Pete Wright

Okay.

So when you feel guilty about not texting someone back, you think, oh, my God, I'm a terrible friend.

You might just be a person with a finite brain trying to maintain an impossible emotional spreadsheet.

Wow.

Okay.

Part the third.

The ADHD friendship tax.

So I have to get a little bit personal.

For people with ADHD, and I am one of them, as you know, everything that I just described gets amplified in ways that are genuinely painful and frustrating.

It's a trope, right?

The out of sight, out of mind thing.

Everybody lives with it.

With ADHD, it is a...

It is a callous way of saying that you just don't care and that is absolutely not true.

What is really happening is your working memory is broken and your brain doesn't hold on to the presence of people the way neurotypical brains do.

And so when you're not in front of me, you don't stop mattering, but you do stop occurring to me, right?

Because it takes so much more effort to focus on the thing that is right in front of me.

There is no margin for other things to just enter, right?

It has to be such an obvious trigger, right?

Sure.