little executive dysfunction things

yr blogmod is in her final quarter of college and as such I’ve been swamped with work and living up to the spirit of this blog title. the first of my big final projects is due soon and once that’s done, if I’m keeping pace with my second final project I should be on here more regularly.

I’m going to try to answer a few asks and such in the coming days! at the moment I’m working 14.5 hrs a week while also being a full-time student and also looking for work after this quarter ends and I stop getting my financial aid (which I live off of) and I have forgotten what it feels like to be well-rested. as if I’ve ever been well-rested.

me: why

brain: you g-

me:

brain:

me:

...wait what do you mean it isn’t 2014

This sounds like an executive dysfunction thing! It requires short term memory recall, multitasking, working memory, and organization, usually with a time limit and the unhelpful awkward social situation of someone staring at you expectantly. It’s a lot of work to mentally compile all the relevant information and not only make sense of it yourself but organize it so that it makes sense to other people who weren’t there to experience it. 

the time thing is true for a variety of executive dysfunction conditions and ADHD is definitely one of them. it’s in part due to attention span problems, because if your attention is flitting from one thing to another, all those shorter periods of attentiveness to different subjects don’t cumulatively feel like the same amount of time as one long stretch of time spent on the same subject. it’s also it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re hyperfocusing on one thing because all of your attention is there with none left over to pay attention to the rest of the world (time included) moving along without you. 

I’ve described it as falling into a time vortex, because I’ll sit down to do something like write a to-do list for the day, and it will have felt like five minutes for me but in reality an hour has passed. I don’t experience time normally - it’s like my brain just doesn’t exist in the present because it doesn’t operate at that speed. 

for events seeming to proceed out of sequence, it could be because of losing chunks of time in ways like that, making it feel like trying to watch a movie with whole scenes and pieces of scenes missing, so you’re missing the context required to understand the following scenes. if you don’t remember walking into the parking lot and starting your car, going from being at school to being on the freeway won’t make any sense because you’re missing that transition.