Can you be so forgetful that you’d forget that you were dating somebody? For a few groggy moments, I was convinced that I had.
As I dealt with forgotten bills, paperwork unearthed from the Jurassic era, and various and sundry things I had meant to get to sometime around last September, I wondered if maybe, perhaps possibly, I was forgetful.
Oh, everybody forgets things! It’s perfectly normal. For example, my mother routinely forgets my name. After bringing me into this world many long and hoary decades ago, you’d think she’d have gotten the hang of it by now, but there she goes again, calling me by name by starting with the youngest son then moving upwards through the sediment of time until she comes around to me.
People with ADHD are just like that, except with trips to another room, a few phone calls, and a sudden urge to reorganize their closet in between each name. Perfectly normal! That’s why you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve forgotten quite a bit over the past half year.
My Fall was more hectic than usual. I started with a car accident in August, surgery in September, COVID–19 in October, RSV in November, then an attempt to catch every virus in Utah before the merry-go-round came to a stop last month. I’m surprised I didn’t end up with Hanta Virus somehow, as well as Chicken Pox for a third time. My life was such a wreck, I was lucky I remembered my own name!
Some interruptions derail the ADHD train so completely that when we finally get our caboose back up on the tracks, we often head off in a new direction. It’s not unusual for me to suddenly realize two months after getting over a death match with the Black Plague that I accidentally started a new project instead of resuming an old one. But there go I introducing a new metaphor. You’d think I had enough archeological material to work with considering how much my bedroom resembles a dig.
Speaking of my bedroom, aside from creating geological strata in all four corners with paperwork, I have been known to sleep there on occasion. Imagine, if you will, my sleepy head emerging from the covers one shiny morning in a panic. No, I hadn’t been buried under the weight of over half a year of mail. I had dreamed that I had suddenly realized that I had a girlfriend who I hadn’t called since September. I was so alarmed in the dream that my heart began pounding as I struggled to remember her name. How could I have forgotten my darling! Then my lucid brain had a chat with my dreaming brain and came to an agreement that it was time to wake up.
As I laid there in the bed calming my racing heart, I chuckled to myself. Like I could ever forget somebody so important as a girlfriend… Then I had a real moment of panic as I realized that I forget people all the time! I forget their names, I forget to call them back, and I forget that I’m on the phone with them when I suddenly start organizing my closet. Yes, I concluded from the sagacious perch of my pillow. I could possibly forget somebody that important.
But did I? I began to worry that maybe I had broken somebody’s heart. How do you apologize for accidentally ghosting somebody for eight months? Fortunately, my lucid brain realized that I was still sleepy and the whole incident was nonsense. There was no girlfriend. I was absolutely in the clear.
Probably.
I'm still surprised that I am so used to being forgetful that I could honestly believe such a dream-addled fiction, even for a moment. To my credit, I’m not so forgetful that I would space off a relationship, but if I ever do get a girlfriend and forget her name, you’ll know I’ll be buried with the dinosaurs if I’m tempted to dig through the layers of my memory and start rattling off past girlfriends’ names until I finally arrive at the right one.
