Heck, try having anxiety or ADHD. Tasks that can be done in five minutes right now seem like they can take days.

I mean, personally for me, if I sit down and do laundry I CAN do it–but there are catches. If I put a load in the wash and walk away and don’t set a reminder, I WILL forget to put it in the dryer and it could mildew. Oh, and the washer/dryer is downstairs, so I’ll put it off because the step of walking down the stairs is just “another obstacle” in my mind. And then my grandmother lives downstairs, and I constantly get trapped in conversations with her and can’t figure out how to leave politely–so I avoid doing laundry when she’s in the living room to catch me, which means it’s even longer. Oh, and then if I remember a load that I did and forgot to put in the dryer, I get guilty and anxious and put it off because I’m avoiding it. The easiest way to do laundry would be to sit downstairs for two hours while the laundry rotates–but I don’t have the time to do that for every load, I’d be down there all day. And that’s not even taking into account things like delicates, which have to be sorted out and hung up to dry–I sort it out, but my brothers and dad don’t, so if I get a load to wash from them I have to separate it out myself.

Sorry for rambling, it’s just…it’s not easy. I’m trying, especially since I WANT to live on my own–I’m 2-freaking-2 and still not capable of living on my own. But cleaning can be a really big hurdle for people, even if it’s just something as simple as considering “walking downstairs” a step that you have to accomplish.

It’s true that I could easily pick up a few things. But everything under those things has sat there long enough that they’ve built up dust, which I’m allergic to.

There’s also ostensibly important papers there that I should not lose, but I’m not sure where to put them. I don’t know what I really should be doing with them next. I mean, if it’s a bill, I’ve paid it. But apart from that, a lot of the papers are things I would like to have organized, and I don’t have anywhere to put it. I could get a filing cabinet, but I don’t have anywhere to put it. There’s too much crap everywhere. At least, as things is, I know where they are now.

I could at least pick up the dirty dishes and put them in the sink. But there’s a coffee cup that’s covering a stain on the table and I don’t know how to clean up the stain. I can’t remember which it is, so I just need to leave all of them there.

It’s all a series of completely trivial obstacles. Take one step out of the insanity, and it’s all easy to handle. But that first step’s a big one. It’s kind of like some of the people I tutored in math, back in the day. This set of people all understood everything they needed to do to get the math done.

If I just asked them, “What do you think the next step is?” and followed that with, “Ok, try that.” they could solve basically any math problem in the scope of their class’ current and prior states. If I was there often enough, they could manage to do that a bit even without my prompting. By the time they had an exam, they’d be good.

But without that prompting, they couldn’t get through even the first step of the next problem.

Other people are like this with taxes, or even non-math stuff such as cooking, solving puzzles, shopping, navigating through places in their immediate vicinity, and all kinds of different things.

For a lot of people with physical limitations, the term ‘differently abled’ is offensive. To quote one person, “I lost my leg in an accident, so I can’t walk. That didn’t suddenly make me able to fly or shoot heat beams from my eyes.” But for a lot of people with mental limitations, it’s apt. (There exists people with physical limitations for which it’s also apt. Some of them are even people who take offense at it, because they don’t even recognize the stuff that they’re better at due to their disability. It’s also not always a causal thing. Sometimes, it’s just something that the person could do better than nearly anyone else that’s not impaired by their impairment.)