Confessions of an ADD'er Part 1: Forgetful Jones

Author's Note: An "ADD'er" is a person with Attention Deficit Disorder. These essays are from my experiences as an adult with ADD.

Hello.

It's very nice to meet you. What was your name again? Please don't be offended; I'm terrible with names. You see, the moment that you tell me your name, I've got it. It's there, right in front of my brain. And in the next instant - the next microsecond of time - it's gone. Gone like it never existed. Gone like we never even met.

I've read that I should use memorization techniques like repeating your name back to you as I shake your hand. I do.  I'll even repeat your name to myself a few times in my head as we make polite conversation, but the polite conversation is sabotaging my efforts to remember your name. I'll say your name to myself as I'm walking away from you. But the instant my attention gets drawn to another person or thing, your name is as good as gone.

But sure, you say, lots of people have trouble memorizing names. You may even have trouble memorizing names yourself. And you'd be right. But we've now reached the spot where “normal” stops, because this isn't limited to just names. It also includes directions. How to get to the shopping mall? Easy. It's down this road to Front street, turn left, then go about a mile and a half and turn right on Elm. You can't miss it. Only I will miss it  because as you're telling me the directions, they are entering a bottomless pit of information. The moment you stop talking, it's as if you never even opened your mouth. Why I even bothered asking you in the first place is a mystery.

The problem also exists with instructions. My boss would tell me a list of things to do. Nothing extravagant; just three simple tasks. Thing one, thing two and thing three. By the time thing three leaves his mouth, thing one is already hopelessly lost and thing two is in the process of vanishing. I make a desperate mental effort to recover thing one and hang onto thing two, which means that I never even hear him say thing three. I walk out of his office, confident that I haven't a clue as to what he wanted me to do, and if I just started working for the company, I have no idea what his name is.

Ever have a moment where you get up  and go to another room to do something or get something and then forget what it was you were doing? Normal, right? Sure. Only to me it happens over 70% of the time, and I don't even have to leave the room for it to happen. I don't even have to get up. I'll know that I was going to do something, but the something has vanished. I'll open the pantry to get a teabag -- with my teacup in my hand -- and stand in front of the pantry like a complete idiot while I try to remember what it was I was doing. The phrase that most often leaves my mouth is, “Okay, what am I doing?” I utter that phrase nearly a dozen times a day.

"Honey-Do" lists? Gone. Very Important Things that I MUST do? A fuzzy haze. What happened yesterday, the day before or the week before? You're kidding, right? I almost never know what day of the week it is, and my perception of time either drags like watching the second hand tick by in school while waiting for dismissal, or zooms by so fast that I wonder why it's getting dark so early.

I'm not saying that I forget everything, because I don't. But unless it has a particularly strong meaning or fascination to me, or it was a particularly strong stimulus, it may as well never have happened. The memory is in there. I know it is because if I sit myself down and make myself think -- hard -- I can catch a glimpse of what it is I'm trying to remember. Not the entire memory; just little flashes that pop in and out of my head.

I can generally remember things I have to do while I'm doing them, but only while I'm concentrating on doing those things. Consequently, I HATE being disturbed or distracted from what I'm trying to accomplish because I know that once I stop working on a task to do something else, it's extremely hard to go back to my stopping point because I will have forgotten where I was.

Writing things down certainly helps, but unless I write down everything, including what it is I'm writing down, why its important and what I need to do with this tidbit of information, its almost useless to me. A phone number and a name is useless. I need a phone number, a name, who this person is, when and why I need to call them. Experts say that writing things down helps you remember them because it makes you think about it multiple times, which is great, but I tend to write things down so I won't have to rely on my memory. Once it's written down, it vanishes from my head.

I used to carry around a little notepad so I could jot stuff down as necessary. It worked out rather well, but I stopped using it because handwriting is such a chore. It's also dreadfully slow; especially when you add in the need to include context information. I would frequently forget the details of what I was writing down as I wrote it, simply because it was taking so long. Having a PDA helped out quite a bit, as it allowed me to quickly jot things down and organize the information. Sadly, PDAs have lost their fashion-trend status and are no longer manufactured. You either have to spend lots of money on a "smartphone," or get a cheap "digital organizer" with much less functionality. My current phone has note-taking capabilities, but it's limited to 140 characters per note - the size of a text message or Tweet. And I can't organize the information - which makes it useless. Very handy for grocery lists, though. . .

Forgetfulness is just the tip of the iceberg that is my daily ADD experience. There are many other challenges and frustrations that I and other ADD'ers deal with every single day.  I'll go into those experiences in future "Confessions of an ADD'er." Up next: The Attention Deficit part of ADD.