The scent of stolen snacks had become the unofficial fragrance of our small house, and Lilo’s exasperated complaints, a familiar refrain. My dog, Horse, a lovable but food-obsessed rescue, was a constant challenge, but one I was committed to. My roommate, Lilo, however, seemed incapable of remembering our agreement to keep food out of his reach. My frustrated outburst – telling her it was her fault he ate her meal – had been the culmination of a year of repetitive training setbacks and ignored boundaries. While I accepted my responsibility as his owner, I also felt like I was battling a losing war against Lilo’s absentmindedness.
I had apologized to Lilo, as promised in my edit, and we’d agreed on a new strategy: Horse would stay in my room when I wasn’t home. The tension in the house eased, but a small, lingering question remained in the back of my mind about why Lilo, despite our many conversations, consistently forgot. It wasn’t malice, I knew, but it was perplexing.
A few weeks later, the new system was working well. Horse was safe, and Lilo’s snacks were uneaten. One evening, Lilo and I were sitting on the couch, chatting and scrolling through our phones. She suddenly frowned, her thumb hovering over her screen. “Oh, my god,” she muttered, “I just saw an article about this, and it totally explains so much.”
“Explains what?” I asked, curious.
She turned the phone to me. The headline read: “The Hidden Impact of Adult ADHD: More Than Just Distraction.”
“I’ve been reading up on ADHD lately,” she explained, “because my younger brother just got diagnosed. And… a lot of these symptoms sound scarily familiar.” She pointed to a bullet point on the screen: “Executive Function Challenges: Difficulty with organization, planning, memory, and impulse control.”
“See this?” she said, tapping the screen. “Constant forgetfulness, losing things, struggling with routine tasks, being easily distracted when focusing on something else… it’s all here. And the part about ‘object permanence’ issues for things that aren’t actively in their line of sight or current focus’… that’s exactly what happens with my food.”
My jaw dropped. “Object permanence?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, her eyes wide. “Like, if I’m making food, and then I get a text or remember I need to do something in another room, the food just… vanishes from my active thought. It’s not that I’m intentionally trying to set Horse up for failure, or that I don’t care about our agreement. It’s like, out of sight, out of mind, in a really intense way. I literally forget it’s there, even if it’s right in front of me, if my focus shifts.”
She scrolled further down. “And the ‘hyperfocus’ on new interests, the difficulty with sustained attention on mundane tasks… it explains why I’m so good at work, but so bad at remembering where I left my keys. And why I can get so absorbed in playing with Horse that I forget he exists outside of that moment of interaction, let alone that there’s food on the counter.”
Suddenly, a year of frustration, of feeling like my efforts were sabotaged by her seemingly willful forgetfulness, evaporated. It wasn’t laziness, or disrespect, or a lack of care. It was a neurological difference, a genuine struggle with executive functions that made the simple act of putting away food a far greater challenge than I could have ever imagined. My initial judgment, my “it’s your fault” outburst, now felt incredibly harsh, born from a complete lack of understanding of the invisible battle she was likely fighting every single day.