My Take
2 min readByMaureen OConnell
Yep I'm neurodivergent, quadruple fold. I'm dyslexic, I have SDAM, Aphantasia and most likely ADHD. I'm not broken, I'm different; I like to think of myself as evolved. This is my life. I live in the moment (hours, days, up to about 3 months). There is no past for me (personally, people, events), it fades so quickly and the future is a blank, black space, my mind is blind, a vast nothingness. It's impossible for you to understand how I live in this world, how I experience it. Just like I can't phantom how you do. I have vague micro glimpses (non visual, a thought perhaps measured in nanoseconds) of a past event but they're fuzzy, Ill defined, just glimpses of facts, and nothing personal. I can't see myself or anybody else except how they are today in this moment. I don't know myself as a child, adolescent, young adult or 3 months ago. My family, they are the same, they only exist as they are today, no memories as they were in the past. I figured out that the few memories I do have are actually pictures I've seen from the past or vague snapshots of a moment in time, with no context, no texture, no meaning. If I don't have regular reminders of times, places or people they disappear, they no longer exist... they never existed. It can take as little as 3 months for people and personal events to completely disappear. That's the SDAM. I might get a rare glimpse of a name or event, but it's just a disembodied fleeting though with no context, no color, no texture, no memory, to be forgotten almost immediately.
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David Carter•recently
As taxing as it is, especially on relationships, I find it is also very freeing. I don't stress about the future. I am not constrained by a grand plan. And I am incapable of being hurt by others because I forget the feeling of being hurt. I have no enemies. It's a strange kind of prison--one with a ledge leading to a bottomless pit. I often wonder if it's worth taking that leap of faith but I just keep soldiering on hoping life will get better and it's just my brain that cannot see it yet.
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gregory coghlan•recently
I think of it as living in the eternal now - with few or no memories of the past, it is hard to project, accurately, into the future. Mostly, I am unable to compare past experiences with current events - but there is one odor stimulus that actually triggers a memory. When I walk by a smoker who is just lighting up, that initial smell of the cigarette beginning to catch will bring up a memory of me and my brother hiding in the hopper of a combine smoking cigarettes. I was younger than 6 (at age 6 dad moved us from Roundup to Livingston MT). We stole cigarettes from the freezer where dad kept his cigs; when we were finally caught, dad actually quit smoking to keep us from them.
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