Buffering Moment

Living with ADHD is a thrill ride. It consistently lands one in buffering mode for a few seconds, days, months, and (in the most disillusioning of scenarios) years. A buffering moment is a pause in the middle of an action scene in life where the connection to your brain wi-fi signal for some reason decides to reset and recalculate. Complete blankness lasts for a few seconds, as the signal resets, and the buffering symbol pops up right in the middle of that really important step where you were just about to…? Too late.

With a little luck, (and I mean ate a nutritious breakfast, took your meds -on time today!-, had a nice early morning workout followed by an engaging exchange of ideas with a particularly intelligent individual who wants to invest millions to help fund your next great business idea kind of lucky) you hit play when the signal comes back and it pick up right where you left off. You’re back to being that ADHD symptom curbing baller that you always knew you’d be. With slightly less fortune, your thinking mojo decides it would rather spend its energy elsewhere. Well, other than the place it has been in the previous thirty minutes of your life anyway.

I mean really though what happens to short term memory access in those moments? Where you’re in the middle of a task, literally any task (mundane, fun, bizarre, possibly illegal?) and then completely have absolutely no clue what sequence of events has led to this moment in time, nor what the plan was for the next thirty minutes.

An outside stimulus might cause these (this is what most of society believes about ADHD). At other times, and for myself the most frequent of times, another thought has loudly proclaimed war on that moment in time and staked its national “fuck you previous task!” flag right at the epicenter of your conscious mind.

Of course, recovery comes eventually, and ADHD lottery individuals find that they do this quickly without having lost much of their productive waking hours. But others (not speaking out of personal experience here of course) have inevitably created a whole new series after the buffering moment. One of steep neurological hyperfocus on the great barrier reef and rapidly growing global crisis of the continual depletion of the coral reef ecosystem. Seriously though have you heard about that? Crazy huh. BUFFERING