“She [Simone Weil] intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and
her bizarre get-up … A great famine had broken out in China, and I was
told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my
respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a
heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her
one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in
no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the
revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I
retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men
happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and
down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”
— Theodor Adorno, “Sur l’eau”, Minima Moralia (1945)
“Trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. […] It results in the formation of intense, unstable relationships that fluctuate between extremes.”
“I’ll remember” is the ADHD demon talking. You won’t remember. Write it down.
bold of you to assume i’ll remember where i wrote it, or even that i wrote it
Visual exhaustion is another symptom of ADHD, which means that if we see something enough times (or we see enough instances of something), it fades into background noise and we fail to notice it.
This is why a lot of ADHD people can stand living surrounded by mess/clutter, because it’s just visual background noise to us. We don’t even notice it anymore.
So if we write something down and see the note stuck up somewhere a lot – or if we write a LOT of somethings down and have a lot of notes hanging around – then we’re even less likely to think of/remember the thing because it’s just part of the scenery now.
ADHD is the Catch-22 of brains.
A very good thing to know about ADHD. Don’t fall into the trap.
A lot of folks in the comments are talking about writing on themselves or setting phone/calendar reminders. Your mileage may vary on those. You may also want to consider ways to set a habit of referring back to a planner or similar every day/hour.
“I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.”
countervisuality 