Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
This doesn’t have to do with dating, but it does deal with an interpersonal relationship.
My roommate is my best friend. Like all friends, we clash sometimes, and it’s always about cleaning. She is pathologically clean. She spends over half of her non-working awake time cleaning. Whenever she gets on my case, I can never argue with her because her response is, “Do you want to live in filth?” I’d say she was OCD, but we both know that cleanliness, even to excess, is not OCD.
The problem is, I have severe ADHD, which means two medications and frequent counseling, just to be as good as the laziest neurotypical person. In the past, I made messes and left them there. I’d spill coffee on the floor and just step over it. A few times, I’ve caused problems at work by losing an email or task, even from earlier in the day. And this is with treatment.
My roommate went away for almost a year, and I visited her. We had a great time, but there was a bad fight, and during, she hinted that my poor cleaning prowess might lead her to find a single when our lease was up.
When I got home, I worked hard to get better so she wouldn’t move out, and also because maybe it’s time I put in the extra effort. What’s frustrating about it is that something that takes every ounce of concentration I have — that I have to remind myself to do every time — is just below the lowest bar for being a decent adult, so no one is impressed, least of all my roommate. A lot of readers won’t be impressed, but this is what I can do now after exhausting training:
I clean up after myself when I’m cooking, including the floor.
If I drop something, I pick it up.
If I spill something, I wipe it up.
If I see cat puke or hear it, I clean it up.
I don’t forget to give my cat his medication.
I wish I could say I was better about my medication.
I do chores without being asked.
I wash my hands when I’m cooking.
I wash my hands after the bathroom.
I shower regularly.
At work, I answer emails as soon as I get them, or when I’m finished with the task at hand.
I pay bills as soon as I get them.
I don’t procrastinate.
These are all things that took years of conditioning to accomplish, and I have over a dozen alarms on my phone to remind myself to take medication, do tasks at work, clean the litter box, shower, et cetera. These things are second nature to a neurotypical person, and many of them don’t believe how hard I have to work. I’m like a kid who studies day and night and can only get Cs on his tests. All I want to do is carry blissfully on like I used to, leaving whatever mess in my wake. But now I’m doing things like turning back around and returning to the bathroom to wash my hands when I forget to.
And the only thing my roommate ever says about it is when I miss something. She seems skeptical of ADHD being the cause of my less-than-sparkling approach to cleaning, and even when she does acknowledge it, she says that my doctors aren’t trying hard enough.
Everything else, literally everything else is blissful. She stuck with me after my ex-wife purged my friends, and she gave me a place to stay when I was kicked out of my home. We make each other laugh, and we eat dinner together every night. When she made dinner for my father, who is sensitive to any spice more than salt, she fixed him a separate plate from the spicy food the rest of us had. Even my ex-wife wasn’t that thoughtful.
And yet, I am constantly on edge, worried about the next mess I’ve left behind, when I put all of my focus into keeping that from happening. If she finds a stray handful of beard hair following my last trim, she drags me into the bathroom to show me. I don’t know if I can live like this, and I’m considering moving out too.
Is there any way I can ask her to chill out on me? ADHD is a huge part of my life. Unlike the bipolar disorder, which I can treat and forget, ADHD is always on my mind because it actively keeps me from functioning like a normal person. I can’t turn it off. It’s like trying to walk uphill on ice with a strong headwind. How am I supposed to live with someone who won’t try to understand that about me? What do I have to do to get a little recognition here?
Sincerely,
Sisyphus
OK, so as with many situations like yours, there are a few issues at play here and all of them are connected to one another. Some of them are inherent to having ADHD, some of them come from living with someone who doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept what ADHD is, and some of it comes from, well… trying to act like you’re neurotypical instead of neurodivergent.
First and foremost, I’m going to push back on some of the language here, because I don’t think it’s helping you or to explain things more effectively to your roommate. You’re treating not being neurotypical like some sort of mark of shame, something you need to strive for and to regard yourself as a failure for not accomplishing it. This is incredibly clear in the language you use and the way you describe your actions – “just to be as good as the laziest neurotypical person” is a prime example of this. So is “ carry blissfully on like I used to, leaving whatever mess in my wake.”
Be honest with me: are you actually blissful when you leave messes? Is that something that’s actually bringing you joy? Or is it that right now, the effort it takes to not do this is very high and very frustrating compared to the path of least resistance? Because if it’s the latter, not the former? Then describing yourself as “blissful” sets some really unfortunate and unhealthy expectations – like you’re happier wallowing in filth.
(If it’s the former, then your roommate is right and that’s not an ADHD thing…)
In fact, let’s take this as an opportunity to segue into the issues with cleaning and keeping your place hygienic. I’m going to be honest – and I say this as someone with ADHD and who’s lived with someone who is very focused on cleanliness for over a decade now – cleaning up and trying to keep things to a reasonable level of sanitary is really important. You don’t need to keep things to the point where you could perform surgery at a moment’s notice, but there’s a difference between “operating room” and “the cockroaches left to find a better place to live”.
I have sympathy here for you – I know what it feels like to live with someone who’s views on cleaning are much more extreme than your own – but I also understand and can relate to where your roommate is coming from. And frankly, I side with her on keeping things cleaner, because this isn’t just a case of her being the Felix Unger to your Oscar Madison. There’re legitimate health issues involved here.
It’s one thing if you’ve got a level of clutter that’s contained to your room, but when it involves spilled food, cat vomit or other organic substances, you’re inviting pests because yes that’s how you get ants. And also roaches, rats, mold and fungus. Beyond being nasty, those can become legitimate health hazards for everybody involved.
And that’s before we get into issues like washing your hands. That goes well beyond just being gross and well into “hand washing, especially before and after handling food or using the bathroom, materially affects human life expectancy”. Not washing your hands when you’re cooking or after going to the bathroom is how you end up spreading a whole host of toxins and bacteria, from staphylococcus to e.coli to salmonella. If you’re lucky, that’s how you end up with pink-eye. If you’re not lucky, people end up shitting themselves to death – and that’s not an exaggeration. Hell, even not paying attention to, say, making sure that any drippings from raw chicken get cleaned up or that the cutting and food preparation surfaces don’t get cleaned properly can cause all sorts of health issues that range from the merely unpleasant to the legitimately life threatening.
So, like I said: I agree with her. To a point.
At the same time, I think it’s uncool that she doesn’t acknowledge just how far you’ve come, how much progress you’ve made and how much effort goes into your trying to keep things under control. Nor do I think it’s cool that she acts like a schoolmarm with a recalcitrant student, dragging you around by the ear to point out all the places where you’ve been deficient.
And I don’t think she quite understands how ADHD works.
Part of the problem – and one of the reasons why I don’t like most of the jokes about this – is that ADHD isn’t just “being easily distracted” like a dog that suddenly saw a squirrel. Most people who don’t live with someone who has ADHD don’t get how ADHD affects short-term and long-term memory. It’s not that we’re careless or don’t bother trying to remember shit, it’s that information doesn’t write to disc. Short term memory’s like RAM; information is loaded to it for temporary storage while the app runs, then relevant info is offloaded to long-term memory and the RAM cache is cleared to make space for the next app. With ADHD, that transfer often doesn’t happen at all. It’s not that you couldn’t be bothered to remember, it’s that those things never got sent to memory in the first place, or if it did, it did so with an indexing issue that makes it impossible to call up that information in a logical manner.
This includes issues like “object permanence”. People with ADHD often have issues losing things or forgetting that things are there, even when it’s right in front of us. Almost everyone who has this condition knows how objects will quite literally fade into the background and we no longer see it because it’s been incorporated into our mental image of the scene. It’s very similar to why most car accidents happen within a mile of home – your brain isn’t actually processing the information coming from your eyes; it’s working from what you expect to be there because it’s so familiar to you. When people talk about how that tree/car/person/whatever came out of nowhere, they’re not trying to excuse shitty driving, it’s that their brain literally put less bandwidth towards “what your eyes are seeing”.
This is why when I say “we don’t see it” I mean that literally – as in “the light may enter the eyes and be translated to signal via the optical nerve, but the brain doesn’t bother translating it back”.
Executive dysfunction is similar. It’s never as convenient as “I can only do the things I want”; it can affect things we enjoy just as much. It’s more like there is a loose wire that occasionally is in contact with the circuit and occasionally isn’t; when it’s not, the circuit won’t close and trigger whatever needs to be done. When you have ADHD, it’s very much like you have the one neuron that needs to fire to accomplish the task and it doesn’t, and thus you often find yourself pushing the “do task” button and nothing happens until certain extreme stimuli break through. This is why, for example, a lot of folks with ADHD seem to procrastinate on topics right up until the deadline – the terror of “oh god this is due TONIGHT” is akin to thumping the box until the loose wire connects long enough to complete the circuit.
So I think part of what your roommate needs to do is to learn a bit more of how ADHD actually works, rather than the popular idea that it’s just excusing laziness and an unwillingness to work. Showing her resources like ADHD Alien or How To ADHD might help her realize just what it is you’re living with.
You should also tell her – straight up – that a lot of what she’s doing is the opposite of helping. Dragging you around to yell at you like a recalcitrant toddler isn’t going to make your brain produce baseline levels of dopamine and serotonin. At best, it’s just going to make you feel bad. At worst… well honestly, at worst, it’s more likely to play into the ways that brains with ADHD will prioritize actions that produce dopamine and deprioritize ones that don’t.
Now here’s a thing you need to consider: you’re not neurotypical. Part of the problem you – and to an extent, your roommate – are having is that you’re trying to live as though you were. And you’re going to be a lot happier when you stop trying to do so.
To be absolutely clear: this doesn’t mean that you give up and just go back to living how you did beforehand. This is about trying to be something you’re not. The “laziest neurotypical” isn’t better than you, certainly not because they’re neurotypical and – critically – you’re not lazy. You’re dealing with a brain that functions differently, for reasons well beyond your control, in a world that isn’t accepting of this. Treating the symptoms of having ADHD as some sort of character flaw is like telling someone in a wheelchair that they could get up those stairs if they’d just try a little harder. Or that it’s their fault that they can’t get through the too-narrow doorways or fit into the bathroom stalls.
And honestly, some of the way your roommate talks is getting a lot closer to that outlook than I’d be comfortable with.
Now part of what I think you need to do is to stop trying to force yourself to act like you’re neurotypical and start leaning into the fact that you have ADHD. That doesn’t mean that you can just disregard everything and go back to walking blithely through an apartment that’s increasingly becoming a Superfund site. It means learning to accommodate your handicaps and find ways to work around them.
If you had issues with, say food waste because you’d buy groceries and they’d go bad in the fridge because you forgot they were there, then the answer wouldn’t be “write a list of everything in the fridge” or “meal prep every Sunday” – those aren’t going to work with how ADHD usually manifests. Getting pre-made meals, or only getting the groceries you need for that day would be an accommodation. It’s not as efficient as planning meals for the week and making only one trip to the store, sure, but it would mean less wasted food and less wasted money.
Keep having issues with washing the dishes? If you’re just going making a meal for yourself, you can use paper plates and bowls. Again, it’s not as cost-efficient as reusable dishware, but it makes a significant difference in your quality of life.
It’s like staying on top of paying your bills. Automating as many as possible is part of how I kept my credit score from going to hell or getting tossed out of my apartment because I forgot to pay the rent. Instead of trying every “system” that was supposed to work, I found the one that worked best for my circumstances.
This applies to your living situation as well: stop trying to force your ADHD square into a neurotypical round hole and start making accommodations for what you’re not good at. Some are relatively simple and straightforward. Roommate is yelling about beard hairs in the sink after you’ve trimmed? Layer some paper towels first to catch ‘em, then ball it up and toss it as soon as you’re done. You can even use the outside of the ball to swipe up any strays.
Other solutions and options require a level of investment on your part. The cleaning is an issue? OK… well maybe you should look into hiring a cleaning service to come once a week. Yeah, it’s going to be an additional expense but ask yourself (and your roommate) this: is that additional cost going to make a difference in your overall quality of life? If so, then you may want to start making that a higher priority than other expenses. You and your roommate may decide to pool funds for this or (seeing as she’d benefit from this as well), make an adjustment for how you split the living expenses. Maybe you roll your share of the cable bill into hiring a cleaner.
But if I’m being honest? I’m wondering if you or your roommate moving out would be the worst thing in the world. I suspect that a lot of what you’ve learned to do, and the ways that you’ve improved, would be easier if you weren’t always worried that she was going to blow up at you.
As couples around the world have discovered: the fact that you like each other and get along great and are important to one another doesn’t automatically mean you can live together. That doesn’t mean the relationship is doomed or flawed; it just means that you’re trying to force two incompatible things to mix, with all the success of trying to blend oil and vinegar. Oil and vinegar ain’t gonna mix, no matter how much you agitate it, but also the oil ain’t shaming the vinegar for not doing so.
(Yes, sheath your tweets, I know about emulsification. Congratulations, you’re very smart, now stop actively missing the point of the metaphor.)
It’s great that your roommate’s a wonderful person otherwise, but if she is going to keep shaming you for shit outside of your control and keep treating you like you’re lesser for having a handicap, then I question how good this relationship is for you.
And yes, it is a handicap.
So maybe you two can be great neighbors as well as friends, instead of trying to make this work as roommates, and living on your own will not only free up some much needed emotional bandwidth, but also make it easier to accommodate your needs as someone with ADHD.
Oh, and one more thing: I’m wondering just how much your medication is helping. I realize that it’s all very much a moving target and God knows that trying to get ADHD meds is a trial under the best of circumstances – and also, Dr. NerdLove is emphatically not a doctor – but it sounds like you may not have hit minimum-effective dosage, or the medication you’re on isn’t working as well as it should be.
I realize that a lot of ADHD drugs are stimulants and can trigger manic episodes in people with bipolar disorder, but I wonder if your current treatment for your bipolar disorder is conflicting with treating your ADHD. This is something you should definitely bring up with your doctor. While I get that for yourself gets tricky when you’re talking about Schedule II medication and you’re very reasonably afraid of the phrase “drug-seeking behavior”, you have every right to advocate for yourself and your quality of life. You have a right to say “I would like to be more than just ‘functional, with Herculean effort’ and I don’t think my current medications are working the way they should. I’d like to try either a different dosage or a different medication.” And if they brush you off, it may well be worth your time talking to a different doctor – particularly someone who’s practice is focused on ADHD and similar conditions.
Good luck.