binary

[dragonlady7]

if i knew how to get a diagnosis without picking up a phone i'd do it, but, alas, instead i'll fret over my phone for another ten years

via https://ift.tt/3abPuAF

it is incredibly sweet how many of you saw my “and taxes are due April 15th” wibble and wrote to me reassuring me about the tax deadline while nobody picked up on the really astonishing issue there, which is that somehow, somehow in (hang on i need a calculator what year is it) 36 years of having a little sister I have never once managed to train myself that her birthday immediately follows Tax Day. Not once! My brain refuses to recognize the pattern 15, 16 as sequential. They’re two totally different things. Her birthday is not the 15th, thus it is not time when I see that. Her birthday is the 16th, which is not a day I had looked at, and thus didn’t exist.

See I have the weird ADHD time blindness thing where time is a binary. It is either Time, or it is Not Time. I do not have a mechanism, not intrinsically, for telling if the status of Not Time is before or after Time; this used to cripple me as a child, meaning to get out of bed at 6:00, and at 5:59 it was Not Time, and at 6:01 it was Not Time, and– anyway my older sister would pound on my wall and it was a whole resentful Thing.

As an adult I am a compulsively punctual person; I am 5-15 minutes early for every obligation. Because I manually reckon the math and count out the time I should leave to be there for a thing, and then I add in a big healthy margin, and then I’m so anxious about it that I leave the very instant the calculated leaving time enters my awareness.

But. Yeah. I still understand it as Time or Not Time and if it’s Not Time I don’t have any real subroutines to be like “bruh you’re late” except the ones I’ve manually kludged, which work great in most circumstances to give me Screaming Anxiety about it (and for a while I worked with a chronically hours late to work coworker who was anxious about shit and oh my god we nearly killed each other I could not handle it) and anyway that’s how I survive.

But there are holes in it, like me recognizing that a landmark date occurs immediately following another landmark date and so preparing for one ought to clue me in to prepare for the other.

Nope! Doesn’t work like that. Anyway Farmsister’s getting booze probably. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[harpers_child]

I forgot my husband's birthday! It just happened yesterday. I forgot it existed. We've been together for like 15 years and were friends for like a decade previous to that. He's my best friend. I forgot it. I didn't buy him anything. I'm a terrible wife. (He understands I'm severely time blind and is cool with late presents.)