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I see a lot of people joking about the adhd thing of "I have a appointment/phone call at 3pm, guess I won't do anything all day!"
But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.
Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!
I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.
Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.
Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)
And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.
You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.
So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?
My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.
(and that's not even getting into the secondary effects. If you know that having an appointment ruins your whole damn day, you're going to avoid them. Even when it's things like "going to that party" or "meeting your friends for a drink/game" or "going to a movie with that cute girl from your math class". Things you should enjoy. Things that'd help you be social. Things that make you feel human.)
All of this. But also: you can use this information once you have it.
One of the biggest breakthroughs for me in living more comfortably with my adhd happened years before I was actually diagnosed, when I finally grasped the meta concept that my brain doesn’t understand time. That I could not trust myself to make estimates of how long something would take, especially “low value” tasks like commuting to work (I mean, it wouldn’t be FAIR for it to take more than, oh, five minutes, right?) or “high value” takes that absorb me (I reeeeallly want to work on that craft project, I can finish it up in five minutes and then do the other stuff, right?
So I started timing everything.
Seriously. I timed my journey to work from front door to desk, and I wrote that number down. It took a few goes, because I forgot to check the timer when I arrived the first couple of times, but once I had a number, I added ten minutes. Then I subtracted that total from the time I needed to arrive at work.
Then I wrote that new time down and said, “this is the time I need to leave the house to go to work”, and set an alarm every day for that time.
The alarm helped, but more than anything it was the act of doing the cold hard numbers calculation. Of looking at that time (8.20 AM if you’re wondering) written down and learning it like a New Fact, visualising it in my head: 8.20 is when I leave the house for work. Even if my brain is whispering that SURELY that’s too early.
Then I did the same thing for a bunch of other stuff. Other journeys. The washing up. Having breakfast. And over time I got two things out of it:
1. I amassed a little collection of Time Facts that I don’t have to think about any more because I’ve learned them by heart. I know what time to leave the house to get to the appointment because it’s maths I’ve already done, I just have to grab the appropriate number from my mental list.
2. I got better at estimating time in general, because I could compare known times to new ones (do I think this task takes as long as the washing up? Longer? Shorter?)
3. The combination of 1 and 2. slowly gave me back a sense of trust in myself. I didn’t have to be in waiting mode all the time because I knew that I had a concrete time when I had to leave for X, and I would often set an alarm for it, and that until then I could let go and get on with things.
It doesn’t work perfectly or fix everything. I am still very familiar with “can’t do anything because I have a thing at 3”. There are still times I get too absorbed or forget an alarm or drastically underestimate how long something takes. But overall, just having the basic self knowledge of “I can’t instinctively estimate time so I have to do it by recording hard data and memorising that” was a game-changer. I hope it helps someone else.
(And if it doesn’t, remember that you’re fighting against the current on this one, and it’s not your fault if you can’t get far upstream. This is a “here is something that worked for me” post, not an “anyone could get past this if they tried” post.)
Please retire the "we are made of stardust" phrase I am so tired of it
Stars are made of flesh
I change my mind bring back the original phrase
misfit-toy-haven