I’m a fortunate person, I think. I have wonderful friends, many more than I suspect I deserve. They support me when I’m at the end of my rope, they forgive my foibles and quirks, they occasionally call me on my bullshit when that’s needed (usually gently, and with care), and they are all-round excellent humans.
They are the greatest blessing of my life.
For myself — as a person with ADHD who doesn’t manage time well — the greatest frustration of my life is that there is never enough time to spend with these people. Some dear friends go months – even years – without contact, and then we meet up and it’s like no time has passed at all, but I always regret those gaps of time.
And I don’t prioritise people in any particular way, or in any way that I can articulate. There are people I know are extremely busy, and have weird schedules, and they prefer to be the one who reaches out to me when they have a gap of time for a chat, because if I reached out to them, they’d have to keep saying “Aargh, no, I’m so sorry, I don’t have time”, so I wait. There are some people that I know tend to withdraw into their own world, especially when they’re sad, and I know that they prefer it when I reach out to them.
There are patterns.
I feel genuine anxiety whenever someone makes a complaint about their friend on the general note that “I’m always the one who reaches out, it feels like they don’t care,” because I know I do have these established patterns with some people, and the fact that I don’t reach out to them isn’t because I don’t care, it’s because… well, that’s the pattern. That’s just what we do. Changing social patterns is hard, and remembering that I’m not just ADHD, I’m also autistic, and social patterns are learned under a pressure cooker of misery and anxiety.
And I have friends where we are both used to being the person that others reach out to, and that’s often where things fall through the cracks, and one of us has to turn around and think, “shit, I haven’t heard from them in a while, I wonder how they’re going, I miss them.”
I’m also a person who retreats into myself when I’m depressed and upset, which at the moment I am (severely. It’s… not great). So it is hard to reach out.
But I do feel that, in spite of all the disadvantages of ADHD (yes, it’s a freaking disability, sugarcoating it helps no-one), there are some ways in which we can leverage it to work for us.
We know, in a way that neurotypical people don’t quite grasp, that time slips through our fingers so easily, and we learn the hard way that there is only so much of it. In this post, I use the metaphor of an overpacked suitcase to explain how we deal with time, by trying to fit too much in, and that entire post is deeply relevant here, but it’s quite long, so let’s leave it at the suitcase for now.
We know we will overpack it and panic trying to get the zip done up. We know this will happen. We’ve seen it happen. We’ve tried to avoid it. We’ve got strategies and reminders and alarms to attempt to work around it, but we also know it will happen again, in spite of our best efforts.
The time that we can actually effectively assign to something is more precious than diamonds.
And we don’t prioritise properly, with ADHD. Everything is equally urgent, all the time.
So here’s one thing we can do.
We can deprioritise some people.
That doesn’t necessarily mean moving them down the list, because our list is hazy at best and tends to run “in no particular order”. That’s hard.
We can, however, take them off the list.
That sounds awful, what the heck
This is about social obligations. Bear with me.
There are people in your life (almost certainly) who you don’t particularly enjoy spending time with. Maybe they’re friends of friends, or they’re a part of your social circle, or they’re family members (that happens a lot). You have trouble maybe admitting that you don’t enjoy spending time with them, because perhaps you feel guilty about not liking people.
You are not a terrible person for disliking some people.
Even if that person is perfectly inoffensive and decent. They may just rub you the wrong way. Maybe you have nothing in common. That’s allowed, as long as you’re not a git about it. This can be hard for the ADHDer to accept – we’ve experienced social rejection and censure for being too much, too loud, too intense, for taking up all the air in the room, for being really emotional about weird shit, and that’s even when we’re really, really trying. So we want to forgive other people for whatever foibles or quirks piss us off.
You don’t have to do that. The benefit of the doubt is a kindness, but (like time) it’s a finite resource. If someone’s benign quirks just really get your goat, well, that’s something you might want to be polite about, and we need to understand that “being polite” is not the same as “being obligated to share more than the bare minimum of space with.”
Accepting that we’re allowed to just not get along with someone is hard.
But you’re really not a terrible for not wanting to spend time with someone who treats you badly. Someone who puts you down. Someone who never listens to you or asks how you are doing. Someone who makes snide, back-handed remarks that are just this side of plausible deniability and you can’t safely call them out on it without most onlookers thinking you are the arsehole – but it’s weird and you are not okay with it.
(shout out to that one person who quietly says “I saw that, and it’s a pattern, and I get why other people don’t see it, but wow, that is not okay,” because that person means that we don’t feel like we are (1) arseholes and/or (2) completely imagining things)
You’re not a terrible person for not wanting to spend time with someone who bulldozes your boundaries, takes advantage of your generosity and vulnerability, and expects you to always be available to help them while not ever reciprocating.
(image from Wikimedia Commons)
Look. All friendships, all relationships – they go through an ebb and flow. Sometimes you’re looking out for someone else when they’re going through a rough patch, and they’re crying every time you see them, and that sucks. You don’t enjoy that, but you’re looking after a mate because you love them (which is honestly its own reward, and I am honoured if a friend feels safe to be vulnerable with me). The assumption is that they would do the same for you, that they can lean on you now while everything has them off balance, but when they’re able to haul it together, you can lean on them.
I have one particularly lovely dear friend who finds a sense of self worth and comfort in helping friends, and I’m the same. I remember one time when we were both overwhelmed and drowning, and we stood at a kitchen bench, and we took turns listening to each other, validating, offering perspective if needed, and then swapped around. Because helping made us feel worthwhile. It took us out of our own problems and allowed us to be useful, and to form a human connection with someone we deeply trusted.
This is what I’m talking about. Spending time with this person is never a chore. She will always be on my (poorly prioritised) list. She will never be taken off it. Ever.
But if it is all one-way? All the time?
If you dread seeing someone? If you groan to yourself when you get a message, when you get a call? And not just when they’re going through a rough patch, but… every time?
Or even if it’s not every time, even if they are okay a great deal of the time, but abusive in repetitive ways that form a pattern?
They get off the fucking list.
Time is finite.
Back to the suitcase
Every hour you spend with someone who treats you poorly is an hour you don’t get to spend with the people who love you. I feel this deeply, because I have wonderful friends that I would love to spend more time with. I feel terrible about the friends who fall through the gaps of time, somehow, because I do still love them, I just can’t make time work for me. If I were seeing The Abusive Parent (whom I do not speak to), that would be a significant proportion of time that I wouldn’t be able to spend with other friends.
I already don’t have enough time.
I already feel like I need to fit everyone in my time-suitcase, and I can’t do it.
And this is where ADHD helps, because my frustration and anxiety about time means that I have become a fucking miser about it. Where I have time, I hoard it like Scrooge McDuck.
wait how is it night time already
Because I have ADHD, and I can spend forty minutes hyperfocusing on social media, or a video game, or weeding the front yard, or doomscrolling, or just – I don’t even fucking know what I was doing with that time, how is it after 2pm already, FUCK – and that means I have so much less productive time to hand out.
If I were still speaking to The Parent, I would deeply resent that time. At best, I would spend that time being talked over and ignored; at worst, I would be subject to attempts to make me feel guilty for not calling more or visiting, to abuse, to insults, to accusations of lying about abuse, etc.
And I’d be thinking: “You know what? I could be spending this time doing literally anything else, but at a deep level, I could be spending this time with someone who doesn’t treat me like an emotional punching bag.“
DO I MAKE MYSELF FUCKING CLEAR
(Picture by Ivan Samkov on Pexel)
Family members are a particularly wriggly canister of worms, because we have an overwhelming sense of social obligation towards them, but in so many cases, they assume they have a right to be absolute arseholes. “Home is where they have to take you in,” yes, but it doesn’t count if they make you miserable when they do. It doesn’t count if they attach strings to everything they offer.
I’ve seen healthy families where people are accepting of one another’s foibles, and mostly they enjoy seeing each other from time to time, and there is a deep bond, and enduring love. It’s hard to see that sometimes, knowing that I missed out on that.
And I’ve seen families where people step up again, and again, and again, to be that emotional punching bag, because they think that’s the right thing to do, that’s the polite thing to do, that’s only morally acceptable choice.
And I think, “Mate, life is short. Do you have the time to waste on these people?”
Now, I recognise my own biases here. I know that what I consider waste won’t look that way to everyone. I know that I have a strong refusal to accept shitty behaviour. “That’s just how they are” absolutely does not hold any weight with me. If the price of admission is that I get yelled at, or jerked around, or abused, I don’t need to see the damn show.
There are other shows to see.
ADHD has taught me to be careful with time, because so much of it will just run away from me. When I see a friend, or call a friend, I want an open chunk of time in my calendar to just be with them. I want to let go of everything else and just be in that space with my friend. That’s where I will put the time, when I can.
It’s sad and frustrating when I can’t do that. It’s upsetting that I already don’t have enough time to tell the people I care about how much they mean to me, or say “let’s have a movie night or go out for dinner or a hike or maybe just a phone date or whatever, it doesn’t matter, what matters is you and me, honey!” It’s deeply distressing that I find it so hard to reach out and suggest those things when I’m in the mental state that I’m in now.
The notion that I should extract some of that time and spend it on someone who makes me feel bad? That’s some bullshit.
The Advantage of the Disadvantage
You know that time is precious. You know that people are precious. You know that you can’t prioritise, that you can’t decide what’s more urgent or immediate unless it’s right in front of you. You know that you can’t guarantee time will end up where you want it to, you can’t make it just stay where it’s damn well put.
And this causes so much strife and difficulty for us.
But this teaches us on a deep level that time we spend on one thing can’t be spent on someone else.
Time we spend with some people comes at the cost of time spent with other people.
Think about the people in your life.
Who do you want to spend time with?
And who can you let go of?
Nothing if not verbose 