I’ve learned not to put too much pressure on my memory. There’s a danger for me to overwork the clay, or get lost in the weeds, to pile on my metaphors. Since I got the ADHD diagnosis, I feel like I’ve got more permission to move gently. The psychologist ran me through a half-dozen evals and questionnaires—some for ruling out, some ruling in. Some just to get the heft of things more precisely.

“Your short-term memory is a relative weakness,” she said. “Relative,” she urged me, was the context. My working memory index produced a lower score among my other scores. Most of my scores were, by definition and numerical fact, above average. “Relative weakness” was a piece of information, not a sentence.

And it wasn’t exactly news. During the evals, especially the ones I competed in the tiny office with the doctor’s assistant proctoring, I could hear my brain fighting with the tests. “If I could just have a pencil and paper, I’d have this solved in a second. If I could just have more time, I could do all of this…”

But that was the point. Some of the tests wanted to find the limits of short-term memory with only auditory information, demanding I juggle my way through either simple or complex processes. If I’d been allowed to write things down, it would become visual information. The brain processes language as word-shapes. And that wasn’t the issue at hand. This was a juggling test.

The diagnosis hasn’t become permission to be forgetful or unthoughtful—that would be excuse, not permission. An excuse is a reason applied post factum, to manipulate the story. Permission is an openness of the playing field, from the start.

As a writer, I have tended to believe that if it’s important, a great idea forgotten will come back to me. I permit myself to let flighty ideas go without undue mourning. If it’s important, it will come back. And maybe if it doesn’t, it either wasn’t so great after all or perhaps wasn’t mine.

It’s a nice thought. Even if it’s not true, once an idea’s gone, it doesn’t matter whether this thought is true. It gets to be true because the opposite can no longer be true. It can’t be mine if it didn’t come back to me, so it gets to be not meant for me after all. 

It’s tidy in a convenient way.

A corollary has occurred to me too: no matter what’s forgotten or what’s eluded my capture, there is more. There will always be more. If I thought it were possible for ideas to run out, I would be a desperate writer, and the good stuff doesn’t come from fear. That’s a way to wear down the works a hurry. 

Here’s the thing about momentum. It begets momentum. Dominoes can topple gradually larger dominoes. Did you know this? Our brains love to line up dominoes for the thrill of a chain reaction, but physicists messed with it, and they know that a smaller domino can topple a bigger one, and so on, and suddenly we’re talking about geometric growth. Increasing power. It has to do with the spacing, the mass, and, of course, friction.

Writing makes me hungrier. It doesn’t make me feel spent, like I’ve been emptied of something. No, I’m listening. I’m looking. If writing is one of my conditions, a symptom is these visions I can only catch from the corner of my eye. I’m forever turning my head, wondering if I will get to watch the next surprise or special happening, or learn enough about the thing to want to tell of it. 

How much do you have to know about a thing to love it? Not much, it seems. Writing only ever gives me visions out of the corner of my eye. If I keep chasing them, I might grow capacity. Maybe there’s something bigger that becomes possible next. I don’t have to hang on to any of it. I don’t need to ask my memory to do anything it can’t. Just lay down the word-shapes, mess with the image, and let the friction work for me.

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