Narrating the ADHD Brain

Erin: You often say “my ADHD brain”, can you describe or narrate what it’s like to be in your brain?

Jeff: One big thing is a surplus of attention – not a deficit. That’s a misnomer. It’s too much attention, being interested in everything, pulled in a million directions. Ping ping ping ping ping!

Another part is “time blindness.” The gift of ADHD is you can easily come back to the present. The problem is, you come back to the present stressed about the zillion things you forgot to do. Because your capacity to plan is poor, and you may have challenges with short-term memory, and be bad at estimating how long something will take. Time blindness comes up in so many ways – it’s not just losing track of time and missing appointments. It can also be hard to locate yourself in time – to remember the past, to position yourself in your own memories. If someone asks me, “hey, remember that time at university when we did this?, even if I could remember, it would be hard to place the year.

Another aspect is sensitivity. Painful emotional sensitivity, where it can be hard to exist inside big feeling states. Also, sensory sensitivity, where certain sense gates are really challenging. In my case I feel vulnerable when there’s a lot of noise. Or soft light touch makes me cringe. I also have intense interpersonal sensitivities – like “rejection sensitivity dysphoria,” where if I feel like I’ve failed someone it’s a knife in the chest. I can feel it for days.

ADHD folks are famous for the good side of all this too. Sensitivity mixed with a labile attention span often means high creative capacity. You’re both noticing lots of fine details and also jumping around making connections. Another positive is a kind of exuberance. I don’t stay in my bad moods long. You get refreshed by the moment and psyched about the next thing. Can make you fun at parties. I should say that I’m talking about my particular presentation of ADHD, which is more the impulsive energized type. Sarah is more of the daydreamy type. There’s diversity even within a single neuro-type. Although she’s also fun at parties. 

Also there seems to be a high percentage of neurodiverse folks in activist and advocacy communities. That could be part of the sensitivity. When something’s happening that’s unfair, either in our lives, or in the larger world, we can be hypersensitive to those injustices. It’s hard to go on with business as usual.

But I don’t want to romanticize the pluses. All of these things are also extremely agonizing. A lot of the abject suffering I went through in my life came from functioning in this way without the support and understanding of how I was.

-       ADHD adult, Jeff Warren, from an interview with Erin Oke in Home Base with Jeff Warren blog post

What does your ADHD brain feel like?

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