There is a specific kind of cognitive overhead that comes with a brain like mine, and for a long time I just accepted it as the cost of doing business. You lose things. You forget what you were doing. You start three things and finish two and spend a non-trivial amount of time trying to remember what the third one was. You pay an extra tax on organization, on transitions, on any system that requires you to be in the same mental place twice.

I know this about myself. I have made my arrangements accordingly.

What I was not prepared for — what I could not have fully accounted for until I was in the middle of it — was what happens when the ADD tax meets a period of sustained high-stakes complexity and there is no margin anywhere.

What Compounding Actually Means

I want to use the word compounding carefully because I think it’s the right word and I don’t want to let it do vague work.

Compounding means that the effects don’t just add together. They multiply against each other. Each new thing makes the existing things harder, not just more numerous. The mental load of managing a property situation compounds against the ADHD response to incomplete tasks, which compounds against the PTSD-level fear response that had colonized the forgetting-something feeling, which compounds against the financial vigilance required when the stakes of a mistake are not recoverable.

These are separate things. I can actually address a lot of separate things. What I cannot do — what very few brains can do — is separate them once they have compounded. By the time they compound, they are no longer separate.

The Cat Litter

I want to give you a specific example, because I think the abstract version of this is too easy to dismiss.

At a certain point during this period, I forgot to put away the cat litter before my daughter got home. That was the thing I forgot. Cat litter. Thirty seconds of task. Fully correctable. Consequence: mild inconvenience, possible mild irritation. Guaranteed teenager overreaction.

The feeling that accompanied forgetting it: immediate, full-body panic. Is someone at the school? Did I miss a call? Was that a surgeon trying to reach me? Did I — and here is where it gets specific — did I do something that I cannot fix? 

Because the thing is, during that period, that category of thing was real. I had wired significant amounts of money on deadlines. I had managed situations where other people’s afternoon depended on whether I could answer a call in that specific window. I had been the point of contact for things that, if dropped, could not be picked back up.

The nervous system does not cleanly distinguish between cat litter and a wire transfer. Once it has been trained, by repeated genuine emergency, to treat the forgetting-something feeling as a five-alarm signal, it treats the forgetting-something feeling as a five-alarm signal. Every time. For, like, five or six years or so.

Not the ADHD alone…

I want to be clear: this was not just an ADHD thing.

ADHD produces a certain baseline cognitive overhead — the forgetfulness, the interruption sensitivity, the task-switching difficulty. That was always there. I had always managed it. It had always cost something and I had always accounted for the cost. I’d had fun thinking about everything else and hadn’t missed too much or anything too serious using my brain the way I had for thirty-five years. The compounding math is why it took the next five years to literally untangle.

What happened during those years was that the cost structure changed. The things I was managing were not the kind you can come back to. The ADD tax, which I had always budgeted for in low-stakes situations, was being applied to situations where the tax could not be paid.

And so the nervous system did what nervous systems do when they are in sustained high-alert for long enough: it stopped distinguishing between the things that required high alert and the things that didn’t. It just ran hot, continuously, and called it vigilance.

Untraining

The work of the last while has been, in significant part, the work of untraining that response.

It is exactly as annoying as it sounds. Physical therapy is a reasonable analogy — not because it’s painful, but because you are doing repetitive small things to rebuild a capacity that used to work and then got damaged, and the rebuilding is slow and the progress is not always visible and you have to keep doing it anyway.

Writing helps. Writing has always helped, for reasons I understand better now than I used to — it slows the processing down to a rate that is useful, it externalizes the contents of the thought loop, it creates a record that the past moment existed and does not need to be carried forward in active memory. I cannot tell you with certainty whether I would have gotten through the last several years without the practice of writing things down. I do not want to find out.

The goal — the one I am working toward and not yet at — is to get back to a state where the forgetting-something feeling is the size of the thing I forgot. Cat litter. Thirty seconds. Fully correctable.

I am not there yet but I am closer than I was.

First Step Is Awareness

The last thing I want to say about this, because I think it’s the useful thing:

First step is awareness. But not too much awareness. Because if you are a brain like mine, too much awareness becomes its own problem — another loop to run, another thing to track, another way to confuse the noticing with the fixing.

You notice. You name it. You put it down.

Then you go put away the cat litter. 

(******😭 update is I missed a deadline for her AP class–which is a pretty big deal– and it’s gonna be a long day. I hate me for her. Sometimes the apology is inadequate because no matter how sincere I am, the result happened. I guess it’s a good thing I’m examining how my brain works and begging/prodding my body to only listen to actual signals and real neurotransmitters and to please quit freaking out when we don’t need to. Like today. Shoulda saved cat litter energy for this catastrophe, eh?)