Develop ADHD-friendly task management and home organization tools

i need to get this out somewhere because i can't say any of this out loud to a single person i know without wanting to disappear into the floor. i know you guys get it or at least i hope you do because right now i genuinely cannot tell if i'm a person with executive dysfunction or just a lazy disgusting human being who doesn't care enough and honestly some days the line between those two things is so thin i can't find it anymore and i think that's the part that's actually killing me from the inside so here's my life right now. i haven't had a single person inside my apartment in almost two years. not one. my mom keeps asking to visit and every week i make up something. my schedule is crazy. i'm getting over a cold. next weekend is better. because the real answer is that if she saw how i live she would cry and i am not ready for that conversation. my sister wanted to drop something off last tuesday and i stood behind my front door holding my breath until she left. i stood there. behind my own door. in my own home. hiding. like i'm squatting in someone else's life and i got caught. that's where we're at. and it's not like i don't SEE the mess. that's what nobody understands. i see it. i see ALL of it. every single day i see it. the dishes that have been in the sink for... ok i'm not even going to say how long because i'll delete this whole post. the laundry "situation" and i call it a situation because calling it a pile would imply there's ONE pile when there's actually a basket of clean clothes i washed two weeks ago and never folded because apparently the washing was the only step my brain could commit to, and then there's dirty clothes on the floor next to the basket, and at some point i genuinely lost track of which is which so now it's all just. clothes. everywhere. the floordrobe is thriving. my dining table hasn't been a dining table since january, it's a doom pile now. it started as one piece of mail and absorbed everything around it like a black hole. receipts, a water bottle, a charger for a phone i don't own anymore, three pens, a single sock that doesn't have a match. i walk past it every single day and my brain has literally stopped registering it exists. and then once in a while my eyes will refocus like i'm seeing it for the first time and the shame hits me in the chest so hard i feel physically sick. and what does my brain do with that information? does it go "ok let's deal with this"? no. it sits me down on the couch and hands me my phone and i doom scroll for two hours straight because apparently my nervous system's response to "your life is falling apart around you" is to seek the nearest source of dopamine that isn't the thing that's literally decomposing in my sink the WORST part. the part that makes me want to rip my own skin off. is that i'm not like this at work. at work? at work i am a completely different person. i clean. i organize. i manage tasks. i meet deadlines. i am so good at masking that my coworkers think i'm one of the most put together people on the team. i smile. i perform. i sweep the floors, i fold things, i keep everything spotless for eight straight hours. and then i drive home and i walk through my door and it's like someone pulled the plug out of the wall. there is nothing left. not low battery. NOTHING. my brain gave every single molecule of executive function it had to strangers between 9 and 5 and now the person who actually has to live in this body gets the empty husk. and i cannot explain this to anyone. i tried to explain it to my ex. he looked at me and said "but you literally organize shit all day at work, how can you not just do the dishes when you get home" and i wanted to scream because THAT'S EXACTLY WHY. that's the whole point. there's a finite amount of "do things" fuel and i spent it all performing for people who don't even know my middle name. but when you say that out loud it sounds like the most pathetic excuse in the world so you just stand there and take it. you just absorb the look. you know the look. not anger. worse. resignation. the look that says they've stopped expecting anything from you. he's my ex now. the apartment wasn't officially why we broke up but let's not pretend it didn't contribute. he never said it directly but i could feel it every time he walked in. the way his eyes would scan the room. the way he stopped sitting on my couch. the way he said "i just feel like if you really cared you'd figure it out" and that sentence lives in my head rent free because part of me, the part that has been hearing "why can't you just" since i was seven years old from every teacher and every parent and every friend, that part of me still believes he was right. that if i REALLY wanted it enough i'd push through. and the fact that i can't must mean something about who i am as a person. i know someone reading this is going to suggest a planner. please don't. i have a graveyard. and i mean a literal physical graveyard. there is a drawer in my desk with bullet journals that have three beautiful pages filled in and then nothing. a notion dashboard i spent an ENTIRE sunday building, color coded, with templates, with linked databases, with everything. i opened it twice. i downloaded tiimo. i downloaded finch. i tried habitica. i set up google calendar reminders that i learned to swipe away without reading in about four days. i am genuinely incredible at making the plan. i will build the most detailed, realistic, beautiful plan you've ever seen. i'll color code it. i'll buy the pens. i'll feel that rush of "this is it, this time it's going to work, this is the system that finally fixes me." and that feeling lasts about 72 hours and then the novelty dopamine wears off and the planner becomes another thing on the pile and now i don't just have a messy apartment, i have a messy apartment AND another piece of evidence that i can't stick with anything. ever. the planning IS the dopamine hit. i was never going to do the plan. i was role playing a person who follows through. cosplaying executive function for an afternoon. and here's the cycle that nobody warns you about because it sounds insane when you say it out loud. sometimes, randomly, usually at like 11pm on a tuesday for absolutely no reason, something will click. the paralysis will just lift. and i will clean like a woman possessed. i'll scrub the bathroom. i'll do every dish. i'll mop the floors. i'll go until my back hurts and my hands are raw and my knees ache from kneeling. and i'll stand there at 2am looking at my apartment and feel this tiny fragile beautiful moment of "oh god. this is what it could look like. this is what other people just HAVE every day without fighting for it." and i'll beg. i will literally beg my own brain. please keep it like this. please just do a little bit each day. just maintain. don't let it go back. and within 48 hours it's gone. always. without fail. and the crash after that is worse than if i'd never cleaned at all because now i have PROOF that i can do it. which means i choose not to. which means it's not executive dysfunction it's just me not caring enough. which means everyone who ever called me lazy was right. and that thought sends me straight to bed where i'll lie there rotting for the rest of the day scrolling through other people's clean apartments on tiktok and hating myself with a specificity and creativity that honestly, if i could channel into literally anything else, i'd probably be running a company by now. i read somewhere that NTs run most of their life on autopilot. like their brain just does things in the background. takes out the trash. starts the dishwasher. puts the clothes away. and we're over here hand cranking every single process manually. every task is a negotiation. every chore is a twenty minute argument between me and my own prefrontal cortex before my body will move. the exhaustion isn't from cleaning. it's from the war that happens before the cleaning. it's from the wall of awful between me and the sink that's so tall i can't even see over it anymore. i'm not depleted from doing too much. i'm depleted from the cost of TRYING to do anything at all. how the fuck do people have time for work and a social life and cooking and cleaning and showering and sleep? genuinely. because i can pick like two of those on any given day and the rest just doesn't happen and i have stopped pretending otherwise. i don't want a perfect home. i've mourned that fantasy already. i don't need the tiktok house. i just want to open my door when someone knocks. i want to stop flinching when my phone buzzes because it might be someone asking to come over. i want my chest to stop tightening every time i walk into my own kitchen. i want to stop measuring my worth as a human being by whether or not there are dishes in my sink. i want one single day where existing doesn't feel like a full time job. i don't really know what i'm looking for with this post. maybe just someone telling me they get it. that the gap between how hard i'm trying and how little i have to show for it is real. that i'm not making it up. that this isn't just what being lazy feels like. ⭐ for anyone who made it to the end of this mess. kind of like my apartment lol