ADHD

It's your day off. You planned to clean. You sit down for a minute and two hours disappear. The apartment is the same.

You have one important email to send. You've written it three times in your head. You've opened the compose window. It still isn't sent.

Someone is talking to you. You're nodding. You lost track of what they were saying about forty-five seconds ago and have been managing the performance of listening since then.

A task you've been avoiding for two weeks takes eight minutes when you finally do it. You knew it would be quick. That knowledge didn't help.

You start organising your desk before starting work. The desk organisation becomes the work. Three hours later the original task hasn't moved.

You're reading a page. You reach the bottom. You registered nothing. You start again. The same thing happens.

A new interest arrives. You spend fourteen hours on it over two days. Three weeks later you haven't touched it and feel a specific kind of shame about that.

You make a list of everything you need to do. The list feels productive. You make it more detailed. The actual tasks still haven't started.

You're in a meeting. Your thoughts drift. You come back. Someone is waiting for your response to a question you didn't fully hear.

You forgot something important that someone told you yesterday. Not because you didn't care when they said it — you did. They think you don't care.

A deadline is approaching. Other people feel pressure and it motivates them. You feel something closer to blankness.

You open a browser to do one specific thing. Forty minutes later you have eleven tabs open and haven't done the one thing.

You need to make a small decision — where to eat, what to work on first. The options don't resolve. You spend longer on the decision than it would have taken to just pick.

You can work for hours when someone else is in the room. The room being empty makes the work feel different even when the task is identical.

You thought you had plenty of time. You looked up and it was gone. This happens often enough that you've stopped trusting your sense of how long things take.

A project is ninety percent done. It has been ninety percent done for two months. The last ten percent doesn't get finished.

You put something down in a logical place and immediately lose it. You've spent more time looking for things this week than most people do in a month.

You interrupt people. Not to dominate the conversation — because the thought will disappear if you don't say it in the moment it arrived.

You perform brilliantly on something you care about and can't seem to produce basic output on tasks that bore you. People call this inconsistency character rather than cognition.

Switching between tasks is harder than it should be. Even switching from something unpleasant to something you want to do has resistance that doesn't make logical sense.

Someone gives mildly critical feedback. Your reaction — internal or external — is disproportionate to what was said. It passes, but not quickly.

You're telling a story and somewhere in the middle you lost the thread and kept talking to find your way back to it. By the end you weren't sure where you started.

You frequently rearrange how you do things — different tools, different workflows, different systems. The new system works for two weeks. Then it's another one.

You intend to sleep at a reasonable time. Something — a thought, a video, a project — catches and you look up and it's 2am. This is most nights.

People have called you lazy. You don't experience yourself as lazy — you experience yourself as stuck. The stuck feeling looks like lazy from the outside.