ADHD: Why Am I Like This? Part 9

By this point in my investigation, I had become suspicious of almost every conclusion I had reached about myself.

I wasn't lazy.

I wasn't simply emotional.

I didn't have a poor sense of time.

So when I began looking at my memory, I wondered whether I had misunderstood that too.

That became another clue.

The Great Memory Mystery

For years, I believed I had a terrible memory.

That conclusion became harder and harder to defend every time someone asked me a question.

I could remember obscure historical facts.

Books I had read twenty years earlier.

Research papers.

Entire concepts.

Stories.

Connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.

Yet I could walk into the garage...

...and completely forget why I was there.

I could misplace my wallet.

Forget why I opened the refrigerator.

Lose my train of thought halfway through a sentence.

Both of those things couldn't be explained by "a bad memory."

So I kept investigating.

My Sister's Childhood

One of the earliest clues appeared years before I even knew I had ADHD.

My sister has always remembered our childhood in remarkable detail.

She remembers conversations.

Vacations.

Directions.

Entire afternoons.

Meanwhile, much of my own childhood feels surprisingly hazy.

For years, I assumed she simply had a better memory than I did.

Now I wasn't so sure.

Perhaps we weren't remembering differently.

Perhaps we were remembering different things.

That became another clue.

What the Research Says

As I dug deeper, I discovered something that completely changed the way I thought about memory.

Memory isn't one thing.

It's many different systems working together.

Researchers have found that people with ADHD commonly struggle with working memory.

Working memory isn't long-term storage.

It's the brain's temporary workspace.

It's what helps you remember why you walked into the garage.

It's what keeps track of where you put your keys thirty seconds ago.

It's what allows you to hold information in your mind while completing another task.

I've come to think of my working memory as an old '90s word processor.

It has no autosave feature.

If I close the document before saving, it's gone forever.

When working memory falters, everyday life begins to feel surprisingly disorganized.

Long-term memory is different.

Once information is successfully stored, many people with ADHD remember it remarkably well, particularly when the material is emotionally meaningful, intellectually interesting, or repeatedly reinforced.

That immediately resonated with me.

Because it described my experience almost perfectly.

Significance Sticks

Looking back, another pattern emerged.

The things I remembered best almost always mattered to me.

History fascinated me.

Psychology fascinated me.

Science fascinated me.

The books I read fascinated me.

When something captured my curiosity, my brain seemed to preserve it indefinitely.

Not because I was trying harder.

Because I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Meanwhile, ordinary everyday details often disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived.

Researchers have increasingly recognized that ADHD is less a disorder of attention than a disorder of regulating attention.

Attention is often the doorway to memory.

If information never fully passes through that doorway, it shouldn't surprise us when it becomes difficult to retrieve later.

That became another clue.

The Detective Board

One realization surprised me more than any other.

I don't think my brain primarily stores facts.

I think it stores relationships.

When I read a new book, I rarely remember every page.

What I remember is how its ideas connect to everything else I've learned.

One study reminds me of another.

One historical event explains another.

One conversation suddenly sheds light on a childhood memory.

It's almost as though my brain has spent decades building one enormous detective board.

Every article.

Every book.

Every experience.

Every conversation.

Each one becomes another piece of evidence connected by invisible strings.

I think that's why I tend to write nonlinear.

I'm rarely interested in isolated facts.

I'm interested in the patterns they create.

Perhaps that isn't separate from my ADHD.

Perhaps it's part of it.

That became another clue.

A Better Explanation

For years, I believed I had a memory problem.

Now I think I had a working memory problem.

That's a very different explanation.

My long-term memory often serves me remarkably well.

My working memory typically betrays me before lunch.

Those aren't contradictions.

They're different systems doing different jobs.

Understanding that changed the way I think about myself.

I stopped judging my intelligence by the number of times I misplaced my keys.

I stopped assuming that forgetting why I entered a room somehow erased everything I had spent decades learning.

Perhaps my memory wasn't broken.

Perhaps it was selective.

It remembers significance far better than convenience.

That realization became another clue.

The Next Clue

As I continued my investigation, another contradiction appeared.

If ADHD is considered an attention disorder...

Why could I become so completely absorbed in a subject that I forgot to eat?

How could someone struggle to pay attention...

...and yet pay too much attention?

In the next article, we'll investigate one of the most misunderstood aspects of ADHD.

Hyperfocus.

Next

Part 10: Hyperfocus - How Can I Ignore the World for Twelve Hours... But Not Fold Laundry?

References

Baddeley, A. D. (2012). Working Memory: Theories, Models, and Controversies. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 1-29.

Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Guilford Press.

Brown, T. E. (2013). A New Understanding of ADHD in Children and Adults: Executive Function Impairments.Routledge.

Faraone, S. V., Banaschewski, T., Coghill, D., et al. (2021). The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-Based Conclusions About the Disorder. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 789-818.

Martinussen, R., Hayden, J., Hogg-Johnson, S., & Tannock, R. (2005). A Meta-analysis of Working Memory Impairments in Children with ADHD. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 44(4), 377-384.