I see time backwards

“You see time backwards.” This was a comment made to me recently and it made me stop and think for a moment.

It turned out to be yet another example of how I manage an aspect of my ADHD that seems ordinary to me but, it turns out, is not ordinary to someone else who thinks differently.

Here’s how I see time ‘backwards’.

Let’s say I’m meeting a friend for coffee at 10am in my local town. To give myself any chance of meeting her on time I need to work backwards through my morning right back to waking up. Without doing this I’ll have no clue what time I’ll be there.

The drive to town takes 20 minutes – add on buffer time for traffic (which is tractors and touring caravans where I live), parking and walking from the car to the café – so we’ll make that 40 minutes from getting in the car at my house to walking through the café doors.

That takes us back to 9.20am.

Before this I need to eat breakfast, that’s 30 minutes to include prep, eating and clearing up.

Now we’re back to 8.50am.

Before breakfast I need to get ready – shower, dressed, do my hair, put on some make-up – it should take 30 minutes but I’ll make it 40 minutes to give myself a bit more buffer time.

So that takes us back to 8.10am.

The dog needs walking – morning walk is a shorter one than the afternoon so including faffing about with putting on my boots, his harness, remembering treats and poop bags, and then towelling him down when we get back, I’ll allocate 40 minutes.

This brings us back to 7.30am.

Before I walk the dog I need to have done the basics of washing my face, brushing my teeth and dressing. Plus time to become conscious and awake enough to do these things!

So, if I give myself 30 minutes to wake up, get out of bed and do these things that means I’m setting my alarm for 7am.

Thinking this way isn’t necessary, it’s essential

It was walking myself backwards through a similar timeline, out loud that prompted the comment, “you see time backwards”. Because the person who listened to me go through this process was somewhat baffled – not only that I worked through this timeline but that I found it necessary.

It’s not necessary, it’s essential. The idea that someone can arrange a meeting or an appointment for a specific time, and then just trust that they’ll do all the things they want or need to do beforehand and be there on time is utterly baffling to me.

And if you’re wondering how I know the length of time needed to shower and get ready, or how long the drive is from my house to my local town it’s because I’ve timed them.

Chicken time

I’ve timed it all. How else would I know?! I have a completely inability to judge the time needed for a task unless I’ve timed myself doing it or perhaps if I’ve done it hundreds of times. I round up so if a task will take me 25mins-ish I round it up to 30 minutes. And if I’ve any doubt about how long a task or a stage of the journey could take I add on extra buffer time. (A coaching client named this ‘chicken time’ because the instructions to cook a chicken are x minutes per kg + 30 minutes. I’m veggie so wouldn’t know but the memorable name amused us both!)

Time agnosia isn’t as simple as seeing time as now or not-now. It’s our entire relationship with time – how something that bores us seems to take forever but we can be absorbed in hyperfocus for four hours and it feels like four minutes have passed. How we know we have ten minutes before we have to leave the house so we think we can fit in a task that actually takes an hour. How I don’t have a clue what time it is without a watch to tell me, aside from light = daytime, dark = nighttime.

I really, really don’t want to be late. For anyone, for anything, ever. I took on the belief early on that to be late was disrespectful and uncaring, and it was proof that I was selfish and thoughtless, all of which made me a bad person. So, decades of ingraining this belief means that I will move heaven and earth before I show up late. And that means I work backwards through timelines from any and all appointments in my work or life.

It’s a well-established habit that serves me well AND it takes significant effort.

And this is the eye-opener for the person hearing me work backwards through my morning from the 10am coffee date to my 7am wake-up alarm. The cognitive effort this process takes and the idea that I go through this process frequently gave them a little insight into the work we ADHDers can put into ordinary life.

The unseen labour, the energy, the effort required to show up for the people around us.

If we don’t show it, they don’t see it

And this is just one example of how, as quiet, contained, conscientious late-discovered ADHDers, we’ve created strategies to manage our ADHD. To the outside world (assuming you don’t speak the process out loud) we just turn up on time. We’re not late, there’s no problem (to them) so we’re coping and our ADHD isn’t an issue, right?

It’s not really that surprising that they don’t understand or perhaps believe our ADHD because they literally don’t see it. We don’t show it so they don’t see the effort that went in to turning up on time. They don’t see the cost, the cognitive load we’re carrying.

They see the outside – the on-time us, the organised, responsible us. They don’t see everything that’s happening on the inside – the thinking, the planning, the juggling, the worrying, accompanied by a soundtrack of our inner critic and a random song from the 80s whose lyrics are stuck in our heads even though we can’t remember what we went upstairs for.

Now I’m not suggesting we ditch our strategies, throw caution to the wind and turn up whenever we turn up. I’m not going to stop seeing time backwards and I am going to keep working through my timelines so that I’m not late for appointments because I don’t want to be late.

But, I don’t need to hide the work I put in to the ordinary stuff of life like being on time. Verbally walking through my process so that someone else can hear what it takes for me to not be late for an appointment is one way to draw back the curtain on how my ADHD brain works. It’s showing my workings instead of only the final answer. It’s dropping the mask of appearing like everything’s easy breezy. It’s letting the busy paddling underwater be seen as well as the gliding swan on the surface.

I’m curious, do you see time backwards like I do? Or, if you find yourself rushing, time vanishing and scrambling to not be late, will you give this a try? Let me know if the comments.