The Wild Inside Her

If you’ve ever spent an entire day waiting for a 3:00 PM appointment—too anxious to start anything productive but too restless to relax—you’re in good company.

Welcome to the ADHD waiting game, where time is either flying at warp speed or dragging like a toddler on a Monday morning. This post dives into the mysterious reality of ADHD time blindness and how one simple event can completely hijack your day (and your sanity).

Because when you have ADHD, time isn’t a straight line. It’s more like an EKG machine line, it’s up and down, fast and slow, and totally unpredictable – mostly depending on the activity happening in the moment, or the anticipation of a later activity.

For an ADHDer, mastering time is like wrangling a wild bull, you can probably attempt do it with a significant amount of effort and energy but chances are slim. One way or another? That bull is running you down.

For example – an event or activity that is scheduled for later in the day? There are two very specific ways I most often handle this type of situation. (And by “handle,” I mean the whole bull wrangling that is an activity in itself that exhausts and overwhelms you and you rarely ever win.)

Let’s say I have a meeting at 3:00 PM.

Scenario 1: I’m excited (or nervous) about it and do not want to miss it.

By 9:00 AM, I’ve already set six alarms, three reminders (not including the 4 from yesterday reminding me about setting alarms for today), and my watch buzzes for every reminder. Because I know me. And I know that “I’ll remember” is the biggest lie I’ve ever told myself.

To prepare for this appointment I start calculating backwards like I’m solving a math equation. You know, like the ones that your high school teacher would say ‘show all of your work’ and it takes up the entire page to do so? Yeah, like that.

So, it takes 10 minutes to get there… but what if there’s heavy traffic? Construction? Red lights? Buses? People at crosswalks? Better plan for 30 minutes. Which means I should leave by 2:30. Which means I should start getting ready by 1:30.

But what if I don’t like what I am thinking of wearing? What if my hair does that weird thing? Let’s just make it 1:00 to be safe.

By now, it’s 10:00 AM, and I’m already watching the clock. I can’t start a new task because what if I lose track of time? So instead, I hover in this weird waiting room of my own life—too early to leave, too anxious to relax.

Maybe I’ll just get ready now. Yeah, best to be safe. Now I’m fully ready… at noon.

Great. Only three hours to kill before I have to go. Why is time going so slow?! I’m ready now.

Scrolling social media sounds good, except I can’t focus because I’m watching the time. Maybe I should just leave early and sit in the parking lot. Yeah. That’s smart. I’ll be early, and I can scroll guilt-free.

So I leave an hour early, spend 10 minutes getting there and spend the next 50 minutes sitting in my car waiting to go in and wondering why I’m like this.

Scenario 2: 3:00 PM meeting again. But this time I have no motivation or desire to go to this particular meeting. In fact I’m dreading it.

Cue, procrastination mode …

I map out my time again and reluctantly get ready but instead of leaving super early, my mind says – ‘Hey Kel, let’s just check on a few things at home before we go to that thing. We don’t really want to go anyway, so why be super early?’

She’s not wrong. And I have been neglecting a few things that will just take a few minutes to do. Then I can feel good about checking off a few things on my to-do list sitting on the table, that’s been side-eyeing me every time I walk by. ‘Are you going to do any of things today?’

I check the top of the list and not yet done (from weeks ago) is – water plants.

Yes, I see my plants could use a little love. (And by that I mean the leaves are curled and falling off and they are screaming at me that death is near if I don’t water immediately.) Quick task, right? Just a little watering before I go. Easy peasy…right?

Except that I notice that one plant is outgrowing its pot and I keep forgetting to replant it. I should do that now while I’m remembering and if I wait it could be weeks before I remember again. (Before you ask, yes this was already added on that same to-do list weeks ago, when I added – water plants. But what a fun surprise it will be when I go to my list and see that I can check off 2 things today!)

So I think to myself, I’ll just quickly grab a bigger pot from storage. It’ll take but a moment. I’m sure I have one. Hmm, where is it? I can’t find anything down here on this shelf, maybe I’ll reorganize it quickly then I’ll find the pot. And since I’m re-potting anyway, I’ll grab this bag of soil and my gloves, oh and the little shovel, where’s that? It’s here somewhere. Wait, is that my ….(pick basically anything, anything at all, that’s the thing, seriously)? I was looking for that! Sweet, how am I going to carry this all back to the kitchen? I’ll just empty out this tote of random stuff and put it all on this nicely organized shelf that I just made space on.

As I get back to the kitchen I notice the sink’s full of dishes. I know if I don’t do it now I’ll feel guilty that I left it for someone else to do later. I put my tote on the counter and think ‘Okay, I’ll just quickly load the dishwasher first. Oh shoot — it’s clean. I’ll empty it real quick.’

And now for some reason the cutlery drawer won’t close properly. Why is there a potato masher in the spoon section? (Remember I live with several neurodiverse people in the house) This needs to be reorganized right now.

Cut to me standing in the middle of my kitchen hours later surrounded by soil, spoons, and the familiar dread at the mess I’ve just made and now have to clean up. I glance at the clock—2:45 PM! What the…?!?

Panic.

Keys? Bag? Phone?

Run to the car. Every light turns red just to mock me personally. Calm your body Kelly, just breathe, it’s going to be fine. Is it? Is it though? Why do I do this to myself?!

I arrive sweaty, stressed, and ruminating about what I’ll say in my apology for being late… only to realize no one has even noticed my despair at zipping in having only seconds to spare before officially being late.

And then, because ADHD is a trip, I immediately think: “See? Totally fine. I didn’t even need to worry.”

The ADHD Time Warp

It’s wild how ADHD can make time either sprint ahead or crawl at a snail’s pace. There’s no in-between. Just a pendulum swing between “I’ve been ready for three hours” and “how is it 2:45 already!?”

This is life. We are either too focused on time that we are paralyzed and nothing else gets done, or we are so caught up in the task that time doesn’t exist.

Before you know it it’s dark outside, your bladder is about to burst and you can’t remember the last time you ate.

When you finally snap out of your hyperfocused state you wonder if anything still exists outside (What season is it now Where am I supposed to be right now? Is anyone home? What day is it?) because you have no idea how long you’ve been in your own little internal world. Until you receive that text saying ‘where are you?’

It’s not that we don’t care or can’t manage time—it’s that time just doesn’t exist in the same way for us. We feel it differently. And sometimes that means living in an endless loop of alarms, parking lot scrolls, or caught up in a space time continuum of fixation and then panicking with last-minute sprints.

It’s like a fun little mind game of what kind of time will it be today?!’ God only knows. 

Eventually it would be nice to figure out a happy place in the middle somewhere. A place where I have one reminder (that I don’t ignore repeatedly). Where I can manage doing a quick task and still leave without rushing out the door. Where I can drive to my appointment with less anxiety and show up ‘right on time.’ Not absurdly early or frantically late.

But, for now I’ll be riding this wild ride called the Time Warp, and believing that one day I will figure out a way to hop off. When I do, you’ll be the first to know.

If you have any tools or strategies that work for you and your time blindness I’d love to read them in the comments below!