Pretty sure those last two are normal.
Also thereâs no time specification â it isnât the same when a friend doesnât speak to you at all for 5 months or 3 years.
What makes these symptoms different in ADHD people is the severity. While a neurotypical person may experience these symptoms occasionally, an ADHD person will suffer them continuously to the point where it interferes with their ability to function.
Itâs not that they sometimes forget they put things away, theyâre always forgetting they put things away.Â
They donât sometimes lose touch with a friend, they continuously forget to check in and communicate with people who are not a part of their daily routines. Hell, half the time I forget I even have a brother because we barely ever see or talk to each other. (Even though I mean to talk to him but then, yâknow, the procrastinationâŠ)
Thank you, @leviathangourmet for wording it in a way I was too tired to. This is what people donât realize about the disorder and dysfunction part of ADHD. Itâs chronic. Itâs constant. Itâs consistent. Itâs every day. Itâs all the time. Literally, it impedes every day life. Itâs only normal within its own very particular parameters. It has no time specification, because time blindness, aka time agnosia, aka dysautochromia, is literally a symptom of ADHD. If a trait happens so often that it impacts your life and makes living difficult, itâs a problem.
Saying things like âoh, thatâs normal, everyone does that, youâre not specialâ genuinely undermines, devalues, destabilizes, and minimizes actual experiences that arenât necessarily fun. Donât do that. Donât claim something is ordinary and normal just because your experience is occasional. The point is that we are divergent, we are out of the ordinary, we are not part of everyone.
Maybe this is my autistic bluntness, but why do neurotypicals and allistics (ADHD is exempt) really think that âeveryone does thisâ is reassuring?
