Is This ADHD or Am I Losing My Mind

Why you forget, and how to tell it from what you’re afraid of

You walk into the kitchen and stop. You know you came in for something. You stand in the middle of the room, looking around, waiting for it to come back to you, and it doesn’t.

This used to make you laugh. You’re 65 now, and it stopped being funny.

You’ve started keeping track of them: the word that wouldn’t come at dinner, the appointment you forgot until they called to cancel, the neighbor’s name gone a second too long. And underneath it all, the thought you don’t say out loud: what if this is how it starts.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called The Forgetting You’ve Always Done. It helps you see whether the forgetting scaring you now is the same kind you’ve had all along, so you can stop reading every blank as a warning.

What’s going on when you forget

To hold a thought in your mind, you have to keep your attention on it, and in ADHD holding it there is harder. A thought you had a second ago can drop before you act on it. You stood up to get something in the kitchen, your attention moved to something else on the way, and by the time you got there the reason was gone.