ADHD Depot: Tools for Leashing Your Potential

Honestly? Yeah. From what I can tell with personal experience anyway. My brain will speedread things by looking for keywords in something and then putting them together in a way that makes sense. However when you're doing this if you encounter something that's unexpected, it can either cause the whole train to derail or the train to just run over that one thing and mangle it so you completely misunderstand what you read.

"You can fuck it up. We can't help."

I was a paramedic back in my 20's and 30's. Constant crisis mode. I am a master of that shit. Clearest I ever am is in complete and utter chaos. That shit breaks your brain even worse though.

I get shit done. But it also accumulates stress & the reason for crisis might not be relevant or sensible. But I guess it floats the goat, and I have no (good) other options.

Thanks, I love and appreciate you homie.

So ADHDers have a problem with object permanence. If we don't see it then it doesn't exist. This happens with people pretty regularly, unfortunately, where if we don't see the person or see something that reminds us of them we can sort of "forget they exist". It's never in an offensive way, our brain just doesn't work. Same with objects.

A good example is that during the Christmas period I made myself a meal. During that meal I had to use the stovetop for a variety of different things. I started to run out of space so I took a hot pot and put it in the oven, saying that I'd clean it with everything else.

That pot was sitting there from like the 28th until yesterday when the oven was turned on. I just forgot it existed. That also applies with things we own. Like I've bought snacks and put them in cupboards and then a day later think I have no snacks and get annoyed. Couple days later I open cupboard, suddenly remember, and hate myself. If I buy stuff I think is neat? Into a random box it goes to never be thought about again until I randomly open the box for something. So I take it out and put it down with other stuff to use. But it goes into a drawer and is immediately forgotten.

Or theres the flipside where instead of forgetting the item you just forget where you put it. Instead of putting it where it should belong, the ADHD brain goes "I must do this in the most convenient way possible to move on to more fun things". So you put it down just wherever is available and forget that information because it's boring and stupid. Then 15 minutes later you're having a panic attack trying to figure out what the fuck you did with it.

Our temporary memory is bad. Memories that are supposed to last a couple hours or a couple days, but not forever, end up lasting a few minutes.

That means if we put something somewhere, we easily forget where we put it and it ends up lost. If that place is in public, that item might be lost forever.

If it's in our own home, it'll show back up eventually, but not when we need it and it can easily end up lost again. I spent a significant amount of time over the summer looking for my bike lock. I found it yesterday while looking for my glove to go skiing.

Having a messy house (also a side effect of symptoms) compounds this by facilitating things going missing.

I like to think of it as having low RAM (and sometimes a random program/thought has a memory leak). It's not that someone just fully and completely forgets they put their food in the (muted) microwave, it's that the task is no longer running because they had to pick up the loaf of bread that fell on the floor or maybe their ponytail needs fixing. There's not enough RAM to run Eat Microwaved Food AND Fix Ponytail. With Fix Ponytail running and ending there's enough RAM to run something else but it has to be manually initiated.

A lot of people with adhd have bad memories. Well a certain kind of memory. Very easy to either forget where something is, or take it with you somewhere and forget you have and then leave it. I've lost so many coats that way.

To add to OP's answer:

I have to put things that need to be attended to somewhere incredibly obvious or else I will forget to attend to it. Like if I have to do laundry but the washer is taken, I have to put the basket in the middle of my doorway so that I literally can't ignore it. Otherwise I won't remember until I'm going to sleep and see the pile of dirty clothes. Or if I want to put off dishes until later I have to set the dirty ones that accumulated on my desk on my staircase or else they just won't get taken to the washer that day lol

Or like, if I have to do something extra at work that's outside of my normal routine, I have to set an alarm/reminder or be hyper-conscious of it without breaking concentration or else I'll just continue on with my normal routine.

They have been misplaced and refuse to identify their new location.

And 70% is kind of a low ball in my case.

There's a part two; Looking for that One Thing, Found that Other Thing and now you don't remember what you were looking for.

They're around here someplace. I think?

For me, they're AWOL. I.e. they still somewhere in my space, but I don't know where, so they're as good as gone until I stumble upon them.

tbf I don't have this one, I know where everything is at all times to an insane level of detail, unless of course anything is moved or I'm trying to get things together to actually use them LOL