“I’ll remember” is the ADHD demon talking. You won’t remember. Write it down.
bold of you to assume i’ll remember where i wrote it, or even that i wrote it
Visual exhaustion is another symptom of ADHD, which means that if we see something enough times (or we see enough instances of something), it fades into background noise and we fail to notice it.
This is why a lot of ADHD people can stand living surrounded by mess/clutter, because it’s just visual background noise to us. We don’t even notice it anymore.
So if we write something down and see the note stuck up somewhere a lot – or if we write a LOT of somethings down and have a lot of notes hanging around – then we’re even less likely to think of/remember the thing because it’s just part of the scenery now.
ADHD is the Catch-22 of brains.
A very good thing to know about ADHD. Don’t fall into the trap.
A lot of folks in the comments are talking about writing on themselves or setting phone/calendar reminders. Your mileage may vary on those. You may also want to consider ways to set a habit of referring back to a planner or similar every day/hour.
You have instructions written down. You don’t need them, but you check them anyway. Somehow they’re different from what you remember. Have they changed since you tucked the paper in your pocket?
You realize that you’ve lost your train of thought. You can’t remember what you were thinking before. There is only your present thought, now a loop of panic at your lost memory.
You stop in the middle of a room. Why are you here? Which room did you come from? You leave the room and remember what you were going to do. You walk back into the room. Why are you here?
You bring up an inside joke with a friend. They look at you blankly. They do not remember this joke. But you were there when I made it, you argue. They were not. They are not the friend you are thinking of. You realize it was your other friend, from work instead of high school, with blond hair instead of brown, tall instead of short. You do not know how these two friends are so similar in your mind.
You refer to every experience as happening “the other day.” Was it three years ago or yesterday? You try to remember context clues. Time is not real.
Someone asks you for an important piece of information. You have not thought about it since you saved it on your computer, labelled very clearly. You search through your files. It is not there. You find it days later by accident, labelled with a cryptic set of codes. You don’t know why you would label it this way. No one else uses this computer but you.
You are running late. You are always running late.
You have lost something. You check everywhere. You check everywhere again. Someone tells you to think of when you last had it. You don’t tell them that is the problem.
You reach the end of the page. You can’t remember what you just read.
100% accurate
THIS IS TOO FUCKING REAL
Your friend says something. You agree. “Last time I said that you disagreed with me”. You don’t remember ever talking about this before.
You watch a movie for the first time. Half way through, the scenes become familiar and you remember how it ends. Frustrated, you watch a movie you know you’ve seen three times before. You don’t remember this character, who is he?
You have a great idea while driving. You spend the next minute holding on to that idea. This happens four times over the course of the drive. You arrive home with no clue that anything has been forgotten.
A friend asks you “have I told you this before” and you say no. Half way through you realise they have told you but you are too embarrassed to tell them you had forgotten because it’s an emotional story. The story goes for too long. You grow impatient. The next time they ask you “have I told you this before?” You still say no. You have no memory of this conversation.
Apparently some people can have a thought like “I need to do this” and then they actually have no problem getting up and doing it. What a weird way to live, how strange, wonder what that would be like.
Fake Benevolence 