I have ADHD. I’m not excusing the hurt your friend has caused, it’s clear you think highly of them as a person and it’s sad that she doesn’t recognise the impact of her behaviour on you.
My post isn’t about your specific situation, which I’m glad you decided how to handle. it’s more an observation about how people with ADHD are perceived.
I am a warm, fun and quite chilled person - inattentive type ADHD rather than hyperactive so it’s my mind that’s a mile a minute rather than my behaviour.
Object permanence is a huge problem for me and this extends to people. I have dear friends that have moved to other parts of the country so I don’t see them around and will go weeks- if not months- without even remembering they exist. It doesn’t mean I think less of them, I just can’t hold them in my brains “peripheral vision”. I think that for most people, the most important things are front and centre in their memory and so anything that impacts those things, or is related, raises a massive flag to say “notice this!” and the person does. Things are in order of priority, the more important the bigger the flag and the more capacity in their brain there is to focus on it.
Like a dartboard, with super important stuff being the bullseye and outside the score area but still on the board being the least important, everything of any note that needs thinking about at all will be on the board.
This is not how my memory works. These friends aren’t even on the dartboard. They are probably 4 metres to the left and down a bit. I will not even see them unless I go looking. One is godparent to my child. She is an amazing, wonderful woman who I think of very highly but I forget about our friendship 99% of the time.
I hate myself for it. The worst thing is that I can see she thinks less of me because of it, but all of the tips and techniques in the world will not change the fact that I just don’t remember she even exists on a daily basis.
For all the things I need to remember to be a good friend- her children’s birthdays, hers, the fact that her beloved dog is having an operation from which it might not recover and she is feeling terribly sad, to send her a meme that I know she’d howl with laughter at, to phone her back when I notice a missed call, to reply to her text before it falls of the bottom of the screen- I could set timers on my phone. I could have reminders and colour coded stickers and alarms and visual cues and a whole network of other systems in place to make me better at what people without ADHD can do more easily. It’s mentally and physically exhausting though.
An example- I did an extra work qualification last year. One single exam. All done via teaching and study over 12 weeks. Quite a couple of sessions online/ in person a week and a few hours of homework. Nothing big. It took so much effort and headspace (which is already massively limited because, well, inattentive ADHD) to not fuck up and miss sessions/remember homework/revise that any free time was mainly spent at home alone in silence so I could recover and prepare for the coming week of making sure I did what I needed to. It’s shit. I ended up having no life outside of the bare minimum of must do’s. Barely any social events, no making progress with bigger household projects, no catching up with friends or family, just the bare minimum of keeping my children safe, warm, fed, clean (ish) and loved. And that’s when I add on only one smallish extra thing that needs me to focus on it for a couple of months. It wasn’t massive.
I have had to decide not to run my life like that. I can’t set myself on fire to keep someone else warm, even if they deserve so very much to be warm.
I haven’t said any of this to my friend, because like a lot of posters on this thread, she would probably think that it’s a shitty excuse and I just need to try harder, if she was that important to me I would make more effort to be a better friend because I am clearly choosing to be shit at it- it’s so easy to set a few reminders on my phone after all.
And what would she think of me if I told her that it’s not just her, even my own son deals with this. My golden, gorgeous, amazingly brilliant eldest son who is away at uni- who I love so fiercely that I can cry just thinking about how his little chubby wrists rolled when a baby, or how funny he is as an adult, how proud of him I am for becoming his own man- that amazing human being who is so important to me, I forget to text him for weeks at a time. What would she think of me then?Not as little as I think of myself I will guarantee that.
Most of my (v small) circle of close friends are also neurodivergent. I don’t have to face the disappointment coming from them caused by my failure to be able to play by the rules of a world whose dartboard I don’t feature on, because they don’t expect me to be able to. The rules for our friendships are very different.
ADHD isn’t something that can be fixed with more effort and willpower. Find the right techniques and we’ll be like the rest of the world, nobody will have to be impacted by it if we just tried a bit harder, applied more thought, more care, more consideration.
I am expecting that lots of posters will tell me to stop making excuses, the OPs friend has behaved really badly. I don’t know what’s going on with OPs friend of course, and this post isn’t really about that situation, the message I’m trying to share is that the views of people with ADHD (and I expect other neurodivergences too) expressed on this thread are like expecting someone who was born without a right hand to be able to shake yours with it and being offended that they can’t.
I’m typing on a tiny screen, I bet this message is massive and littered with inconsistencies and spelling and syntax errors. I’ve subjected you all to an outpouring. I’m touched and surprised if anyone has stayed with it to the end :)