For my entire life, I have been labeled as lazy.  Mostly because I am disorganized, but also because I have always been seen as "not a hard worker".  When I got pregnant, my father told my in-laws and myself that he hoped my labor was hard, so I could actually know what it was like to work at something.  He also told them he hoped I stayed married to their son, because I quit everything I try.  

As a kid, my parents always said I never did chores or cleaned my room.  Which was blatantly untrue, as I did do the chores I was asked to do, even though the second part is true, because I did organize my room, but it was an organized mess, so why would I want to clean it and not know where my stuff was?  I was content in my mess.  And for some reason my mother thought that a) by picking on me for it, it made her feel better about her hidden messes, and b) it was something she could use against me to shame me to her friends and our family.  "Have you had your shots yet?" was her go to question to anyone venturing near my room.  As though saying it for years on end wasn't enough to make anyone want to scream.  

But the message was clear: my mother was so ashamed of how my room looked that she would be willing to embarrass me just so she it didn't look bad on her.  

See, my mother wasn't clean in the least.  She was a closet hoarder.  She shoved everything into drawers and closets, until they were bursting at the seams.  She had zero idea of how to organize, but on the surface, everything looked put away and bare.  I mean, minus the fact that our house was completely filthy growing up.  It was like she was too busy smoking and drinking with my father to bother cleaning the carpets or washing the nasty walls.  You had to wear shoes in my house, or else your socks or feel would turn black in a few minutes.  And it smelled.  Like cat piss and thirdhand cigarette smoke.  But my room was the thing to be embarrassed of.  Even though my room wasn't dirty, just messy, and it didn't smell bad at all (I was the only person lucky enough to have wood floors and not carpet).  

She is the biggest hypocrite on the face of this earth, though then again, what narcissist isn't?  

Anyways, because my room was messy and I was more of a dreamer than a doer, I was labelled as completely lazy.  Never mind if my parents were raking the yard, I'd come out to help and they'd go inside to drink and leave me to finish it (and I always did).  Never mind I mowed both the front and back yards myself as I got older (which took two hours).  Never mind every time my mother left the house I'd clean the entire house for her (and when she'd come home instead of saying thank you, she'd say "You left streaks on the hall mirror", as if she never did).  Never mind I'd do hours and hours of homework every single night (in high school) and could not do chores, even if I had wanted to.  Never mind I was never asked to wash the dishes, not once, or do laundry (though I taught myself how when I was in middle school because she kept ruining my clothes--and never let her wash my clothes again).  Never mind I taught myself how to install doorknobs, fix electronic stuff around the house, and learned to build things.  Never mind all that shit.  I had a messy room and didn't finish a lot of the projects I started because I had undiagnosed ADHD.  So I was fucking lazy.  

My father died believing this about me.  He also died never apologizing to me for being a total asshole for most of my life.  And my parents belief that I was a lazy filtered over into my adult life, with a messy house and my first husband used to call me lazy, too.  Never mind he never once lifted his chubby little fingers to do shit, like vacuum, dress his children, or do the laundry.  It was my home life all over again.  But that's what we seek out, those of us who grew up in toxic households.  We seek out more of the same toxicity, because that's all we know.  And not to mention, the entire time my ex shamed me calling me lazy, so was my mother, who had a key to our house and barged in whenever she liked, screaming at me about the state of my house.  What about her house?  It smelled like piss and farts until my father died.  And then she used his insurance money to renovate the house.  Why didn't she think my father, who paid for our house, who's name was on the deed, wouldn't want to see his house livable when he was alive?  What good was doing that after he died.  But I digress, because we're talking about a narcissist here, and nothing they do ever makes any sense.  

So I had it coming at me from all sides.  Getting called lazy from this way and that.  

And I had come to believe that they were all right.  I mean, if my mother called me lazy, my father called me lazy, my husband called me lazy, and his parents, too, then how was I not?  

Turns out, I am just disorganized because I have ADHD, which means I have horrible executive functioning skills.  AND I have found out, at the age of forty-four, I AM NOT FUCKING LAZY.  Not in the least.  Yes, I tend to put things off (another executive functioning issue), but when I do something, I do the shit out of it.  I built railings for my mother on the back porch, so she wouldn't fall off.  I didn't have any plans, I just came up with an idea and did it.  I created a HUGE garden this past summer, and many of the plants I grew from seed inside the house.  I even had a schedule that I made for each plant, knowing when they would best start sprouting and whatnot.  Could a lazy person do that?  I also manage all of our finances, build savings for the house (which we always end up spending because shit breaks), and am in charge of building everyone's credit scores.  I also create content for my various blogs, almost daily, and I finished FOUR around three-hundred page memoirs in a year last year.  Before, with writing fiction, I couldn't finish one book in a year, and now I am writing machine.  I also do the meal-planning for the house and I am the main cook, as well.  I take all the pets to the vet, get their meds and give them to them when needed.  I cut everyone's hair in the house, including my own, as well as our two dogs who need to be groomed (I am so much better at human hair LOL).  I do 90% of the cleaning, though my mother does dishes (unfortunately, because she's horrible at it), and I usually rewash them most days.  I organize the garage and the basement on the regular, and I've been systematically downsizing our belongings since moving in here in 2020.  I am in charge of my mother's twenty-something medications, and in charge of making everyone's doctor's appointments.  I am not completely organized, but I am so much better than I was when I was younger, as I have been on a mission since 2016 to learn how to do better (and Clutterbug.me has helped me soooooooo much!).  But my lack of type-A organizations skills doesn't make me fucking lazy.  It just makes me disorganized.  That's it.  My kitchen is organized as fuck.  My bedroom is getting there.  My basement is....well, it's where I have all my creative shit I do, so it's let's just pretend that doesn't exist.  But still, I am getting it organized and cleaned out, so that's something.  

Personally?  I think I am one of the least lazy people I know.  This dawned on me yesterday when I was cleaning out my basement. I worked my ass off to get done what I did, and I thought to myself "I am a hard worker, dammit.  Who the hell thinks I am lazy??"  I've always been hard worker, even as a child.  So why on earth did they ever think I was lazy?  Mostly, it was due to the fact that I was being judged by narcissists and other toxic adults, who had no idea how to be adults in the first place.  Even if you aren't a hard worker, that doesn't mean you're lazy, either.  You have better things to do, like use your mind to do more important things.  But I am a hard worker.  And I also am a dreamer, who likes to come up with ideas and projects almost daily.  I don't always get them done, and some I never start.  But that's the dreamer part of my personality.  There is nothing lazy about dreaming, no matter how many people tell you there is.

Laziness is not a real word, do you know that?  It's a word that signifies someone who doesn't do things the way others want them to do those things in a time frame that is acceptable to the person making the judgement.  But that's all it is: a judgement.  Nothing more.  We humans put shit off for many different reasons.  One being anxiety and/or depression.  I put off taking a shower for two entire weeks once because my anxiety was so bad it terrified me to do so.  Granted, I washed myself, I was clean, but the idea of being boxed into a little space just bothered me to no end.  Another reason we put shit off is because we don't feel good.  I have POTS, which is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (look it up) and sometimes I go through periods of time where I cannot leave my bed at all due to dizziness or adrenaline surges or migraines.  Sometimes we put shit off because we just plain forget.  If you have ADHD, you sure know what that's like.  It sucks to forget so much, and there are strategies to help us, but even so, they don't always work.  And we still forget.  My mother's biggest issue with me is my forgetfulness, in which she makes about my laziness.  As though me forgetting means I am too dumb to get things done.  Never mind all the other shit I get done.  I'd go to the grocery store last year and get her everything on her list, as well as my list, too.  And she'd say "You forgot my cigarettes" rather than just say thank you.  She doesn't do that anymore, as I have trained her better, but it wasn't that long ago she was still getting on my case about being lazy.  

But the biggest reason people look "lazy" on the outside is due to poor executive function.  Here is one great video on this to help you understand what executive functioning is all about: 

What is Executive Dysfunction? | Kati Morton - YouTube

But there are loads more great videos on the subject, just search it. 

I can't believe it took me until yesterday for me to realize just how NOT lazy I am.  I can be lazy in certain moments, but there is always reason for me not wanting to do something.  Sometimes there is no good reason, but hey, we're all allowed to be actually lazy at times.  The rest of the time, we actually have good reasons for not getting stuff done.  And fuck anyone who wants to call you lazy.  And fuck all those assholes in my life who led me to believe I am lazy. 

Yesterday, as I stood in my basement, I thought to myself "I hope my father, if there is any sort of afterlife, realizes just how much he fucked me up with that label.  And that I forgive him for it, because he was a child in a man's body.  And so what I do care what little children think of me?  Unless, they're my kids.".  And he wasn't my kid.  If he was still alive, he'd surely be my child, because I'd be stuck taking care of him.  But most likely, I would have had nothing to with either of my parents by this point, if he had survived until now.  I hate my father died so young, but at the same time, I am so much better off without him in my life.  So very, very much.  But I have nothing to prove to him.  Nor my mother.  They are both little brains in big bodies who think they are grown.  And they're just not.  

And I am not who they told me I was.  I never was.  And now it's time for me to change my mindset about who I am and what I am capable of, without their judgements.

Finally.