Okay, so, first I have to back up a little, and describe a bit how my brain works. There are certain areas my intellect has always excelled in, and certain areas my intellect has tended to suck in.

The ones I excel in tend to be … “pure” abstract things, for lack of a better word, but like 1s and 0s, computer code, pure math and logic, etc. The ones i struggle with sort of follow logic but there’s always some kind of “real world” messiness or whatever that imposes … exceptions that deviate from the nice abstract “minimally complex pattern that describes the problem,” and this extra weight bogs me down badly.

Things that follow the rules / schema / structure 100% are “easy” to store and re-derive. If I can remember how to derive a calculus formula, I don’t need to memorize it for the test, I can re-derive it as needed, and the result won’t change. Exceptions to rules must be remembered, and thus add additional complexity from the minimum mental load. Computer code, for instance, can be “easy” (minimally complex for the problem it solves) or “hard” (lots of additions that contradict each other, things that are named weird, exceptions you have to remember, hacks for legacy systems, etc). At the worst, computer code can devolve into so-called “spaghetti code” where one has to follow a hugely tangled ball of wire for hours to figure out how to make any simple change (like deciding which wire to cut) w/o breaking random stuff (example: replacing the spark plugs suddenly causes the brakes to fail because they were connected for some weird reason and no one documented it).

So i’ve always been good at:

• Keeping hard drive organized (any folder fits into any other! If you have enough mega/giga/terabytes, you know the data will fit no matter its “shape”!)
• Computer code (computer tolerates no ambiguity in its instructions, complains fails with an error on first tiny bit of ambiguity (“syntax error on line 357, unexpected semicolon”))
• Pure math/logic
• Reading (information ingestion and storage/organization)
• Progression systems in video games

And i’ve always been bad at:

• Finances (wayyyy too many terms that are ambiguously defined, too many human factors, what the hell is the difference between accrued interest and dividends and why do we have to have so many words for various categories of money and how are said categories defined)
• Figuring out which aisle of the grocery store the item I need is (is it a “condiment”? is it more used in “baking”? how are these terms defined?)
• Insurance of all kinds (don’t get me started on how needlessly complex it is, obfuscating a simple answer to the question “if my stuff breaks under what conditions will you pay for a replacement and how much will you pay”)
• Taxes (tax code too complex / inefficient, brain gets distracted complaining about how bad it is and how a better more elegant solution would work. again, why so many categories and why are they named so terribly illogically that I can’t re-derive them at will, I have to memorize them)
• Real world storage of physical objects (if only all physical objects were shaped like Tetris pieces and didn’t have squishy weird shapes and weren’t deformable and were infinitely stackable!)
• Car classifications (what is a “crossover” and what two (or more?) things does it “cross over” and how? and what’s the difference between a “pure crossover” and a “coupe” and a “hatchback” (don’t MOST cars have a thingy at the back that opens up?? If it’s not a trunk, isn’t that a hatchback???)

Underneath the surface, many of the “things i’m bad at” category do have logic based systems, they’ve just historically been too unwieldy for my brain to comprehend. They exceed the size of my (limited) working memory, and I can’t feeling that dealing with them is pointless and dumb, just like spaghetti code is pointless and dumb unless I’m being paid by the hour for my pain, whether to clean it up and make it nice (dopamine!) or take ~20 hrs to find the precise location to make a ~15 min fix.

It would appear that my stimulant-based meds give me more…. resilience to needlessly-complex systems. Like a boost of working memory or something. I now, say, analyze the rules of a tax form from start to finish, and start to make sense of things. With more executive function energy in the tank, i can cut through the red tape easier and start to grasp the big picture, and ignore the part of my brain that wants to get distracted optimizing the hell out of it. I have more confidence in myself too, that I can actually reason in these systems.

I’ve always loved learning a (well-behaved) system from the inside out and learning to exploit it efficiently. Some examples:

• Learning the best builds to optimize damage dealt and minimize damage taken (and deaths) in a video game
• Learning computer languages and frameworks and how to make computers do my bidding
• Learning how digital audio processing works (how to make recordings sound really good) and how to edit digital photos (how to make pictures look really good)

All of these systems are pretty easy to describe and understand abstractly – I just couldn’t transfer the techniques to the messiness of the “real world”. A few examples of systems that I hated:

• I hated organizing physical objects because every object is a different shape and some of them aren’t even perfect rectangular solids!
• I understood numbers and math but not financial numbers or tax math because the legal / financial jargon was too based in fuzzy human language and pure objective definitions are hard or impossible to find!

The “red tape” or the “human messiness” in these systems made it take up too much space/energy in my brain, and I’d bang my head against the wall and fail over and over again, wondering why I can understand calculus but not my tax returns, and feeling like an idiot even though i’ve become an expert in various more abstract realms.

Thanks to ADHD meds, I think I have a better shot at success in “real-world” systems now. I’m looking at a W-9 and my eyes aren’t immediately glazing over, and if I concentrate, I can skim / form a mental model of what it’s saying. If I concentrate, I can organize physical items in some approximation of a best-fit algorithm. It’s not Tetris, but I can allow it to be “close enough” to Tetris and not freak out at the “imperfection”. In short, I can let things be “good enough” and “messy”, and not require abstract perfection.

I think this is a game-changer.