You're viewing a single thread.
Okay wait... Is this strictly an ADHD thing? I do this all the fucking time. Like, I go through this mind palace thing where I hunt down my every single action with that object and play "Where's the stupid place I left my wallet this time?" In my brain.
But I don't see where I put the wallet, just places I've been with the wallet until I'm in the right place and my brain clicks. Like walking through a doorway and remembering what I was going to do.
Most things you read about mental disorders and even illnesses are in all of us in very small portions, but it gets diagnosed as a condition when it starts to inescapably condition your life. To hit a modern definition of a disorder, you (or rather a psychiatrist) need to confidently tick several boxes.
I'd recomend to read about ADHD, people's stories and lifehacks that can be useful anyway, without jumping to assumptions just yet.
Well, I do have a diagnosis. I appreciate you providing the insightful take on the process though. I just thought this was another instance of me just being forgetful.
Hard to de-condition myself from thinking about myself in a neurotypical fashion and recognise my limitations are real.
Hehe, I didn't get it from your comment.
I can't say a strong yes since I'm not a professional, but it's common to me too. Thinking about that from a programming perspective, we all have short-term memory (e.g. RAM in PCs) where we write tasks, things, impressions we need now. It's limited in volume\blocks, so when we push one another thing in, it takes something else's place, and past things inevitably gets overwritten, unless they went the long-time memory road. What's left are traces and parts beyond recovery, usually a saved meta log of your thoughts\intentions, some unique emotions and visions, or something that you saved in another sources (e.g. you interlink where you lost your keys by remembering what other thing you did at the moment). You comb these together and construct either a list of timestamps or a blurry 3d scene in motion of significant actions and details, and work from here.
It is, as I know, natural to everyone. It becomes an ADHD thing when inputs are that frequent you don't stop overwriting important stuff with first, second, third thing you now focused on, or try to reactualize lucky survivors by writing all your memory with them.
I haven't thought much about that when my life was slow and boring, but as it got to it's speeds now, the rhytm I'm actually thrive in intellectually, losing things or forgetting stuff becomes too much apparent, compared to my more NT colleagues.
Take it as my own personal perspective and nothing else.
That's not what this is about, i. e. it's not about retracing your steps. That's common for everyone.
It's about remembering the feeling you had when you stashed the item away, often knowing, at that moment, that the place you picked is woefully inadequate for storing this particular object, all while being fully aware that your mind will not be able to make the connection later on and you will end up searching for the object, with none of your usual coping mechanisms suitable to guide you.
That particular feeling is then recalled later in a moment of despair, often when the need to retrieve the item is greatest, and accompanied by a certain, ironic amusement looking at the events that led you there, with no one to blame but yourself.
Yeah... That's just about the feelings and experiences I tend to have.