nooooope

[psocoptera]

Wow, Susan C. Pinsky's Organizing Solutions For People With ADHD was not the right book for me. My ADHD status is more like "alleged" than "diagnosed" but a lot of the things people with ADHD say about their executive functioning struggles resonate with me. Pinsky does not have ADHD herself but is the parent of an ADHD kid and works as a professional organizer with a lot of ADHD clients - I can only hope she comes off as less of a dick in person than she does in this book. For me, as a person who is constantly unavoidably aware that I lead a much smaller life than I might have with a less shitty brain, being told for 200 pages that I *also* can't have things I *did* think I might be able to have was, variously, infuriating and dispiriting. "Sentiment is for sissies"? I only get *ten photos a year*? Keeping multiple boxes of your kids' art is "pathological"? Fuck all the way off! If this book did one thing for me, it confirmed that I would rather get to have board games and books and muffin tins and keepsakes and craft supplies and mess and clutter than follow Pinksy's draconian rules and have an orderly but barren house. Do we have room for all those things? No, we really don't, but, I don't know, it would be ridiculous to try to will away my alleged ADHD, right, but I'm just supposed to be able to will away all of my emotions and values around stuff? Why isn't that also unrealistic?? If sentiment is pathological, like, literally pathological, a state of involuntary mental disease, wouldn't we get further trying to honor and respect that like we would the ADHD?

Comments

[belecrivain]

From your description I suspect you would feel more comfortable with Driven to Distraction and/or You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?, although neither is specifically devoted to organization.

(I've been hitting the Kondo hard lately but that's not ADHD- or executive-function-focused and I can see how it might be alienating.)

[antimony]

Okay, books I am putting on the never-to-read pile! Yipes. That sounds like a fundamental disconnect with how some of us process emotions related to things.

That said, I really should get my diagnosis formalized (it's possible it was in adolescence but I don't think so).