The Hidden Benefits of Messiness & ADHD

Hello brains. There's two of us. We're both called Jesse. Well, okay. I'm Jessica, but uh close friends will often call me Jesse. Hey, I'm Jesse J. Anderson. Uh I'm the author of the book Extra Focus. And uh I have ADHD. Yes, we both have ADHD. And we both have a struggle in common, which is we are both messy. We grew up being called messy Jesse, both of us. When I found that out, I was like, we need to do an episode about this, about what it was like growing up being called that, why we earned that nickname. Um, just answering a bunch of questions. So, unlike videos where I'm just asking somebody a question, I thought this would be a cool thing to do like a panel where we're both going to be answering questions. So, yeah, let's answer some questions about what it was like being called messy Jesse growing up. Let's do it.

What earned you the nickname Messy Jesse? How I earned the nickname was I was a mess a lot of the time. So my mom would get me ready in the morning and drop me off at school and my dad would pick me up from school and like my hair would be disheveled and like I'd have you know like I'd have forgotten my jacket and just like I was a disaster like dirt on my face and my dad would be like why did you send her to school like that? Mom would be like I didn't she did that to herself. So, you know, I got the message that like I did this to myself, right? Like I'm messy and it's like something that I shouldn't be and that I could be different if I wanted to. But like it almost got treated like it was a choice. But I don't actually know where I got the nickname in the first place. But I do know this. At one point I went back to my mom and I was like, "Yeah, I know I had this nickname growing up like messy Jesse, but like it was actually kind of hurtful. Do you know who gave it to me? " And she goes, "Oh, I did. " Like my mom gave me the nickname Messy Jesse. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you say somebody specifically get gave you the name. I felt like it was just such an easy rhyme and I was so obviously a mess that it would come from all sorts of different people that would come up with it. They always thought they were so clever to call me Messy Jesse at jobs. I would have like bosses that would be like, "Oh, there's messy Jesse late with his, you know, sloppy expense reports or whatever it was. " and it just sort of like stayed with me for a long time because the messiness it didn't go away. It is part of who I am. I function best kind of with a bit of a mess. So that nickname just sort of kind of stayed with me for a long time because of that. Yeah. How did you feel about it? Not

great. I was undiagnosed so I didn't know about ADHD. All I knew was that everyone around me, parents, my teachers, anyone with any sort of authority in my life, kept looking at me and finding things wrong and telling me like, "Hey, these things are wrong with you. " And me not knowing what to do with that. I'm just a kid trying to figure out how to be I'm trying to be a good, you know, a good son, a good kid, a good student, and all of that. And I didn't know what to fix. And so Messy Jesse in particular was just one of those like, "Hey, something is wrong with you because you're a giant mess. " So much so that we're going to give you this nickname and continue to refer to this anytime you mess up again. It was pretty brutal. Uh didn't feel great. I felt it coming and I almost like tried to get ahead of the joke. So sometimes I would call myself Messy Jesse. Oh yeah. Even though I hated it. I hated the name, but I was trying to like get ahead of what other people are going to say. And if I make the joke, well, it doesn't hurt as much. It still hurts, but much as if someone else said it. I definitely leaned into it somewhat for that reason. I felt like I didn't take myself very seriously. Partly because I was always a mess. Like, it's really hard to feel on top of things or like you've got your stuff together or deserving of respect when your place looks like it does, right? Like if somebody wanted a ride home, like I didn't ever Okay. Hey, I feel like you get a ride home. My decision was never based on like how inconvenient it would be for me to take them home. How many minutes is it going to take to clear out the passenger seat? Yes. And how much embarrassment am I willing to suffer to take this person home? If I could do it like real quick, like then okay, yeah, you can have a ride. If it was going to take me a while and they were just going to be standing there judging me on the sidewalk, no, you can't have a ride home. I'm busy. Like, right. I have some other thing I'm going to or you'd make up some excuse to be like I don't I can't tell you that the reason is just that I'm messy Jesse that's yeah it felt isolating that I was this way and everybody else seemed to be able to organize their stuff and I couldn't. Yeah, that isolating I think is a big part of it. Other people would have a mess occasionally but they didn't get the nickname. Jesse got the nickname for being messy Jesse. I had a situation where I had a teacher that literally would make an example of me when my desk got messy. I don't know if they even do this anymore, but I had when I was going to school, we had desks that had like a lift top thing and there was like an area inside where you could put your books and papers and it was a mess. It was just like a giant kind of like everything was just like disorganized in there. I kind of knew how to navigate it, but it was not organized. And my teacher would get so mad at how messy my desk was that he would come up with creative ways to basically shame me in front of the class. And so a couple of things he did, one day he brought a shovel into class and literally shoveled out my desk in front of the other kids and then made me clean it up and organize it because it was such a mess. Another time he just grabbed my desk and literally held it above his head and shook it and said everything fell out on the floor. I feel like I shouldn't need to say this, but don't do that. Like, if you've got a student in class, if you're a teacher or a parent and you've got a kid who's struggling to be organized, recognize that as the challenge that it is. It's not a choice. It's not like we're doing it on purpose. It's not something you can shame us out of. It's a struggle that we need support with, not shame about. Do you have any

stories about hiding the mess? I did the whirlwind cleanup a lot of the time if people were coming over. You know it. You know. Oh, yeah. Very familiar. So sometimes I would end up finding things like weeks later in really weird places. Like I would find like a dinner plate with like complete with the cutlery like shoved under my bed cuz I'm like, "Oh shoot, somebody's coming over. " Like I don't want the place to be a mess. Part of it is when you have ADC, you're forgetful and you don't realize that you set something down when you set it down and that's how we like find our keys in the fridge. But sometimes we find things in really weird places because we shoved it there in a panic. Uh when I was growing up, I had a bunk bed that I used to share with my brother. And then when I got a little bit older, I moved to my own room, but I kept the bunk bed. And I slept on the bottom bunk. And the top bunk very quickly became the place where I could hide the mess cuz I didn't want to actually clean stuff up. You know, when uh when messy Jesse cleans, he just moves. He moves things around. From ground level, you couldn't see what was up there until I made the mistake one time cleaning my room. It got too high. And my mom noticed that like what is up and she climbed up. There's like dishes and silverware and like there's stuff up there. But then my mom was like that's where that is. It was this whole big thing. It was my go-to place until I went a little too far. Sorry. I'm just like sitting here having an epiphany because you said when messy Jesse cleans, he just moves stuff. Isn't that what cleaning is? Cuz like oh no, what are we supposed to be doing? If there is more to it, I am not privy to that information. And this is why Cass from Clutterbug is coming out to help me declutter next week. Cleaning is partly moving things around, but it's moving things around to where they belong. That's totally true. And I feel like what you often hear is like, "Oh, just put it in its home. Where's its home? " And I think I'm just really bad at coming up with a good home for all of the things. It's kind of like when I take something, I'm like, "Oh, this is really important. I'm going to put it somewhere where I won't forget. In fact, I'm going to pick a weird spot so that I'll definitely remember it. " And what was that weird spot? I knew that I was going to remember it and it's gone forever. One of the things that Cass told me when she saw my walkthrough is like, "Yeah, if you had a home that was twice as big, you would still have too much stuff. " And I don't think that I realized that. So, I think that's part of it is just like having trouble estimating how many things can fit in a space. In my head, I kind of have like four or five go-to like homes where I put things and I have way more stuff than can actually fit in those places. We have like a desk in our living room and I kind of have like one little area that's supposed to be where I can put my stuff and then like one thing will go above. There's like a little drawer where it can go and then there's a spot above and I'll put one thing up there and then two things. And right now there's probably 27 things up in that spot. It's just like it grows. I don't come up with a new home for things and I keep getting new stuff because I love the novelty of a new Amazon box showing up. Yay. And it's a problem. Yeah.

Any advantages to being messy? Oh, I definitely think there are advantages to being messy and I didn't know it at the time, but now I can appreciate it. I've heard that people who write have a really hard time with the blank page and like the pressure of like putting a word on the page and I'm like, you do like I just dump things out. Like I just brained up dump like everything, all the chaos in my head, I just dump it out on paper and then from there I can write. And so there's an advantage to being messy, which is that you're comfortable with the mess. And there are a lot of things in life that require a mess. Even organizing requires a mess on some level. Like you have to be willing to like open the closet and get all the things out and have it be messy. And if you're not comfortable with the mess, that can be really difficult. And it's not for me. Like I'm comfortable with the mess. I'm comfortable with other people's verbal mess. If other people verbally process, I have no problem following. I feel like I've learned tools and strategies that otherwise wouldn't have learned because I had to because of the mess. So I have really great ways of finding what I need even in a mess. And I feel like I I'm pretty creative. like I come up with creative solutions a lot of the time because of the chaos in my brain. People with ADHD are often really good in emergencies because emergencies are chaotic. There's a lot of like moving parts. A lot of people with ADHD really thrive in that environment. Like I remember um one of my early jobs I got a job at Best Buy and my first day was Black Friday and it was like the day that they were giving away TVs. This is back when Black Friday was wild and it was the most chaotic thing ever. It was my best day ever. I lost a job like 3 weeks later, but during Black Friday, I was like employee of the day for that day. I feel like there's this interesting mix uh for me where a lot of stuff in my life is really kind of disorganized and messy and chaotic, but I also love a good project. Um where it takes time and I don't do it regularly, but I'll do a giant project of organizing a thing. And so like when I was younger, it might be like a board game or a card game that I was really into like organizing all that stuff and getting it all perfect. With the book, I had the same thing where I had like a million different ideas and then I would be like, "Okay, let's get everything like put everything on index cards and lay it out and I had this like giant mess of index cards where I was taking this mess of ideas and then just starting to organize it like okay, this and this match up here and that would actually go really good into this part. " And I feel like there's something that I'm I can be really good at organizing and cleaning with a project. Yeah. Just not daily. What type of support isn't

helpful? People cleaning for me is not helpful because then I don't know where things are and I will create quite a bit of a mess looking for them. If someone cleans up my mess for me, the first thing I'm going to do is make rebuild the mess because I can't find stuff. There's the idea of like a memory palace and I feel like I have that but it's not in my head. It's on my desk. It's just like a little memory palace on my desk where I kind of know where things are. I think the problem isn't even so much that I don't know where this thing is. It's I don't know where the important thing is that was next to the coffee cup. And I knew it was really important and now I don't even know what it is to look for. I completely relate to that. It's kind of like if you're trying to drive to the store, but they rearrange the streets, right? I don't know how to get to the store anymore. Helping with them, that can be really helpful. Or like body doubling. Growing up, the only time I ever got my room clean was when my mom finally figured out like, hey, when he has friends over, that's when I should make him clean his room because then they're going to hang out in there and just chat and he'll clean some stuff up while he's chatting with his friend. And that still that is what is effective for me when I'm body doubling. I can actually get stuff done. It's so helpful. If you guys don't know what body doubling is, we have a video about it here. The cost of the mess. What has

it cost you? So, I don't know if everybody knows this, but checks often have expiration dates on it. Yeah. They expire after 90 days or 180 days. The other thing that happens when you notice like a check that has expired. Now, there's all the stuff I don't like to do, like making phone calls and admitting that, hey, this check you sent me, I forgot to cash it because it was buried in my mail pile. And I've left probably thousands of dollars on the table from checks that I forgot about, sometimes expired years ago. like I find I'm like this was 3 years ago. It's real money that would have been really helpful and I just lost it in the mail and forgot about it and that's like a very direct financial cost and I felt too embarrassed to ever get it reissued or whatever and I just lost out on that money. Yeah. Because it's such a reasonable amount of time, right? Like 180 days. Like really you couldn't cash it within 180 days and like then I'm like I don't even know if they have the money still. Like I don't know. Right. Yeah. I've lost out on stuff like that too. But also like opportunities. Yeah. So, once I got a fix it ticket and like I fixed the I don't know the tire or the window or whatever I needed to fix, but like then I lost the ticket, which meant I didn't have the reminder that I needed to then take it to the courthouse and show them that I fixed the thing. And so, I had the opportunity to have my first real adult job ever. I was going to be hired by this copier company. I was going to sell copiers, which I was very excited about. I was going to have my own desk and a company car and all these things. And they ran a background check and I'm squeaky clean. So, I'm like, and then the background check came back that I had a suspended license because I hadn't gotten that fix it fixed. Oh, man. Because I didn't know where it was. Sure. That a lot of people lose jobs because they're messy at work. How has struggling with messiness

impacted your partner and how do you make it work? I just found a partner who is as messy as I was, which is good and bad. Yeah, I was like life hack sort of. There's much less judgment, but also our house is way messier than it would be otherwise. I knew that he was messy. So, when I came out, I was just like, I will just ask one thing. Clear walkways. That's my like minimum standard of living is like the walkways need to be clear cuz otherwise I will be in a hurry and I will trip over something and I will like die. So, clear walkways. Like before I had a baby, it was like me going clear walkways. Like making sure that he was clearing the walkways and now it's him going clear walkways. But also like it stresses him out because I have to have housekeepers come every once in a while to help me do like a reset or it just gets too overwhelming for me. But he has ADHD. So he's also autistic and also has ADHD and things get moved around when the cleaners come. And so it's very stressful for him. It's one of those things where it's like, well, we can't do this ourselves, but also it's stressful to have somebody come in and help us. So like I don't know what to do. But thankfully uh we have um things that help us have a positive relationship regardless of the mess. like paired ADHDers tend to hyperfocus at the beginning of a relationship and then later on we're hyperfocused on other things. So, it's really important for us to have tools to support us in refocusing on our partner and taking care of our relationship, which the paired app does beautifully. There are questions, quizzes, games, very importantly, streaks. My partner is on anund and something day streak at this point. 121. Oh, there's a new feature, answer depth, and it tells you, can you elaborate more? So, if I do like a really short answer, that's not going to be as connecting, right? We want to elaborate. We want to talk more deeply with each other. And so, it's really rewarding. There's this little bar that tells you how deep your answer is and when you've done good, which is nice. It's really nice, actually. It's very motivating. This week has just been really busy. We've been apart a lot and it's been really nice to stay connected, especially because being neurode divergent does present challenges in a relationship. Being messy being one of them. Click my link below to get a 7-day free trial and 25% off paired premium so you can maintain and deepen your connection with your partner. It's kind of a miracle that my wife married me because she saw where I was living before we got married. And I had a roommate at the time and our apartment was a disaster. In the kitchen, we had an area that we called can city because it was all the like leftover soda cans that we just left out. You're naming your piles. I appreciate. We were literally naming uh the piles a mess. Uh so it was bad from the start. She knew what she was getting into. She feels this pressure to maintain our house in a certain way so that if people come over that things are not looking like we have 27 things for this one spot in the house. So what I'm hearing is we're just both really good at Tetris. Oh, I'm so good at Tetris. I love Tetris. I would say that's a constant uh struggle that we're talking about a lot because my messes grow and then she wants me to clean up and then it's hard for because I don't have any where for the things to go and I'm such a visual person. There's a lot of those things I want to leave out in the open. So, it's definitely something that has affect our relationship because it comes up from time to time. if I didn't have these clutter piles that I was dealing with, we would have less arguments. I'm curious how that conversation goes. Like, one of the things that our therapist brought up was about how some arguments are never going to be solved. If you're lucky enough to be married for 50 years, in 50 years, you're probably still going to be arguing about some of those things. Like, those are going to stick with you. But it's about trying to figure out how you can navigate and like, you know, finding compromise. And so for me a lot of times what that is those sprints where actually hosting people and so I'll do a sprint of cleaning up those like three specific areas that are really bad. What helped you get to this

level of self-acceptance? I think the thing that helped me gain the greatest self-acceptance around this is meeting other people with the same struggle. Yes. And being able to talk openly about it, which is what we're doing here and what we're hoping that this will do for you as well. Understanding why we struggle with it was also helpful. Like just reading the research papers and knowing that this is like a legitimate thing that people with ADHD tend to struggle with. Yeah. And also, I mean, the fact that there are great resources like that shows that the problem isn't just me. Whereas growing up, it felt like it was just me. When I found my ADHD, it was just like such a light bulb moment of explaining so many things in my life. And that really helped me to reckon with what I used to feel shame for. And then I don't know like every romantic comedy ever I feel like there's like a girl or a woman that's like yeah I can't find anything and anyway I'm deserving of love. So like that also helps. Most recently um I have felt so vindicated because I have a baby now and do you know what's important for babies? Messy time sensory play. And I'm like I got this. We were working with a feeding specialist. She's like yeah I prefer that they don't even use bibs. Strip her down. Like let her get messy. And I was like, I got this. And so, like, now I'm just delighting in watching my baby get to make a mess and then I have to clean it up, which is the unfortunate part. I am getting so good at cleaning up, having a baby. I will say that. But no, like knowing that it's actually valuable to make a mess and it's something that they're supposed to experience because that's how they learn. That's how they grow. It's how they get comfortable in a mess. Like you want them to be able to get messy. And knowing that, like having it actively be encouraged as a new mom has been so nice. A mess isn't entirely a bad thing. Sometimes it's desirable.

Thank you so much for coming. This is such a great conversation. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This is amazing. I love this. I was so not happy for you, but happy for us to find out that someone else had the nickname Messy Jesse. It was very validating know like it wasn't just me. I think it's a really important topic and it's something that is embarrassing and so a lot of people don't talk about it openly. So, thank you for talking about it with me. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you uh so much for having me. So, if people want to find you, if they want to hear more um insights and wisdom from Jesse J. Anderson, where can they find you? I go by ADHD Jesse on social media, including my YouTube channel. Uh but the best place to go is probably extrafocus. com and that's where I have my weekly newsletter where I talk about ADHD strategies and uh whatnot. So, yeah, extrafocus. com. Thank you so much to our brain advocates and all our Patreon brains for supporting the work that we do so that we can do cool interviews like this. If you would like to see the full interview, it is over on our Patreon. If you want to go support the work that we do, you can see all of the mess of our conversation. Like, subscribe, click all the things, and we will see you next video. Bye, brains. Nailed it. Thank you so much to the Paired app for sponsoring this video. Click my link below to get a 7-day free trial and 25% off paired premium to deepen your connection with your partner.