The lighter side of ADHD
I have this friend that we used to talk for hours non stop ..we used to work together and it was awesome how we could talk all day long..we parted ways since he moved to another country.. A couple months ago we hung out while he was visiting and we had some news...O told him I was diagnosed with ADHD..and he told me he was diagnosed as autistic.. Thinking about it..it makes sense now how we got along great and used to talk about other people being weird for some hidden social rules..
As someone who doesn't have conversations regularly, how is this different from when people "normally" have conversations? or is this suggesting person A is saying one thing and when person B chimes in, they immediately pivot to some other topic and this flow continues without actually finishing one conversation?
I think what's actually happening is that people sometimes are extremely critical of social situations, often thinking there is one right response and many wrong ones. They feel like they fail conversations and other people think the same thing, even when they usually dont.
Socializing isn't a right and wrong thing, there's many choices and flavors. I think people with ADHD just need to relax their expectations of what socializing is when it goes well.
Eh, I'm autistic and I can explain exactly how my tangent is related to the initial topic, its just that a lot of people do not have the attention span or patience to follow a complex set of successive or simultaneous associations.
Its possible to be an autist and not also have adhd, Neurodivergent as a term is a wide net cast over a diverse array of thinking modes... not solely a term for only one of them.
I have ADHD as as long as someone asks "Wait, how did we get to this topic" while we are still going I can give a step by step string of tangents. Can't reliably do it after the conversation ends though.
The tangents are never random, they are always connected!
I think people get lost sometimes because the thought/story that triggered the tangent can continue for a bit before the tangent is shared. The tangential moment sticks out for the one wanting to share their tangent but it otherwise is a normal moment of the thought/story for others.
It took years of practice but I always make the tangent connection clearly when I bring it up. The other person often forgets it, but when they ask for the recap they go 'oh yeah'.
Well hey there ya go!
I mean, I probably would not... be able to recreate my own entire thought process like, the next day, unless I ended up getting hyperfocused on it for whatever reason lol.
Maybe if all the context could be recreated or described back to me, then I probably could... but, not if some bit of context that was really important to me, but totally unimportant to the other person, ended up getting left out.
If you don't know this sketch by Key&Peele already, you'll have a laugh
Sounds quite like my wife. She's not random, but she appears random because the path to get from A to B is indeed a rollercoaster.
Oh how I wish I could meet a woman like that.
You lucky bastard, hah!
She can be her own heap of trouble but my life is ever richer for it.
Ah, and the resumed conversation from weeks ago is another thing she does with the full expectation that I will remember the thing that she is now answering. Imagine suddenly being thrust backwards through time, weeks peeling away, suddenly arriving at a reply to a comment made in passing a month ago. Like necroposting but in real life.
You are just making me more jealous, you are describing more things that seem completely normal and like default behavior to me.
You realize that when an autistic person acts like that, irl necroposts at you... that's a sign they trust you to an incredible degree, right?
My guess would be she would not be offended or annoyed if you just asked her to refresh you on the context, to help you sort of... reload the last save file of that conversation that's been to at least some degree ruminating or present in her mind over all those weeks.
It used to drive my wife insane because my mother and I will just pick up in the middle of a conversation we had been having a month ago. No "do you remember when we were talking about X", just straight up picking up the conversation right where we left off without missing a beat. She has gotten used to it now but she still does not understand how we can do it.
Same here. Every reply is connected, just not always welcome.
I also have friends with ADHD who can connect things perfectly, their attention span just goes all over the place. But other ADHD friends are exactly like this post.
We're all different.
When I read your comments about your personal experience, I often wonder "are you me?!" I've even tracked conversation topics and made maps of their interconnectivity after having been accused of incoherent rambling.
Lesson learned: if you're ND AF, consider having similarly ND friends and romantic partners. NTs are often baffled by us, whereas my ND homies are more likely to love to hear me wax poetic in great detail about the processes of insect metamorphosis or the microbiological and etymological origins of petrichor.
Hemiptera are my favorite!
Yeah, I too have realized that I'd probably rather never date again than date a non autist again.
I've tried with NTs, I really have, multiple multi year relationships.
It just doesn't work. Too much work for me to half pretend I'm not autistic, and for them to half-pretend they're not bothered by it, made uncomfortable by it.
Nope nope nope.
Would be nice to find someone who just fundamentally mentally functions very similar to how I do... and the great thing about being autistic is that we probably don't actually need to have specifically similar interests... because if we like each other, we'll just truly enjoy infodumping and also infoabsorbing basically any kind of topic, because learning is fun!
Sharing (knowledge) is caring!
"What the fuck are you on about? You yappin again?".
No thanks, conversations with normies tend to be fairly short and limited.
Thats worse than a normie, you've aggro'd a brainrotted, near feral idiot.
Anyone else have that one friend that you can talk for hours with?
And when I say hours I mean HOURS, like started at 9pm and finished at 5am full 8 hours with a few breaks in for snacks and drinks.
Not chatting whilst playing a game, like talking and sharing links and pictures back and forth on discord, debating, speculating, etc.
You go on one tangent and then when you've exhausted that tangent, you backtrack and backtrack to continue the conversation until the next tangent, rinse and repeat until you realise you've been chatting the equivalent of a full work day and you both should probably get some sleep.
Is it just me and him?
Yes except for me "him" is now my partner and we're getting married next year. I do have some friends with seemingly unlimited conversation topics too, but eventually I get socially exhausted and I need to finish the conversation and have a break.
My wife as well. We get each other.
Congratulations to you both, I too hope to find a partner like that.
I remember standing in the parking lot with one of my friends, ready to go into my car to go home. We start talking and suddenly it's like 3 hours later, I'm not even joking.
I also remember being able to speak to friends on the phone for multiple hours.
Occasionally I have that friend, yes, but I think most of them just endure my autistic unload, be it out of politeness, to unload theirs, or because they just don't mind that much.
In my current phase in life, it's too much for everybody :-)
Conversation Bonus: Going back in time to a subject one of you mentioned five minutes ago
Oh you mean unwinding your conversation stack to get back to the original point each tangent was intended to make to their parent topic?
Though my stack is usually corrupted by the time I try to swing back, so it turns into a "now why the fuck was I talking about this again?"
It's also important to keep track so later you can go back to a previous topic and add what you wanted to say earlier but forgot because you had to say something about an idea that was tangential to the new topic. Also pause from time to time and wonder how you got where you are and what you originally wanted to discuss.
that's my favorite type of conversation!
Zhuangzi, the author of one of the top 5 texts of our species, talks a lot about 遊 yóu - a word that means roam, wander, stroll, walk, associate with. It's sometimes translated as "free and easy wandering" and used in words like friend, play, sightsee, visit, amuse yourself, parade, dissociate.
For Zhuangzi, yóu is really important for happiness and to understand the world.
The clearest example of yóu I've experienced is the kind of judgement-free free-association of talking to other neurodivergent friends.
New rabbit hole unlocked! Thanks. I have linked the article below for future deep dives into this text. I love Taoist thought and this comment was well timed to prompt a revisit.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Chuang_Tz%C5%AD_(Giles)/Chapter_1
The text itself is a really easy and fun read. Even a couple thousand years later in translation, the inner chapters are hilarious, nonstop brilliance and plenty of the outer chapters are thought provoking. It got me through the pandemic.
Though it would go on to become foundational for Daoism, I'm skeptical that it was ever intended to be part of a larger tradition.
Have you read Neither Lord Nor Subject, by Bao Jingyen? It clearly and passionately makes an eco-anarchist critique of authority from a daoist angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs23tDAaEho
Or more accurately, randomly swap between those strategies based on a coin, a d20, and a cat chasing a laser pointer
Random-incremental-search!
Or spiderweb-tree structure!
Every single phone call with my best mate, there's still important things we need to tell each other that we are only half way though telling, some of them have been for years, we'll get there one day.
The entire conversation is just an endless string of Family Guy cutaways.
Now I'm wondering if they ever did any full episodes like that, just a disjointed series of references and videos of said reference and no overall episode plot.
It's related... Distantly :(
That sounds nice
