I was diagnosed with adhd as a young child, and still very often forget stuff. My short term memory can be terrible and I often immediately lose a thought or forget an idea after just a couple of seconds.
However, I’m often able to recall an idea by going back to what I was doing, which is something I never hear other people with adhd talk about. Sometimes all it takes is going back to the visual that triggered the thought or reading back a couple of sentences. This usually doesn’t take longer than ~10 seconds. Other times I have to retrace my thought process, which can occasionally take up to a minute… If it takes any longer, then the thought is likely to be lost forever and I always feel terrible when it happens. At times I randomly remember something days later, even though it had felt like the thought was truly lost forever.
Is this common among folks with adhd? I only ever hear people talking about forgetting, and never about remembering.
Absolutely. I often find that re-tracing my steps makes the thought come back. It makes me wonder if the same set of stimuli would make me have the same thought even eg. a month later
I can’t remember the specific examples (surprising nobody), but I have had at least a couple occasions where I found traces of something I’d done that showed me I did actually react that exact same way some while previously and forgot about it entirely. In one case, a friend stopped mid conversation to say, “Wait. Haven’t we had this exact conversation before?,” and I while it wasn’t as concrete as finding my own evidence, I was pretty sure he was right.
It’s almost like a coping mechanism, even if I don’t do it intentionally. My life is a book, but at any given moment I might not know what happened on the last page or three. So I have to just figure it out and act how I would act even when I’m clueless.
Haha yes. It’s sad how predictable this implies we are.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one! I feel like what you’re describing has kind of happened to me before under certain circumstances. I can’t seem to recall a specific example, though :(
So say im scrolling through my gallery, and a specific sequence of pictures makes me have a thought, which I try to remember, but soon forget. If I go back and look at those pictures again soon enough, they usually re-trigger the forgotten thought.
That’s exactly how it goes for me! You’ve made me wonder if I’m actually remembering a thought or if my brain somehow just reconstructs a thought that has a similar vibe. I guess there really is no way to find out. I don’t even know what I’m talking about at this point lol.