Just a mental ret*d (or someone who has a messed up brain)

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So, I have been living alone for some time now, and all I seem to know how to do is work and play video games.

When I try to cook a healthy meal for myself, I screw up, all the time. Always cooking with dirty dishes, dirty pots and pans. Cooking takes too much time for me but I need to be healthy.

When I went to college, I was overwhelmed that I had to cheat in half of my classes to get good grades. Now I feel like I forgot how to write english papers,


When I'm at work, I tend to forget what people are telling me. I make the same minor mistake over.

Done stupid things in life.

Damn you brain. It feels like I have to do everything on my own and that's too hard.

If my dad didn't hit me in the head way too many times when I was young, and grow up with a brother who also had mental disabilities, I would had developed better. Now my brain is poorly rewired.

Seems like you are being hard on yourself and I can relate...If I could count the amount of times I feel like a complete idiot, or that I must be the stupidest person ever it would be a lot. As for the cooking with dirty dishes why is that? defective dish-washer? or do you do them by hand and they just don't get clean? And cooking can be hard, I have trouble with that myself I mean I want to eat healthy and be more self sufficient when it comes to making my own food...but it just takes a lot of effort maybe you should try and find some easy/simpler recipies to try, or with a crock pot you can make a lot of things in bigger quantities so you have enough to feed yourself for a couple days....admittedly I have yet to really get into that but it seems like one way to make it easier.

Also doing dishes right after use or at least rinsing them might help...that way stuff doesn't cake on so then its not so much effort later. I am also very bad with verbal directions and have to have them repeated a lot of the time, its not that I am actively 'not listening' I just cannot seem to keep it all in my head. But anyways seems like you have some legit mental issues....but you shouldn't blame yourself when those interfere with your life or put yourself down for it or at least doing that can make one feel worse.

Yeah some of us including me fall into the grey area between not being able to work or take care of ourselves at all, and doing it only well enough to get hired and fired over and over. Coping well enough not to get treatment, but badly enough that we seem like shitwits.

I just repeat my bad habits over and over, finding it harder and harder to come up to them.

I think a lot of it has to do with our ability to laser focus on one area at a time. This can cause us to see the details but not see the bigger picture sometimes and then cause us to misunderstand something, or totally miss a step in a task or misinterpret something. This can have it's good powers too in that the laser focus makes you good and skilled at what your interested in. Dr. Temple Granden said she focus on what she was good and interested at and got very skilled in that area and then expanded on it by learning more stuff that branched off of it but was still closely related to give a more broader knowledge of it. A few things I've learned when struggling with fallowing directions is that when someone tells you how to do something, I repeat the instructions back in your own words. This gives me a chance to make sure I understood everything and didn't miss anything. I find the boss usually like this because it show initiative in making sure I'm getting the task right. I also try to write the steps down on paper so I can refer to them many times so that way I don't forget -especially when I'm learning a new task. I also set reminders on my cellphone that helps using the calendar/alarm feature.

Sounds like executive function problems, very very common for us. I never could wash the dishes and stuff like that when I was younger. I still don't vacuum and clean very much. I don't have suggestions, other than to tell you it doesn't make you a "ret*d".

You're not "ret*d," you just have "executive function" difficulties.

As far as the dishes are concerned, make sure you have a supply of "Dawn." And a towel on hand to dry the dishes.