Please will you pump my gas?

Beyond the Book: What I wish people without ADHD understood about my brain

A few nights ago, my partner and I were having dinner with friends and we were discussing ADHD. Like my partner and I, our friends are a couple where one person has ADHD and another does not. And we don’t often get to talk with other couples with similar relationship experiences. Talking about what it’s like to have ADHD and what it’s like to live with a partner with ADHD, offered the chance to discuss day-to-day adult ADHD life in ways that I haven’t really gotten to in a long time.

As the two of us with ADHD were talking about what it was like to have ADHD and our partners were talking about how they witnessed our ADHD and the impacts that it had on them, we were able to surface a lot of things that people without ADHD don’t understand about ADHD - and that lack of understanding can cause a lot of annoyance, pain and even conflict in relationships. So, inspired by this conversation, I thought I’d list a few things that a lot of people who love people with ADHD don’t understand, that I really wish they did.

Welcome to my brain! Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash

1. We have a lot of trauma related to “failing” people we love. When you voice disappointment or frustration with the person you love with ADHD, you may get a reaction that doesn’t make sense to you. They may immediately start beating themselves up in a way that seems disproportionate or even manipulative. They may assume that the slightest complaint means that you are completely fed up with them and are going to abandon them. They may become defensive and argumentative. These reactions all stem from how these sorts of conversations have gone in the past. I don’t know any adults with ADHD who don’t have a long list of relationships (professional, platonic or romantic) that have fallen apart because the people we were in relationship WITH were fed up with us seeming unreliable. And because there are no amount of relationship failures that will suddenly cure the ADHD that makes us seem unreliable, it can make us seem like all of our relationships are doomed before they even start and can make any complaint about our unreliability sound like the bell that tolls for us.

2. But we really do mean to do the things we promised to do. One of the most important things for me in embracing my ADHD and healing from trauma related to it was to finally admit to myself that I wasn’t going to be able to make myself into someone who could suddenly do things that my ADHD really didn’t want me to do. I grew up hearing, “if it really mattered to you, you’d do it” and some part of me really internalized that. So if someone was depending on me and I cared about that commitment to them, then I’d surely find a way to follow through this time, right? Maybe I just hadn’t tried hard enough last time, but I’d try harder this time and I’d do it. Other people could do it, and I’m a smart and talented person, so I absolutely could too. And I’d try so hard, and it still wouldn’t happen. And once again I’d have made a promise that I didn’t keep. When I decided to be honest with myself, and accept my limitations - not as defeat, but instead as a decision to invest my time in what I could do well instead - I was able to have more honest relationships with people. I could say things like, “I have this amazing idea. Let me share it with you. I’m not going to be the one to make it happen, but if somebody else could, that would be great.” Or, “Oh, please don’t ask me to remind you to do that thing, I will not remember to no matter how hard I try.” Or, “If you really want me to do this thing in the future, please remind me. I won’t get annoyed and you won’t be nagging. But right now I have a lot of obligations testing my ADHD and this obligation to you is important and I don’t want it falling through the cracks.” It also helped me build in my own safeguards to make failure less likely. I keep a running list on my phone of just about anything I think of that I want to do, and I put it there. So when I’m at the store and think, “what was the thing I said I’d pick up??” It’s in there. Or when I’m ready to quit work for the day and think, “did I promise somebody something today??” It’s in there. Most of the time. When I remember to put it there.

3. The wild circus that is our brains makes us really great “big picture” people. There’s a reason why so many people with ADHD are in creative fields. Our brains are constantly making wild connections with everything we experience in the world. Every new bit of information will bring up dozens of different ideas and possibilities. And while some of the leaps that our brain will make don’t seem to make a lot of sense, a lot of them make the kind of sense that blows people’s minds. This is why I can take a complex social issue and not only explain how it works, I can show many different ways in which it may be showing up in your life. Sometimes when I’m writing about a particularly tricky issue and an analogy pops up in my brain so far left field and yet oh so shiny I just giggle to myself and say, “YESSSS LET’S GO ON THIS RIDE TOGETHER.” But before I was writing professionally, this helped me in my office jobs. When I worked in project management I was the person who could look at a project set to launch in 3 months and be able to point out every possible issue that may arise with it. As annoyed as people were when I’d interrupt a meeting to forecast disaster, my peers soon learned that listening to me and putting in a few safeguards to prevent some of the more likely downstream problems saved them a lot of time and money in the end. But that brings me to the next thing that a lot of people don’t understand about ADHD minds.

4. Our minds are constantly churning up possibilities and that can be a very bad thing sometimes. Ok, so you know how I said that ADHD brains can just make all of these wild and amazing and sometimes beautiful connections and that this can make us very creative people? Well this same creativity can lead to some of the most extreme catastrophizing you’ve ever seen. It’s not just that our brains can think of really amazing disaster opportunities, it’s also that we lack the executive function to be able to prioritize these disaster opportunities according to what is most likely to happen, and what might have a one and a million chance of happening. If we can think of a disaster, it might as well be happening to us right now. Oh you have a slight cough around me? I am not just thinking you may have covid, my brain is instantly pulling up every single cough related file that is floating around in there. You now have black lung. No, you now have this one rare disease that I read about that is only happening on the other side of the world right now, but we’ve learned how sickness travels and now I’m picturing how maybe at that last meeting you went to you sat next to someone who had just been in that same place I read about. But also, do you know that I love you? Are you prepared for the fact that you might die? Oh no, am I prepared for the fact that we will all die one day? Did I make a will? No of course not. Now I need to make a will. But who will take care of my family when I die? Should I write letters to my kids in advance for their birthday every year in case I die unexpectedly? Will they appreciate these reminders that I love them and am proud of them? Or will they find the emotional burden of these annual letters too much to bear? Should I include in the letters that they don’t have to keep opening them if they don’t want to? Why am I crying? Because you coughed. But the more important question is: why aren’t you crying too?

5. Our gas tank only holds like, one gallon of gas. Let’s assume that we all need fuel to get to where we need to go in life. Most people will fill their tank on a pretty regular basis, and it’s pretty easy to do. An evening of tv, a good night’s sleep, an hour at the gym- these are things that for a lot of people, fill them up with enough fuel to complete a day of tasks. But if you have ADHD, your tank only holds about 1 gallon of fuel. So you got up, made breakfast, showered, and took your dishes to the sink and suddenly you only have like half a tank left. And you look at the dishes in the sink and you think, “oh, if I do these dishes, I’m going to be spent.” And do you really want to spend the rest of your gas on dishes? So you skip the dishes and go to work and you open your email and you are sorting through all the fucking mundanity in there and you are done. That’s it. So you go seeking more fuel. You surf the internet, you walk around and bug a coworker. You do something that you know will give you that dopamine that will fill your oh-so-tiny tank. In an ideal world, you’d repeat this process as much as needed to get through your day and get the most important of your tasks done. But you can’t dip out halfway through that 3 hour meeting in order to refill your tank. You can’t teleport yourself out of rush hour traffic for a few minutes to recharge. And sometimes just knowing that people are watching you recharge every hour or half hour and judging you, because they are doing just fine on their gallons and gallons of fuel so maybe you are just lazy, is enough to keep you from recharging even when you really, really need to. When we can’t refuel as often as we need, and we run on empty for too long, our engine does indeed seize up for a while and we just….can’t….anymore. We cannot work, we cannot think, we cannot do anything that demands anything of us. If we end up feeling bad about having been in this state for too long, and then try to make up for it by pushing ourselves even further past what our fuel will allow, we will end up in a really destructive cycle with even longer and longer periods stuck on the side of the road that can lead to really bad anxiety and depression as our life passes by us on the highway.

6. We don’t have more things that are hard for us than people without ADHD, they are just different things. Everyone has struggles. Everyone has tasks that they avoid like the plague. Everyone has areas of their life where they feel like they are just not up to scratch. But we’ve normalized the things that people without ADHD struggle with. Oh you hate taxes? Shocking. Reply-all emails? Join the club. Flossing? Who doesn’t? These things are normalized. And there are also things that neurotypical people don’t like that are so normalized that we have built great ways to outsource or eliminate the need to do those tasks. Until the last few years when my business got a little more complicated, I’ve done my own taxes every year (and my mom’s as well) without any struggle. It’s fun. It’s a rare puzzle that I get to figure out once a year. But do you know what I really hate and try to avoid at all costs? Pumping gas. I hate it. Oh I hate it so much. When I absolutely have to pump gas I only put like $5 in. Sometimes I can get myself to put in $10 or $15. That’s it. And when I’m done I want to take a fucking nap. Because every second that I’m standing outside holding that pump and squeezing the little lever thing I want to climb out of my skin. I love flossing - it’s part of a daily care ritual that’s really soothing and engrossing for me, and also I (like many other people with ADHD) will damn near push a tooth out with my tongue worrying any little bit of stuff that gets stuck in my teeth, so flossing helps preserve my sanity. But do you know what makes me want to actually cry sometimes? Having to deposit a check in the bank. Big checks, little checks, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to take the check and go to a place to be able to spend the money. I even got a machine to deposit my work checks at home and do you know what I hate even more than driving to the bank? Plugging this fiddly little machine in, apparently. I’ve had countless checks expire because they just sit on my desk mocking me for months while I try to gather up the willpower to deposit them. It’s not like I’m so rich that checks don’t matter. I do actually need this money. Who hates putting money in the bank?? I do. And it’s easy to feel really broken when the things you struggle with are things that nobody else seems to struggle with. But my therapist recently said to me: “people don’t want to do what they don’t want to do. There’s nothing strange about that.” And I’ll be honest that it hadn’t occurred to me before that. That maybe there was nothing strange about avoiding things that I don’t want to do, I just don’t want to do things that are different from the things that other people don’t want to do. Recognizing this offers up opportunity in my relationships, because there are things that a lot of people don’t want to do, that I don’t mind doing at all. And I can offer up these tasks in trade. My partner fills my gas tank and loads the dishwasher. I handle all power tool use and home supply stockage (years of running out of things I need around the house has led to a habit of buying 10 of everything I might need at once. One of our smoke detector batteries was low and my partner called and asked if we had the type of batteries for the detector and I was like, “DO WE EVER!! I’ve been waiting for this day for years.” and directed him to the battery backstock in the cupboard).

7. Sometimes the energy it takes to remember to do something feels like actually doing something. I don’t know how many times I’ve texted a friend, “sorry I didn’t reply sooner, I read this a week ago and was thought about a reply and forgot that wasn’t the same thing as actually replying.” If there’s anything that kills a lot of my friendships, it’s the fact that every time I read a text, or am just thinking to myself, “I wonder how so and so is doing, I sure do like them,” it feels like I actually picked up the phone and texted or called. And so in my head, our friendship is solid because I’m still putting out effort and that person I like or love is still pretty regularly on my mind, but all of that effort never actually leaves my head and the person that I’m thinking of so fondly so often has long ago decided that I don’t care about them. There are people I haven’t spoken to in over a year and I will talk about them like we just got drinks yesterday. And I’m not pretending, I love them and we absolutely got drinks in what feels like yesterday. Yeah, friendship with me requires a lot of honest communication and understanding. Like, “hey, Ijeoma, let’s actually put this hang out on the calendar, here is a date that works for me.” Or, “hey, did you get that text from me the other day? I’d love a response to it.” But there is a plus side to this. Are you going through some shit and need to disappear for a bit? Guess who will still be here for you with no hard feelings, and in fact, may well be shocked to find out that you had disappeared at all? This girl right here. We’ll be friends for life even if we only see each other about 5 times in that entire lifetime.

I could go on and on but I’m bored now and want to do something else! But if you recognize yourself in any of the above items, let me know in the comments. And if there’s anything else you’d like people to know about your ADHD, feel free to add them. The more open and loving we can be with ourselves and the different ways in which our brains work, the more joy we’ll be able to experience in our lives, and others witnessing our radical acceptance of ourselves will often feel granted permission to be kinder and more accepting of themselves as well.