Most people will tell you that those of us with ADHD don’t have a good memories. I thoroughly dispute this. I think there are two issues at work that make it look like we don’t have good memories. The first is our lack of attention. If we’re not deeply attending when something comes into our sensory universe, we don’t lock it in to our memory. So it’s not that our memory is faulty. It’s that we’re not paying attention in the first place.
The other issue we have is that we do not have good situational memory. Part of the stems from our lack of time sense. We’re kind of like giant toddlers. Everything is either yesterday, right now, or later. And we don’t experience time as a constant because time moves much faster when we’re engaged and torturously slowly when we’re bored. The result is that we’re just not good at remembering whatever the thing is when we need to remember it. We might remember before and after we need to remember, but just not at the right moment. All the more reason we need to have external structures to manage our time and remember our tasks.
Standard disclaimer: I promised myself when I started this blog that I would post regularly, hopefully weekly. In order to achieve this goal, I have to fight against my own perfectionists. That means I edit very little if at all. I’m focusing on content not on detail. So please forgive any mypellings grammatical / punctuation mishaps, and anything Strange like weird capitalizations due to my using voice recognition.