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Aug 26, 2022Liked by Jesse Meadows

Super interesting! I definitely do feel like I experience time ~differently~ than is expected by hegemonic capitalist american culture, but I also know I'm not alone in that. This made me think of / reminds me of CPT (colored people's time) and "island time" and other cultural terms for different ways of temporality and experiencing clocktime. Would be super interesting to explore more! I'm white so I don't have much more to add than this haha but I do find it fascinating and it seems connected to me.

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Aug 22, 2022Liked by Jesse Meadows

Thank you for this article and all of your work explaining research on complicated studies. It’s amazing and I really appreciate it!

I find the idea that ADHDers are time blind, or struggle with time as a cultural group really interesting. Ive been diagnosed with ADHD and have struggled with time in the pass, but I never connected the two as related together. I don’t struggle with time anymore, mostly cuz I have better organizational skills, and I’ve never really felt like “time-blind” was something innate to me or my personality. I’ve also never really felt like my relation to time made me feel different and othered. It’s really interesting to see how and why people pathologize themselves, and how people determine what kinds of suffering are innate to themselves.

For example, I feel like I suffer because of ADHD, but not in a temporal way. Others feel like they suffer because of ADHD, and that suffering is temporal. I’m intrigued about how ADHD suffering can encompass so many things. I also don’t really have problems with executive function (another time related thing) but I do have extreme problems with focus. I have mini blackouts several times per minute. They don’t really keep me from doing tasks but they’re disorienting and upsetting. That’s another way that attention suffering can vary across individuals. Some people can be good at capitalist things and still have neurodivergent behaviors/problems/ways of thinking.

I wonder, if we stop labeling temporal suffering as innately connected to ADHD, could we separate our notions of time from attention, and break down all the ways people struggle with each? I’d really like to have conversations about attention suffering that doesn’t get into the bio-essentialist trap of trying to fit everything into either a neurotypical box or a neurodivergent box. I feel like there are more than two psyches.

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Catching up with posts this morning, and I am so glad I listened/read this today (btw, thank you so much for transcripts as I struggle with auditory processing without a visual element to accompany it)! I appreciated the excerpt on neurobiology--so much about the way people are pathologized is not reflective of how interconnected and complex the reality is (reminds me of gene theories of mental illness and isolating single genes as “causes”). I also have a very strong innate sense of rhythm (I am a cellist and can keep near perfect metronomic time even when the metronome is turned off after initial sets-point), so that piece really shifted my thinking about my struggles with how I experience time. Also caused me to pause and wonder if this could be connected to why moving my body rhythmically can improve my attention (since attention, memory, and temporal perception seem to be so connected)?

When temporal suffering is not a result of disordered perception, it does really shift the focus and make the whole problem feel different. It is always surprising to me that, regardless of how I may intellectualize and determine pathology to be inaccurate or harmful, the emotional impact of being told I am disordered can linger. Looking forward to diving into part 2!

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Thank you for making a recording to listen to! I often don’t get around to reading things but I can listen while I do other tasks.

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