees. Do you guys have red pepper…crushed red pepper? Yeah, thanks. Cool. I like your name tag. Is that really your name? Samsquatch?..oh! It’s Samuel, but you changed it to Samsquatch! I love Trailer Park Boys. Fuck off, Leahy! Yeah. Sorry. I got excited.
Okay. So…um, is there a descriptive word for ADHD that isn’t ADHD?
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At-def
I’m so quirky!
I gave a joke answer, but I also have heard the term “kaleidoscope” to describe the shifting mental state, and I liked it. Maybe “kalaidoment”?
“Addy-haddy”
Hello, I’m unfiltered.
I’m like 95-100% filtered at first to avoid upsetting anyone. Very rarely, I’ll make it to 0% unfiltered with only the most accepting and trustworthy people.
I generally refer to myself as ASD (also has disorder in it) to describe my autistic traits and ADD for my ADHD. Sometimes I use Neuro divergent or ND if I’m feeling lazy.
It is not cool or trendy to be Autistic…
I know that you probably don’t mean it that way but I do think it is important to see people for who they are.
I usually describe myself as “a bit much.”
To that I say “if you think I’m too much, go find less.”
I’m fine in small doses…
Just don’t get me started.
This is the disclaimer
I started there, but I eventually got to the heart of it now and just say I’m an asshole.
I’ve used “spicy brained” and people seem to get it.
It might be that I am approaching middle age but I wouldn’t have got that. I would have thought you were calling yourself hot headed or something. Like you had major anger problems or maybe act kind of unstable. Is it a reference or common saying?
There is the term neurodiverse, which is an easy catch all for neurologically abnormal, but not broken.
Neurospicy is a play on this, spicy vs bland. People have strong opinions on spicy, very few have strong opinions on bland food.
We all tried to come up with a nice concise term for ADHD but ended up writing multi page papers instead.
I started thinking about it, and thought that adhd kinda looked like a palindrome, which made me think of anagrams and how they’re often used as a reveal in bad mystery plots. So I wrote a program to generate anagrams from an input in rust because I wanted to learn rust and never thought much about the algorithms for generating anagrams before. I then hit some complexities with multiple words as anagrams. I’m currently optimizing the dictionary look up by refreshing my knowledge on searching and sorting algorithms.
I expect to make more progress on this task tomorrow.
I wasn’t expecting to be called out like this
Neurospicy
This makes me think of Tabasco. Not that it’s good or bad. It’s neutral. I’m just sharing.
absolutely hate this phrase.
Ok, it’s your moment. Let’s hear it all. Dump it. Why do you hate it?
it’s such a heckin pupper way to describe one of the biggest challenges i deal with in my life. i’m not grim about my neurodivergence but i’m sure not perky about it either.
I can respect this. I have all this creativity, 98th percentile in creative writing standard tests in the US (SATs, but this was also a while back), and I can’t ever get beyond the start of a book before I’m bored, hate it, feels like work. I’m immediately drawn to other, shinier things to do. Forget neurospicy, I feel neuroblocked. I’m neuroselective of what I want to neurodo.
It’s like drowning, but you can pick from a bunch of tiny straws poking up in the water to get air. Some days you want the yellow straw, oh but wait the green straw looks good… but there’s that temptress the red straw in the corner, the sly devil. Sometimes you just want to breathe so you grab multiple straws in one day. Sometimes no straws look good and you just drown that day. However, by ADHD law, you can never use the same straw twice in a week.
I also deeply dislike the phrase for much of the same reason as the other replies. It’s a phrase that evokes high-functioning TikTokers looking to quirkily stand out from the crowd and in general downplays the reality of many neurodivergent people and their very real, very tangible struggles.
I can’t speak for hypnicjerk, but I personally dislike the term because it feels too glib.
I can’t do shit because of executive dysfunction and I forget things all the time, that’s not “spicy”, it’s preventing me from having a life.
I hate this, but I use it because “I’m from a neurodivergent family” sounds worse to my ears that “My whole family is some flavor of neurospicy.”
We have 2 ADHD+anxiety, 1 dual ADHD+Au, and 1 dual ADHD+NVLD.
It is broader encompassing, but you can just say Neuro divergent
That doesn’t fit well, because a person with adhd doesn’t want to be assumed has autism. It would be an unnecessary hurdle for the interpreter to get past lol
I like to call it the “ta da!” because the Spanish acronym is TDAH. Who doesn’t like being able to say “ta da!”?
remember back in the early days of windows… like 3.1 era… when windows started, it did that. like “see? i actually booted up!! TA-DA!!”
It’s not exactly what you’re looking for but I have described having ADHD as like having a TO-DO list except any time something new is added to the list you have to roll a dice and decide which thing on the list you’re going to do right now. On the rare occasion nothing else comes up before you finish one task you’ll be golden. But if anything should pop into your mind it throws the entire things back into the random TO-DO list which you will then reroll.
This is the perfect visual example of what living with ADHD is like: https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0
I just don’t tell people. It never leads to anything good.
Agreed. It’s like they start looking for confirmation, so they start expecting and noticing every little mistake. Or they don’t see it, and give you unsolicited speeches about how they struggle to focus to and you just need discipline… In fact, you should stop taking your meds
I just tell people without telling people. “I can’t sit still for too long, I have to walk”, “the music/videos and stim toys help me focus”, “my thought process is weird, I know that sounds unrelated but it makes sense to me”, “I know you’re writing up a list, I need to take notes to process what you’re saying
and if I don’t doodle I can’t pay attention to this boring ass meeting”If you take on the label, they don’t see you as managing your symptoms, they look for the cracks. If you explain your compensation strategies and areas of difficulty, they usually are pretty supportive and will even respect the level of thought you put into it
“They look for the cracks” is an excellent way to put it.
I don’t even tell friends, except those who are very close. Too often, it changes the way people treat me.
Conversely I’ve met people who were diagnosed as adults and who then blame everything they do on their ADHD - “you know, now everything makes sense about me!”.
Ditto with Autism, to be fair - you don’t get to excuse being an arsehole just because you’re not neurotypical, Dave.
