ADHD, Forgetting and the Cost of Living with Time Blindness
The ticket’s already under the wiper before you’ve even reached the car. You know before you’re close enough to read it.
You check the time. Not the actual time, the time you were meant to be back by. Forty minutes gone. Maybe more.
Somewhere in that gap, the meter had been quietly running down while you were doing something else entirely. A conversation that caught you. A ‘just five more minutes’ that became many more. Time slipping past without asking permission.
If you’re ADHD, this scene might be familiar. Not the parking fine specifically, though maybe that too, but the shape of it. Time disappearing. Something important held for a moment and then, without any warning, gone.
It isn’t only the money. The fine stings, obviously, but it’s rarely the only thing that stays with you; what might also stay is the “not again.”
“I let someone down.”
“I forgot the appointment I wouldn’t forget this time.”
“I’m explaining myself, apologising. Again.”
Caught in the familiar feeling of failing at something that seems to come so easily to everyone else.
I wonder how many people are quietly carrying a tally of these moments. Each one small on its own. Building into something bigger.
That “not again” is doing a lot of work. It isn’t really about the parking meter or the appointment or the missed call. It’s about a pattern that keeps repeating, no matter how much you care, how much you want to get it right, how many good intentions you started the day with.
I hear a lot of ADHD clients describe this same thing. Not carelessness. Not a lack of caring. A brain that simply didn’t hold onto something, not because it wasn’t important, but because something else took over in that moment and there wasn’t room for both.
That’s hard to explain to someone whose brain works differently. It can sound like an excuse, even when it’s utterly true.
For many, scaffolding is built instead. Timers. Alarms. Apps that ping. Partners, colleagues, friends who’ve learned to send that second text, the “you still coming?” that isn’t really a question, more a lifeline you’ve come to rely on.
There’s relief in that scaffolding. For some, there can also be a quieter cost which picks up on neurotypical expectations. A sense of judgement from yourself or others of needing to be reminded again, can feel like its own kind of failure, even when the reminder is exactly what enabled you to show up.
Perhaps the timers and the reminders and the people who text twice aren’t signs that something isn’t working. Maybe they’re the shape your support takes in a world mostly built around a different kind of memory. They enable your brain to do what it does well, without asking it to hold onto everything the way someone else’s might.
There’s permission in that. You don’t need to arrive at the same place the same way everyone else does. Your way is allowed to look different.
The meter will still run out sometimes. The reminders will still be needed. But the story you tell yourself about what that means, that can shift.
If this is a pattern you recognise, and you’d like some support in making sense of it, you’re welcome to get in touch.
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