26.09.2026 Diary XXVI Home, sweet home
For someone with ADHD, home is where the mask comes off and where order has to be built from outside. I wrote about why home matters so much.
26.09.2026 Diary Page XXVI
Home is the only place where you do not have to explain yourself.
Saturday. Today I stayed home, and I was happy to be able to say this sentence: home, sweet home.
Most people use this saying for comfort. For me it means something else. For me home is more than a place to rest: it is the place where the mask comes off.
Why home matters so much
A day spent outside consists of two jobs for someone with ADHD. The first is the job itself. The second is not letting it show that you are managing while you do the job.
This is called masking. Checking three times, leaving early to wait so as not to be late, gathering your attention back by hand when it slips, carrying an extra layer so as not to look disorganized.
When I walk in at night, that second job ends. That is exactly the real reason for the tiredness anyway; I wrote about it in the piece on burnout.
Home is the place where the second job closes. That is why it is not only nice, it is necessary.
The two faces of home
But to be honest: home is also the place where I fall apart the most.
Outside there is a frame. Meeting times, the school bell, the bus departure time, people's gazes. These are a scaffold that comes from outside. At home there is no such scaffold, and the heart of the question of working from home is here: freedom or a trap.
The answer is both. Home is good because it lets you go free, and hard because it lets you go free.
So home being good is not something that happens by itself. It has to be built.
How I build it
What works for me is closer to the idea of a home that functions than to the idea of a beautiful home.
Visibility. What sits in a cupboard is ignored, what sits in the eye is used. That is why the visible place system exists: keys, bag, medication, water.
One list. I do not keep a separate place for the jobs at home. The one-list rule applies at home too, otherwise it becomes a job living on three separate lists.
Few things. Not because I like it aesthetically. Every object means a decision: where it will be put, when it will be cleaned, where it will be found. Few objects, few decisions.
Food being ready. I like cooking, but when the energy runs out in the evening, even things done with love do not get done. As I wrote in the piece on kitchen order, what carries the job is the list being seven lines and not changing.
Sensory adjustment. Light, sound, texture. They look small but they decide the whole day; I covered this in the piece on sensory overload.
Mess and shame
This is the most loaded subject about home. For someone with ADHD, a messy home is not only a matter of order, it comes back as a reading of character.
I read it that way for years. Messy home, messy person. The panic that starts a day before guests are coming.
Today I see it differently. Mess is a sign that a system has exceeded its capacity. It is not a moral matter, it is an engineering matter. I wrote the same thing in the piece on housework: the system gets renewed, the character does not.
This frame does not make cleaning easier. But it changes the sentence I say to myself on the days when cleaning is not done. That was the subject of yesterday's piece too.
What I did today
I did not do much. I did a part, I left a part.
And I noticed this: a Saturday spent at home is not, for me, a "day I did nothing." It is a recovery day. The thing that makes the rest of the week possible.
For a long time I did not take it as a holiday, I took it as laziness. Looking back now, it was a maintenance job.
Home, sweet home. Today I earned this sentence.