The Broken Clock of Friendship: ADHD, Time, and the Myth of Neglect

Nov 7, 2025

I bumped into an old friend recently. Someone I hadn’t seen or heard from in almost a decade. We locked eyes, laughed immediately, and picked up like no time had passed. Stories, jokes, mutual chaos—it all just clicked. Then, somewhere between the second beer and the third “remember when,” he said, “Man, I can’t believe it’s been nine years.”

And I just blinked at him.
Nine?
In my head, it felt like two…months. At most.

This is one of the strange, quiet heartbreaks of living with ADHD. Time passes differently. Emotionally, it’s like having a broken clock in your pocket that only ticks when you’re actively thinking about it. If someone isn’t right in front of you, your brain just… puts them in a kind of emotional stasis. The connection feels frozen in time, unaffected by the days or months or even years that tick by in the real world.

You still care. You just don’t realize how much time has passed since you showed it.

Living in the ADHD Time Warp

People with ADHD don’t experience time the way others do. There’s a thing called time blindness—a real cognitive quirk where everything is either now or not now. There’s no smooth flow of “last week, then this week, then next week.” It’s more like, “Oh crap, that was three months ago?” or “Wait, wasn’t that yesterday?” when it was actually last year.

This hits friendships hard.

Because while life is flying by in a blur of projects, ideas, half-finished to-do lists, and fifteen browser tabs open at once, you don’t feel like you’ve drifted from someone. You just haven’t had the mental ping that reminds you to reach out. The emotional connection stays warm in your head, even though it’s gone stone cold on their end.

And that disconnect? It’s devastating when it finally surfaces.

You think you’re fine. You assume they’re fine. Then you get a message, or worse—you don’t—and realize they’ve taken your silence as a message: “I don’t care.”

But that’s never what it is.

When Your Mechanics Are Just… Broken

I saw this tweet once that said, “One of the hardest things about ADHD is how it can wreck your relationships because you don’t have friendship degradation mechanics like everyone else.”

That’s the line that hit me like a brick.

Because it’s exactly that. Most people’s relationships erode over time if you don’t maintain them. Little check-ins, birthday messages, the occasional meme drop or coffee hangout—these are like friendship upkeep rituals. But if you’ve got ADHD, your internal system is often completely missing that reminder.

You might genuinely feel the same level of closeness with someone after five years of silence. You could call them tomorrow and expect to be laughing about inside jokes from 2013.

But they might not be there anymore.
Because to them, the silence meant something.

That gap wasn’t neutral—it was painful.

The Magic of Neurodivergent Friendships

The upside? A lot of my friends are creatives. Neurodivergent. Messy-brained geniuses. And guess what? Their friendship mechanics are busted too. In the best way.

We can go months—sometimes years—without talking. Then one of us sends a dumb video at 2:14 a.m. and suddenly we’re planning a short film, launching a weird side project, or just brain storming in DMs like nothing ever changed.

There’s no guilt. No keeping score.
Just an unspoken agreement: “Life is chaos. We’re still good.”

Those friendships are pure gold. They don’t run on calendars or social etiquette. They run on shared weirdness and mutual understanding. You don’t have to explain why you vanished. They already know.

That’s rare. And if you have it—protect it like a fragile hard drive full of your favorite memories.

But What About Everyone Else?

Not all friendships can survive like that, though.

There are people in my life who need more from a relationship—consistency, predictability, evidence that they matter. And I respect that. But trying to meet those needs with an ADHD brain can feel like trying to bake a cake with missing ingredients and a kitchen timer that only goes off when you're in the shower.

You forget to check in. You mean to reply and forget. You do reply in your head but not in the actual text box. You delay sending a message until you “have time to say something useful,” then suddenly it's been six months and you feel too embarrassed to even try.

Then one day, you realize they’ve stopped trying too.

And that’s the grief. The slow, quiet loss of people who didn’t know you were fighting to remember something your brain didn’t flag as urgent.

It’s not their fault.
But it’s not really yours either.

Bridging the Gap (Even When It's Hard)

So what do you do? Honestly, some friendships can’t be saved. Some people will take your silence personally, no matter how you explain it. And yeah, that sucks.

But sometimes, being straightforward helps. Not an excuse. Just, “Hey—my brain doesn’t track time properly. I vanish sometimes. It’s not personal.”

You’re not asking for forgiveness or giving some TED Talk about your neurology. You’re just giving people the manual. If they get it, cool. If not—well, not everyone will.

And yeah, if you want to keep certain connections alive, you might need to put in some manual effort—calendar nudges, check-in reminders, whatever works. Not because you're trying to be someone you’re not, but because some people are worth that workaround. Even if your brain doesn’t serve it up naturally.

It won’t fix everything. But it can at least keep you from looking like a ghost who forgot how phones work.

You’re not broken. Your mechanics are just... different. Just don’t act like those differences don’t affect other people. That part’s on you.

In the End

Friendship with ADHD is strange. It’s like owning an old truck that runs perfectly as long as you remember to kick the dashboard twice and jiggle the keys. You know it works. You just need to remind others that it does work, even if it doesn’t look like everyone else’s.

Some people will never get it. Some will drift. But some—your people—will love you exactly as you are: spacey, loyal, chaotic, consistent in your inconsistency.

And those people?
They’re worth the extra effort. Even if you forget sometimes.

And if you’re reading this and I haven’t chatted to you in forever—ping me… lol.

More From This ADHD Circus Tent

If this story made you nod, laugh, or aggressively point at your screen like “yes, that’s me”—you might like a few of these other brain-scrambled adventures from the creative trenches. Same flavor, same chaos, maybe even a duck metaphor or two.

Three Brains, One House
Stop Finishing My Sentences (Even If You're Right)