Last Call at the Local (Love, Lists & Fancy Ships, #3)

by Sarah Grunder Ruiz

It can be a challenge for me to give anyone my full and undivided attention. It’s not personal. My brain is just a shitty computer. The browser is perpetually frozen on a tab for music. The error message This webpage is using significant memory is ever present. No matter what I do, thoughts of music are as persistent as pop-up ads. It’s caused me real problems. It’s hard to force-quit my thoughts, and, unlike an actual computer, I can’t reboot my brain, or replace my faulty frontal lobe, or upgrade to a new one. Most of the time, I feel as if I’m running a different operating system than everyone else.

I can be too much. But hopefully, when I click with someone like that, they feel it too. They might even be a little too much themselves.

“You’re telling me this place is rent-free and comes with a cute roommate? Sounds like a dream.

But my problem isn’t that I don’t think. It’s that my brain only has two modes: think everything all at once and make sense of none of it, or think about one thing obsessively at the expense of whatever actually needs my attention. The point being, I am always thinking. Just never about the right things.

I know I put it in a safe place. I remember putting it somewhere special, where I’d be sure to run into it. Given past experience, it probably is safe. Safe from me, because I never remember where these special memorable places are.

I never know what sort of reaction I’m going to get when I tell people about my ADHD. Some people shrug it off like it’s no big deal, when to me it is a very big deal. It impacts almost everything in my life. Then there are the people who don’t even think it exists. And we can’t forget the classic, Don’t we all have a little ADHD? (No, we don’t.)

All the little costs of having ADHD that add up in the long run. Lost customers. Overdue bills. Replacement phone chargers. Time spent looking for things. The way it makes me feel, like a child. As if everyone else is a real adult and I’m just pretending. The frustration that I can’t do the simple, everyday things that most people can. Like laundry, and making phone calls, and remembering to take out something from the freezer for dinner. It’s the missed deadlines for opportunities I could’ve had. The broken relationships. How people think I’m lazy and selfish. How they think I don’t care. How I think I’m lazy and selfish, even though I know I care.