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A big ADHD thing I have difficulty getting other people to understand is how stuff becomes “invisible” to me if I’m not actively focusing on it - especially mess/clutter, which means that if I’m not doing a Serious Deep Clean I’m very bad at keeping my environment tidy.
Has anyone else ever found useful language and/or resources to explain this experience to neurotypical people? I just get a lot of “just think about what you’re doing!” and like, if I could do that then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation okay
But seriously I end up with like, my keys in the flowerbed, my toothbrush in my wardrobe, a paintbrush in the middle of the kitchen floor, because when my brain switches tracks my body just kind of automatically drops whatever it was doing beforehand.
And it’s so weird, because when someone goes around pointing out the clutter, it’s like a magic eye image and all these things suddenly come into focus out of nowhere.
But yeah, I’m terrible at “normal” tidying, because I’ll like, arrange everything very neatly around a mug with a mouldy teabag in it, but the mug itself feels like it’s just part of the table.
A Huge Big Tidy is different, because you’re removing EVERYTHING, but maintenance tidying is just, it doesn’t happen.
It’s just hard being like “I literally could not comprehend that there was a dirty mug there” when other people hear “I saw the dirty mug there, and then I LEFT IT, ON PURPOSE, because I LOVE FILTH”
So on the one hand I want to be like, “this isn’t malicious, I literally did not notice or recognise the thing” but on the other hand I don’t want to be like “ADHD gives me moral carte blanche to be a slob”
