love incredible.

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Is it weird that it’s hard for me to maintain personal relationships if I don’t physically see them all the time? Like I love my parents and my sister, but I never really *miss* them. I only get homesick when I’m about to leave, but once I’ve adjusted to being at school I’m totally fine. I can go months w/o contacting HS friends and weeks w/o seeing my college friends or even my bf during the semester. I rarely if ever get the urge to reach out. I just don’t think about them, which sounds super callous, but I definitely do care? But it’ll be like 2 weeks since I’ve seen someone who lives a building away or a month since I’ve called my mom and they’ll text me like ‘I miss you!’ and I…don’t? I don’t feel compelled to seek out their company and sometimes I don’t even reply to messages because I don’t have the mental energy to hold an interaction with them. It’s like I pause all my friendships to come back to later, except real life isn’t Netflix and people won’t hold your place if you don’t actually put in the work. I can feel my high school friends drifting apart but I still don’t feel interested in their lives away until we’re back together in person and it feels just the same as always. I don’t realize it’s weird how little I talk to my parents  (who I love very, very much and have a great relationship w) until someone’s like “lol my mom calls at least every other day” and I realize that my mom’s expectations from me are “maybe a few emojis every month”. My boyfriend sometimes complains that he’s never been the one in the relationship to be nagging for a text back. If I’m at college, I don’t miss home, and if I’m at home, I don’t miss my friends from college. 

Is this an ADHD thing? I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I hate that I feel this way. I feel so shallow and self-centered because I struggle to maintain attachments whenever there’s physical distance. I saw this one random blogger make a personal post about this same exact thing, wondering if it was a facet of her ADHD, and now I’m wondering if it’s a facet of mine, too. It’s like I lack “emotional object permanence”, like if I can’t see the relationship it’s not right in front of me. I’ve only just been noticing this because I’m in college, but back in high school I rarely hung out with my friends outside of school and only sporadically had contact over breaks. I didn’t think that was weird but now I’m thinking it kind of is.

(I have Inattentive Type ADHD w/ impulsive tendencies)

Ugh, this posted instead of going to drafts. Tumblr, WTF?!?

Anyway, I was going to look up attachment styles for you because it sounds like you have both the typical ADHD out of sight out of mind thing like you say, but also it sounds like your attachment style is a bit out of whack. You can read up on it via the link from this post. There are ways to mitigate some of the challenges associated with an off-kilter attachment style, and counselling is a good way to work through that process.