ADHD Brainfarts: Stand Up and Take a Bow

Take a man with an ADHD brain on the fritz, deprive him of sleep, and put him on a diet. Then sit back and watch the show.

I had a business call to make early Monday morning. I had been trying to get in touch with this person for some time and I seemed to always call when she was out of the office. Her name was Claudia.

Say it with me. Claudia.

That's not such a hard name. It's not ethnic. It doesn't use phonetics alien to my tongue. It's not even spelled creatively like "K'lawd3ya". Just Claudia. Simple.

Yet when I called her office this morning to return her call, the conversation went like this.

"Really-long-business-name. May I help you?"

"Yes, hi! I'm returning a call for…"

There was a very awkward silence. I had no idea who I was calling. I couldn't remember anymore. In the past, my first reaction used to be to hang up the phone in a hot flush of embarrassment. Years later I would fake a bad connection or a sudden interruption (Good Heavens, no! Don't put the nuclear waste there!! click). But now I'm at one with my goofiness. I take such things in stride.

"Wow, I can't remember the name of the person who I was supposed to call back. I'm sorry."

I had forgotten my ADHD phone tip: Always have the name of the business person you are calling written down in front of you. I laughed; she laughed. This was very important. I kept my voice cheerful and in control and described the nature of the business I was calling about.

"Is it Claudia you're trying to reach?"

"Yes! That's the name. You have saved my life." And I laughed again. She did, too. All was well. Being affable saved me from being humiliated.

If only that had been my one goof for the day. I'm afraid Monday wasn't finished having its way with me.

A half hour later I was eating my "power oatmeal" made with oatmeal, extra water, and vanilla protein powder. No sugar. (Yes, I'm on a diet.) Somehow I had convinced myself to eat the stuff, but it was so vile, or I had prepared it so terribly, that I could not believe the incredible gritty blandness of it—a textural assault of boringness to torture my palate. Forcing myself to eat it was a test of my commitment to the new food plan. I decided to take a picture of it and tweet the following:

This is what a goat vomits up after passing through a lumber yard.

But my tweet was nowhere to be found. How puzzling. Thirty minutes later somebody sent me an @. Apparently I had posted the picture AND comment to my blog, not Twitter. How embarrassing. There it was. "Vomit" in half inch tall type at the top of my blog with a picture of oatmeal. I screamed "Oh Noooo!" all the way down the stairs to the computer to erase my mistake with my eleven year old eagerly following along to see what Daddy had done wrong this time.

I have decided that the twelve pounds I have lost over the past week came not from my waist as intended, but from my brain. There really is no other explanation for it. Either that, or I didn't get enough sleep. Doesn't matter. Sometimes there's nothing that can be done when the ADHD brainfarts happen and pull the rug out from under you. You just have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, clean up the damage, and if you're cheeky, take a bow.