I have hangups around cleaning. I used to think I was just lazy and bad at cleaning. Turns out I had the cleaning skills of a 5 year old because that’s about the age my parents stopped teaching me how to clean and started yelling at me about not doing it.

It also turns out that, as a parent myself now, I recognize how bad a strategy it is for me to neglect cleaning for weeks, fail to prompt my kids at all to help clean, and then get angry at them when I go into hyperfocus and they don’t wanna help. Which is exactly the strategy my parents went with.

“All I do is clean all day and you kids never help.” No, dude. You sit in executive dysfunction for hours on end, clean for 20 minutes, and then rage quit. Keep telling me about how you don’t have ADHD even though all of your kids and grandkids do, though. Literally keep chugging a whole pot of coffee every morning just to be able to get out of bed instead of taking a pill. I understand people have their reasons for self-medication, but my parents are literally just stubborn and don’t believe in psychiatry.