ADHD memes

"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.

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