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  • Grace & Discipline with ADHD (Part Two)

    Grace & Discipline with ADHD (Part Two)
    2025/02/07
    originally written for Medium • Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash If you know, you know. And that changes pretty much everything. “Suddenly, so much of my life made so much more sense.” That’s the most common refrain I hear from people like me who were late-diagnosed with ADHD. In my case, it was an ongoing, bitter, semi-serious joke, because while I excelled at tests, writing, and learning of all kinds, I somehow wasn’t ever able to parlay that into a secure career the way my peers seemed to. I would ask myself, over and over, as I looked at a depleted bank account or sat in traffic on the way to another job that I used to love but now felt like sandpaper in my gut: if I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich? Almost exactly a year ago from this writing, I got the confirmation of a possible answer to that question: because you’ve had ADHD (combined type) since you were a kid, and nobody knew it. I can’t blame anyone, not my teachers, not my parents, not my self, not my well-meaning friends and partners who tried a variety of techniques to help me succeed. There wasn’t the science to understand what ADHD was (in truth, there still isn’t, really, but at least it’s getting better). Now that I know I have ADHD, what does that change about my life? Being ignorant is not a sin. Remaining ignorant, is. — Robert Heinlein “What…are you…prepared…to DO?” — Sean Connery to Kevin Costner, The Untouchables Like many late-diagnosed ADHD folks, I channeled the one double-edged superpower that I understood: hyper-focus. I devoured the books, the podcasts, the papers, the social posts, the videos, and started writing about how I understood what I was learning (and now you’re reading this article! Sing with me: “It’s the CIIIRRRRRCLLLE of WRIIIIIIIIITE…”). That was the easy part. The hard part was — still is — that second part of the serenity prayer: accepting the things I cannot change. I have to stop pretending that my brain will work in the same way that most brains in this world work. It explains all the mishaps, mistakes, and poorly thought-out decisions that have made my life more difficult than it needed to be, but it doesn’t fix them. That’s up to me. Discipline means limiting my options. I hate even writing that. The cold, hard truth is that there are just some things that I see other people take for granted that I cannot do. I’m going to give you the current version of the running list, but before I do, I want to head off the typical neurotypical response: oh, everybody has that happen sometimes. Yes. You’re right. They do. The difference of ADHD is not in the symptoms; it is in the frequency and severity of the symptoms. Yes, everyone has diminished mental capacity when they don’t get enough sleep; for someone with ADHD, trouble sleeping is more common, and the diminishment is more severe. Which is why it’s at the top of the list: Things I cannot do: Skip on sleep. There’s an inverse relationship between how much sleep I get and how much my ADHD manifests during my day — and yes, I’m aware that sleep deprivation affects everyone, please see the above about severity. To add a layer of complication, the quality of the sleep also seems to be a factor.Skip on meds. It’s not just taking them — it’s the whole system of checks and reminders I have to have in place, because my brain doesn’t form habits, nor can it just assume I’ll remember to take them. Hence the obnoxious and insistent medical alarm on my Apple Watch, the checkbox in my daily journal for meds, and carrying a spare dose with me everywhere in my ADHD every-day carry.Skip on exercise. Again, I know: everybody needs to move. However, for most people, it’s because their body needs it. Mine too, but it’s become more and more clear that it’s really because my brain needs it to function adequately.Buy things conveniently. I used to think that contactless payment idea, the PayPal’s and the Venmo’s and tap-cards were wonderful inventions — until I realized, decades too late, that they make it that much easier for my brain to create crises by making impulsive purchases. I have them, but I’ve made them harder to use for myself.Use phrases like “in a while”, “soon”, or “later.” Time blindness is a thing. I’ve learned the hard way that I really have no concept of the passage of time, so if I use those very common phrases, they really have no meaning at all. Things I have to do: Interrupt my life to make notes. I have to write things down — names, tasks, ideas, you name it — in my little field notebook, or they get lost. It’s a common joke among ADHDers: The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “Oh, I’ll remember this later.” And sure, there are things on my phone that can let me conveniently take notes — but the phone is no longer a phone, remember? It’s an Infernal Distractibility Sarlacc Pitt of New Shiny ...
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    19 分
  • Grace and Discipline with ADHD (Part one)

    Grace and Discipline with ADHD (Part one)
    2025/02/03
    originally written for Medium.com • Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash The Deeper Long-Term Effects of Late-Diagnosis ADHD I was interviewed recently by the hosts of a decluttering podcast (link to come later, it’s not online yet!). I’ve been writing about organization systems and techniques for decades. I have always enjoyed trying out new systems, finding out the advantages and limitations and constantly re-optimizing them in various ways whether physical (whiteboards and labeled boxes!), paper (53 folders! File cabinets and notebooks!) or digital (Obsidian! Notion! Johnny Decimal! Tags, tags, so many tags…). It’s gotten to the point where I have to finally accept that it’s not so much a “need to get organized” as a hobby that I enjoy. Being a productivity/organization nerd for so long has made me into a bit of a resource for friends and clients as well; in any given situation, I usually can find a few different ways to organize, systematize, and optimize it, with a good idea of the pros and cons of each system. A long chat with a couple of decluttering enthusiasts was a wonderful way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and we laughed and traded ideas and experiences for over an hour. Finally one of the hosts asked me a question that resonated more deeply than I expected: Has your diagnosis of ADHD changed any of the ways you approach decluttering or organizing? Seems like an easy question, right? I could just point to the ADHD-friendly PDF planner, or my ADHD everyday carry kit, or something like that. But for some reason, the conversation sent my brain into deeper, more existential motivations, and two seemingly contradictory words bubbled up to the surface of my brain. “Yes. I give myself more grace, and more discipline. Grace is hard for a recovering workaholic ex-hustle-culture single-parent former Marine. Love languages are one thing — what about “motivational” languages? We all have varying ways of talking ourselves into doing things, as well as giving feedback to ourselves about the things we’ve done. Quite often these voices are echoes of the voices we internalized from others in our lives — parents, peers, teachers, partners, bosses, mentors, even books or podcasts. To use a distasteful example, a “pickup artist” enthusiast will likely start referring to people in terms of how attractive they find them — usually with a number, because objectifying other people with labels is much easier than actually interacting with them. But the interesting thing is that they also will refer to themselves with that numbering system — and it becomes a motivation for self-improvement. I’m only a six, but if I get in shape and dress better I could move up to a seven or eight and then I’ll have a chance with a nine, maybe even a not-picky ten! Gross, and also effective in some people I’ve met in getting them to pay more attention to their health and appearance. Even more distasteful and also unfortunately effective is the use of self-directed shame and anger as a motivator. I know this because many of my own accomplishments and “good habits” came from this kind of motivation. Nobody beats me up better than the drill instructor in my head (What do you mean you don’t feel like working out? Since when does a man your age have a choice in that? I don’t know what I did to deserve to be stuck in the head of someone this pathetic!). Or shame: No wonder your blog numbers fell. You don’t get up at 5 am and write anymore, the way real writers do. Might as well just keep scrolling Instagram, your work isn’t ever going to amount to anything anyway. Or just things not being good enough, even when they do get done: Sure, you think you’re a clever writer, coming up with these little voices in your head — but three? Four examples if you count the pickup artist? That’s ridiculous. Nobody’s going to read that much. You should have spent more time editing, instead of just squeezing in your writing on your lunch break. No wonder you’re not a Top Writer. That’s been my motivation for most of my life. Bullying and berating and belittling myself into getting things done — and it’s been quite effective, because I’ve done a lot of things, and certainly achieved the mainstream milestones of masculine success. And amidst being treated for the depression and anxiety that was the result of all that “success” came the news from my therapist and my psychiatrist. Oh. You have ADHD, combined type, and it’s pretty obvious that you’ve had it your entire life. That diagnosis added a new voice in my head. Suddenly there was a new set of ideas in my head, a clarification of the contributing factors to a huge number of decisions, events, and behaviors in my life. The simple understanding that my brain does not process dopamine the way that approximately 97% of other brains do explained why so much of the world I lived in — the world designed to ...
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    12 分
  • Your Productivity Tools and Hacks Are Useless Without This One Thing.

    Your Productivity Tools and Hacks Are Useless Without This One Thing.
    2025/01/31
    originally published on Medium.com I learned the hard way, so maybe you won't have to. I write a lot about productivity tools and methods. I’ve written about time management and project planning and habit formation and self reflection. I’ve reviewed the things that make these possible, apps and notebooks and timers and even wrote a book about my favorite form of meditation. I left something very important out. Something that happened in December made me realize that I’d done my readers a disservice: all this productrivia was worthless without one particular practices. Come with me to the Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin, just after the Harlem Globetrotters performance, where I learned this crucial and painful lesson. I was absolutely, 100% positive I had parked my car in this lot. But as I stood there shivering in the Wisconsin winter, the halogen lights showed everybody else had parked their cars there, and were having no trouble finding them. I, on the other hand, had been wandering the rows for about half an hour, trying to find it. It was a layer cake of self-blame and physical misery. I was tired, cold, my knees hurt. But worse, I was ashamed: I was supposed to be giving my sister the dance teacher and my 6-year old nephew a ride home after their triumphant halftime performance with her dance class. I had gotten to be Good Big Brother and Cool Uncle, because she’d been injured by a horse (yes, she also works at a ranch) and so I’d offered to be the chauffeur. Except now I was the chauffeur who’d lost the car. I knew that she was waiting as patiently as she could, but I also knew that my nephew was getting really tired and they both needed to get home. I was letting them down. Worse, this situation was all too familiar. I’m notorious for forgetting where I park; once in college I’d wandered with my best friend through a parking ramp for an hour, trying to find the right stall, only to suddenly stop, look at her, and admit: “I think we’re in the wrong ramp.” She’s not my best friend any more. The thing is, I have an iPhone. One of the features of the Maps app is that, when you park your car, it drops a pin. This is where you parked! it says helpfully. I’d looked at it, seen the little blue dot that was me on the north side of the Coliseum and had a little walking-trail laid out to the east side, where it said my car was. I didn’t believe it. I’d been careful at the end of the game to make sure we’d retraced our steps, and I was completely positive that I was in the right parking lot. But my car wasn’t there. Priorities: I called my daughter, who’d also been at the game, and she first drove me around the lot a couple of times, on the off chance I was having some ADHD-related blindness towards my car. Nope; it just wasn’t there. I got out and asked her to pick up my sister and nephew, still waiting at the Coliseum exit, so that at least they’d be ok. I resigned myself to the frigid hellscape of the parking lot, wandering among the few cars that were left, getting ready to call the police and report my invaluable 2014 Prius as stolen. You know how the story ends, I suspect. A few seconds after my daughter went to get my sister, she called me. “Dad, your car is over in the East lot. I’m looking at it right now.” Right where my iPhone had said it was. The Maps app told me I could have walked there in two minutes. You have to trust the tool. I had billions of dollars in Apple R&D and the support of hundreds of high-tech global positioning satellites literally at my fingertips, all trying to tell me where I’d parked my %$#@ car…and I thought no, I’m sure I’m smarter than that. Before you decide a tool doesn’t work for you, it’s worth asking yourself: am I letting it? The effectiveness of any system is only as good as your willingness to trust it to work. A system only works if you work the system.
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    7 分
  • How TIIMO Can Help You Manage Your Time and Relieve ADHD Anxiety

    How TIIMO Can Help You Manage Your Time and Relieve ADHD Anxiety
    2024/10/28
    Raise your hand if any of these phrases sound familiar: “Oh, %$#@, it started five minutes ago!” “Wait — that was today?” “This is taking forever. How can it not be over yet?” “Guess I’m just gonna be late…again.” “What was it I’m supposed to be doing now?” If your hand is still down, this article is not for you; go back to reading “How to enjoy your perfectly manageable schedule” or “How to let people without an unfailingly accurate internal clock know how much you pity them” or whatever it is people like you read. One the other hand (the one that is raised) you may be like me and have a condition called time-blindness. You can read the science on it if you want but the TL;DR is that it makes it difficult to sense the passage of time. A lot of people use the analogy of color-blindness: you know that there are red flowers and green flowers because everyone around you says they are, but you can’t sense it yourself. Unfortunately, this doesn’t manifest as a zenlike existence because you and I live in a world where clocks rule everywhere around us. Instead, it looks like fatigue and stress from trying to compensate. dozens of apps and productivity systems tried and abandoned. unreliability because of missed or late appointments. rushed days, berating myself for being unable to keep to my schedule. a lifetime of feeling like I was failing at a really basic skill that everyone else could do, while people in authority kept telling me I just needed to do better. Which is about as useful as telling a color-blind person to just look harder. The good news is that once I realized time-blindness was a thing I had, I was able to start intentionally finding ways to “scaffold” my sense of time — externalize it. There’s a reason there are large clocks prominent in most rooms of my house, and why I have a collection of timers sitting on my desk. But nothing has been as useful as one particular app. Enter TIIMO, my Time Wingman TIIMO was originally developed by two researchers, Melissa Würtz Azari and Helene Lassen Nørlem, in order to “support neurodivergent youth at school.” The app was simply a tool for their research, but proved so useful to the subjects of the study that they didn’t want to stop using it when research was done. “It solved a problem that existing apps did not.” TIIMO (not an affiliate link) is a visual calendar and timer built into one. Here’s some images of what TIIMO looks like during my days: Building my schedule in the morning, using the app on my phone, integrating the complication in my watchface and getting a reminder later. In a lot of ways, TIIMO is just like any other scheduling app. You can set repeating events (things like my “Magic Desk Time” or “Walking the Dog”). You can set these by duration or by time-of-day, all pretty standard in calendar apps. You can set up routines, too — for example, here’s my morning routine: Yes, I know I use silly words. It works for me. Notice the visual element — you can set an icon (or upload your own) and specific color (I tend to use green for my day job, blue for my side gig, and orange for personal events). While you can sync it with your calendar, I prefer not to. The act of manually entering in every appointment in my day provides a check-in moment: Did I give myself travel time? Did I double-book myself? Is this something I really need to spend time on? Is there something I forgot that I really need to spend time on? Is there something I thought needed time that actually doesn’t? Have I severely overestimated the number of things I can spend time on whether they need it or not? Entering my schedule into TIIMO at the start of the day has resulted in farfewer missed appointments, double-books, or lost tasks. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of having direct proof of that on days when I skip that part of the morning routine — Wait, that was today? The real benefit is peace of mind. For me, what sets TIIMO apart from all the other scheduling apps I’ve tried is the granular notifications setup. Take a look: What you want to know, when you want to know it. This, as it turns out, is exactly what I need to keep on track during the day. Having it ping me 5 minutes before an appointment at the the start of that appointment halfway through, and five minutes before the end …has resulted in my time finally feeling elastic enough to actually get done what I need (or want) to get done. I don’t worry (as much) about being late. I’m able to handle meetings with more grace by having an alert when half my time is gone, and when I should be wrapping up. TIIMO becomes literally my time-sight, letting me know where I’m at in my day in case I can’t really tell. It’s not perfect. Within the Apple ecosystem, at least, there’s a few issues here and there. Most annoying is the way it syncs up with my watch; for whatever reason...
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    17 分
  • The 3-Step Foolproof Way to Find Lost Things When You Have ADHD

    The 3-Step Foolproof Way to Find Lost Things When You Have ADHD
    2024/10/28
    drawing by the author using Adobe Fresco #byHumansForHumans #noAI Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself rummaging through drawers, wandering through room after room in your house, checking backpacks and briefcases and pockets repeatedly, all while muttering “I know I saw that somewhere…” “That”, of course, is a thing that you did not need when you saw it last. It registered as a blip on your conscious mind — the feeling of “Oh, I see that. Good to know I still have it” without the burden of actually remembering where it is located. Then, a few days/weeks/months later, you suddenly realize it would be useful for some task or project — or, worse, it’s essential for it. For example: your partner just surprised you with a getaway to the Caribbean — where’s my passport? your cat ate one of your earbuds right before your Zoom meeting, but you know you have a spare pair — somewhere. you accidentally left your glasses at work, but you have an old pair in the junk drawer? No. Closet shelf? No. Dresser? No. The other shoulder bag! No. *sigh* As you’re stumbling around the house with blurred vision apologizing to your boss for the echo while your partner is reminding you that the flights need to be booked, know that there is a straightforward method to finding the thing you need. The 3-step guide to finding that thing. Step 1: Give up. It’s lost. Just admit it. Even if you live in a 600-square-foot house and have rearranged the furniture twice looking for it, it is gone — vanished through a wormhole to another part of the multiverse. Take solace in the realization that somewhere there is an alternate version of yourself who is holding that thing, muttering “Where did this come from? I don’t remember having this,” just like you did last week. It’s not personal. It’s just how the laws of nature and physics work. Step 2: Order a replacement. It used to be a lot harder when we lived as hunters and were forced to chip our replacement obsidian arrowheads after searching for hours in the bush by the spot where we missed the capybara. At least there were some nice berries there as a consolation prize as our mates and children watched us with hungry eyes as we made a few more shafts. And I’d like to think there was some consolation in knowing that millennia later some anthropologist would get a byline in NatGeo after finding the one you lost. Now, replacing those things you lost is as easy as a click away — even if you don’t have next-day delivery, there’s usually a one-week trial you can use. Or get past the free-shipping threshold by ordering two of whatever it is you lost — that way you’re sure to have a spare in another place you will forget within an hour of carefully placing it there. You must make sure to order it online — don’t go out and buy it in person. Step 3: Lose something else. This is the tricky part because you can’t fake it. Pretending to look for something else in order to warp the space-time continuum into revealing the thing you actually need almost never works. The universe knows. But if you actually put yourself in a situation where there is another thing (let’s call it Thing 2) that you need, remember seeing recently, but cannot locate in the first, second, or third places you think to look …then you can start looking for this new lost object, again checking through all the same places, bags, cushions, pets, vehicles, plants, light fixtures, and top-shelf kitchen cupboards. You won’t find it — that’s not going to happen. But along the way, you will find the first thing that you needed but couldn’t find. It will be in a spot you are pretty sure you looked before as if it spontaneously appeared from some alternate dimension — and indeed, some suggest that is exactly what happened. It will also be in a spot that you remember putting it, your past self placing it carefully because, at the time, it made sense. It’s not your past self’s fault; that ally put it there specifically so that it would be safe, ready for when you needed it. They were wrong. But now you can go back online and cancel that replacement you ordered (well, you would be able to if you had a better functioning working memory. That’s ok — when it arrives, you get the opportunity to forget to return it). Reflect on how fortunate you are to live in this miraculous age! You can’t un-chip obsidian. What about finding Thing 2? The beauty of this process, like all natural cycles like the seasons and parthenogenesis is that it can be repeated ad infinitum with Thing 3, Thing 4, and so on. Yesterday I found Thing 45,673 — an old set of Apple AirPods. It was next to the little chest of drawers in my closet. I didn’t need it any more — I use BeatsPro now — but it’s nice to know I have it. I also didn’t find the mic stand extender that I was actually looking for when I found the AirPods. That’s ok; I’ll need a USB cord soon, ...
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    26 分
  • Five Things You're Guaranteed to Get at the ADHD Open Space

    Five Things You're Guaranteed to Get at the ADHD Open Space
    2023/12/16
    Transcript: Welcome to the ADHD Open Space Podcast. My name is Gray Miller, and I will be your host and facilitator as we explore ideas, workarounds, accommodations, and other aspects of being a professional adult with ADHD. Most of this will come from my perspective as a cis white male in his mid-fifties living in the Midwest who found out a year ago that I've been living with ADHD my entire life. I am not an expert on ADHD, except maybe in not knowing I have had it for half a century and somehow still getting by. But I promise to cite my sources or at least admit when I'm repeating something I read on the interwebs. If I say anything you don't agree with, you're welcome to call me on it and let me know. This podcast is also part of the lead up into the first ADHD Open Space happening in Madison, Wisconsin, on January 20th, 2024. You can learn more about that event both here in the show, and at the website, ADHDopen.space. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to the ADHD Open Space Podcast. This is the first podcast after National Podcast Post Month, which was November. And we succeeded in our goal of posting 30 different episodes about open space events and ADHD, different things about that, including a couple of interviews. Did I make all the interviews I wanted? Nope. Did I talk about all the stuff I wanted to talk about? Nope. Uh, but I did succeed in the goal of getting 30 posts up, which I think gives a pretty good body of knowledge. And I wanted to give it a, myself a little rest after that, uh, month long, you know, high pressure, have to get these things out kind of thing. And I also wanted to see if there was still interest and believe it or not, I'm still getting signups, even though I haven't really done much on the ADHD OS sub stack or podcast. That tells me that there are still people interested and so we are gonna continue I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I'm gonna make a schedule We're going to aim right now for every two weeks. If I do it more than that, then I hope you'll forgive me. And if I do it less than that, well, then that's probably a sign that I need to take things down a little bit. But in the meantime, I'm also happy to say this is the first podcast that I'm recording using a non-Adobe product. I have cut my ties with Adobe and I am going for some pay once and then use it forever kind of thing rather than software as a service. And we'll see how that works. If you notice any difference in the audio quality, please let me know. While I do have, I have a pinned on the site, the reasons why an open space is the just custom made for ADHD brains. I had a friend who he was we were talking about the fact that there's not been a whole lot of signups yet at the ADHD Open Space at the time of this recording. That again, the invites are mainly for people who kind of have trouble planning ahead. So we're still five weeks away. Of course, we're not going to have all the signups. Anyway, but he said, well, have you have you put it out there to, you know, the people who are more familiar with open space events? And I was like, who? I mean, if there if there's, if you look at two groups of people, and you have people that are familiar with open space events and how they work, and you have people who are familiar with or experiencing ADHD, the latter group is a lot bigger. But it also highlights why I need to Make sure that you understand when I talk about Open Space what you're being invited to. And one of the questions I get from people is like, well, okay, an Open Space event is an event where people show up and they put sessions on the board about things that are important to them at that moment. or, you know, things that have been important to them, but things that they really want to talk about during that day, which means we don't have a slate of certified, vetted speakers with lots of initials after their names. And if we don't have that, how can we actually be sure that what we're getting has any value to it? Now, I can go a whole lot of things about pedagogy, and I may actually ...
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    37 分
  • ADHD in Relationships: Interview with my partner, Natasha

    ADHD in Relationships: Interview with my partner, Natasha
    2023/11/12

    This was a hard one to post, because my partner is loving and honest and so there are parts of this interview that my brain tells me will make you hate me.

    But authenticity is important, as is trust, and I trust both her and you, my listeners. So here it is in unedited glory.
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    34 分
  • How My ADHD Brain Created a Nightmare of Social Anxiety

    How My ADHD Brain Created a Nightmare of Social Anxiety
    2023/11/12
    After my diagnosis, even my dreams make more sense. Sort of. Note: all people mentioned in this article are fictitious constructs of my subconscious brain. Even the one who is real. Since my relatively recent diagnosis, I’ve been immersing myself in research, anecdotes, podcasts, videos, and social media related to adult ADHD. It’s been quite the revelatory experience, as my perspective of the last fifty or so years of my life changes with this new lens turned on myself. Last night all that knowledge finally seeped into my subconscious and I had what I suspect will only be the first of many ADHD dreams. Or nightmare, really. This is not fiction or allegory. This is exactly the experience that played out in my dream, no elaboration, just description. See if you can pick out which particular ADHD symptoms my brain explores as we visit Morpheus’ demesne… It started with me traveling. I got off a train to Chicago, dressed casually in jeans and a button-down shirt. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived later than expected, and that I’d missed some connection and was going to have to find someplace to crash that night. Not a lot of stress, because I have many friends in Chicago with whom I’ve crashed in the past. But definitely some why didn’t you plan this better? angst going on. I decided to go into a convenient dream-coffeeshop and figure out what to do next. Then I met this woman. She was young, smart, friendly, and she introduced herself from the other table in the cafe and struck up a mildly flirty conversation. When I was younger this might have led to me asking her out in an ethically non-monogamous way, but in the dream it seemed more like a friendly pity-flirt that’s more and more common as my hair goes gray. Still, we got along well, and ended up chatting and walking around the beautiful summer Chicago market my dream had created. Then I realized: my pants were on backwards. I didn’t know how I’d managed to do it, but the zipper was in back and the ass was in front and I laughed it off because haha, isn’t that funny while inwardly (ok, it’s a dream, I guess it’s all inwardly) I felt a rush of embarrassment. How long have I been walking around in public with my pants on backwards? Luckily, we were near my ex’s apartment. My ex-girlfriend is the only real person with a role in this dream. She does not actually live in Chicago. No idea why my brain chose her (out of an embarrassingly large number of choices) but with that particular logic that dreams have I knew that we were near her apartment, and that she was out of town, and even though I’ve not spoken to her in years she wouldn’t mind if I stepped in briefly and fixed my pants. The young woman and I went into the walk-up, still talking all friendly-like. I turned my pants around, but then something weird happened. I know, I know: “Then it got weird?” But up until this point, this was simply a very vivid but also completely plausible dream. Until the suspenders* showed up. As I’d put on my jeans, I noticed on the floor a pair of suspenders that obviously belonged to me — they had a kind of yellow-and-purple pattern on them. What was weird was that I didn’t remember wearing suspenders. Have I been wearing suspenders this whole day? I thought I was wearing a belt. I shrugged and put them on, with my new friend helping me attach them in the back. That’s when my ex opened the door. Apparently she hadn’t been as out-of-town as my subconscious had led me to believe. She and her husband (she does have an actual husband, but this one was fictional because I’ve never met him. My brain made him up.) came in the door and were, to put it mildly, a bit surprised to see me standing there with half-fastened suspenders next to a young woman. I put on the cheeriest smile I could. “Hi!” I said. “You’re home! Hopefully it’s ok, I had to stop in and fix a quick wardrobe malfunction.” I remember chuckling in my dream, feeling incredibly embarrassed. My ex, though, has always been gracious, and she just kind of shook her head (”Oh, that’s so like Gray” her expression seemed to say) as she and her husband took of their coats. Then things got worse. I realized I was wearing her shorts** Looking down, instead of wearing my jeans, I realized I’d put on a pair of jean shorts that must have belonged to her. Suddenly I noticed, draped over the chair next to me, my jeans — complete with the belt I thought I’d imagined. I looked more closely at the suspenders, and realized that the purple designs on them were not what I thought. “Huh,” I said, embarrassed even more. “Looks like I accidentally put on your shorts and suspenders***.” I tried to think of something more, but the awkwardness was huge. “Oops…” Did I mention my ex has always been gracious? She just shook her head again, glanced at her husband (quite a handsome man, incidentally, very Cary-Grantesque) and said ...
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    11 分