So I’m going to a store, and I’ve got sunglasses on. I’m what I call “floating”. My mind isn’t on what my body is doing right now. I’m composing some of this article. I’m in the store. I talk to the clerk I start home.
On the way home, I drop back into my body. I realize I don’t have my sunglasses.
I had them on my way to the store. I ask my autopilot if he put my sunglasses down. He says, “Why are you asking me? You’re the one with episodic memory.”
The autopilot has fucked me again. It can do a lot of things. Mostly, keeping track of things isn’t one of them. My most common advice is to not float, to always be present and aware of my immediate surroundings. It’s easy, neurotypical people explain to me like someone telling a one-armed person how simple ladders and shovels are.
If there is an article that tells you as an ADHD person how to stop floating or how to get your autopilot to keep track of stuff, put this down and read that article. All I can do is contain the damage.
Try to go easy on yourself. You have to face that there are things you don’t have. Medically speaking, the thing you don’t have is enough oxygen to your frontal lobe. More immediately, the thing you don’t have is your phone. Where the fuck is your phone?
I have directed immense amounts of shame and anger at myself. I’ve hated my autopilot with a fury, berated it for forgetting my phone. It’s not helpful. If you tell your autopilot, “remember the phone, the phone, the phone”, your autopilot with obsess over the phone, take it out of your pocket, put it back, take it out of your pocket, put it back, take it out of your pocket, and you don’t know where that was because remembering things isn’t what your autopilot does.
So I’ve been like this for over fifty years. My possessions now fit into one of four categories.
Homebodies
Homebodies don’t leave your home. I’ve got a tablet. It’s great. It can fit into my backpack. It doesn’t go into my backpack because I don’t want to buy two or three tablets a year. My portable tablet goes to my office to my living room to my bedroom.
I don’t know where my tablet is now, but I do know it’s in my house because it never leaves.
Commuters
Commuters are either at your house or at your work and nowhere else. I find it helpful to group commuters in boxes. I have an essentials box with my work badge, my dongle (my work has high security), my mask, my perscription glasses and my headphones. My tech box has a mouse and a macro keyboard. These things and my laptop go to work and nowhere else.
People who have to go to multiple places have more trouble with these items. I’m lucky that my work is in one building. If I still was in college, I’d have multiple classrooms to lose things in. I don’t miss textbooks.
Offerings
There are things that you need to carry sometimes that are pretty cheap. Gloves, sunglasses, reading glasses are all offerings. I accept that I’m going to lose these all the time and have learned to accept I need to get new ones regularly.
Talismans
In time, you can train your autopilot to immediately pull you in if a specific thing is missing. A phone has the added benefit that it typically has a GPS and you might be able to find it by Googling “find my phone”.
You need to carry your talisman in the same place, and you need to carry it all the time or your autopilot will decide it’s okay to ignore it. If I’m outside and the phone isn’t in my left pocket, something is wrong and the autopilot hits the alarm. If my phone breaks, I carry the broken phone. If it’s a quick jaunt and I don’t need my phone, I carry the damn phone anyway.
Autopilot gets way worse with multiple talismans. If you have a phone, keys and wallet, can you make your wallet and keys part of your phone? Can you stop carrying any one of those things?
So those are my categories. Sometimes a thing will move. I really wanted to listen to music whereever I went, but headphones became “commuters” after I left them in movie theaters twice in two weeks. Maybe my vision will get worse and my glasses can be a second talisman, but right now autopilot takes off my glasses when I’m not reading, and I’ve lost four pairs, which is why perscription glasses are commuters and only reading glasses go to the store.
Habit can make you slowly better at tracking some things. I’ve had the same two pairs of gloves for two years. It feels weird to ride a bike without gloves unless it’s summer, so I walk out, get ready to ride my bike, get off and find my gloves. I’m doing even better with my bike helmet. I’m hoping one day I can keep track of sunglasses.
