For me, having ADD is like having a workshop on the top of a mountain. It’s not that the things I need to do are necessarily difficult—they might even be relatively simple—but I can’t actually use any of my tools or get anything done unless I climb the mountain first. And the path to the top is twisty and difficult, and most days I just don’t have the energy to scale it. There are times when I would like to work on a project in increments over a period of days, but I can’t, because that would require hiking up the mountain every single day for a week, and I just don’t have the physical capacity to do that, especially when I know I can leave a day aside at the last minute to hike up there, work through everything in one chunk, and then climb down again and recuperate for another few weeks before I need to go back up. But of course, sometimes the weather ends up being really shitty on the day I set aside for the climb, and I’m totally screwed trekking up there in the rain, and then I hate myself because it was sunny all week and WHY DIDN’T I JUST CLIMB THE MOUNTAIN EARLIER, but nope, that’s not how it works.
I know this isn’t what it’s like for everyone, but that’s how it is for me.
Oh, and like, most people don’t have workshops on mountaintops—their workshops are only up a few short flights of stairs. Or their workshops are on mountaintops, but they are avid hikers who have boundless energy. So they’re like “Why didn’t you start working on this sooner like I did?” and they don’t understand that you have a very different journey to get to the same place.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 