There is a text on your phone you have not answered since March.
Thinking of you! How's the new job?
You read it in a parking lot and meant to answer that night. By April the answer needed a sentence about April. By July it needed a paragraph. Now it is almost October, and the reply you owe her has grown into an essay you are too embarrassed to write, so you write nothing, and every week the essay gets longer.
If you were diagnosed late, you probably have more than one of these. A friend from college. A coworker you liked. The neighbor who moved. You love them. You think about them in the shower. And you have concluded, somewhere along the way, that you are simply bad at friendship.
What opened the silence
In Soft Where It Counts I break the cancelling and the not-answering into three mechanics, and the first one explains most of that text in March.
Friends drop out of the planning queue when they are not in front of you. It feels like forgetting someone you love, which is why it hurts so much, but the book puts it plainly: "love and working memory are different brain functions and ADHD affects one and not the other." Her text arrived, you felt a real flash of warmth, and then the day moved on and took the reply with it.
The other two mechanics make it worse. A catch-up after a gap costs more energy than a quick reply would have. And some friendships ask you to seem more punctual and more responsive than your brain allows, which makes every message to them a small performance.
What keeps it open
The first week, it is working memory. By the fifth month, it is something else.
The line I keep coming back to is from Was It Always This?: "ADHD opened the silence. Shame keeps the silence open." The longer the gap, the more the reply seems to need a defense, and the more it needs a defense, the less possible it feels to send anything at all. So the silence ends up being about its own length.
If some of the grief you feel about your diagnosis is really about the people who drifted, that is part of the same grief, and it is allowed to take up room.
What she will probably feel
Here is the part the shame gets wrong.
A research team led by Peggy Liu ran a series of experiments, more than 5,900 participants in total, on what happens when someone reaches out to a person they have not been in touch with. Some people sent a short note, some a note with a small gift. The people reaching out underestimated how much the message would be appreciated.
And the gap got bigger in two situations. When the message was more of a surprise. And when the tie between the two people had gone weak.
That is the five-months-later text, exactly. It is a surprise, and the tie feels thin from your side. Those are the conditions under which you are most likely to guess wrong about how it will land. (An independent team has since repeated the main finding. The effect came out smaller and still held.)
She is far more likely to be glad.
What to send
Short. That is the whole rule.
Was It Always This? gives the opening in five words: I have missed you wildly. You can send those five words by themselves.
If you want one more line, the book's re-entry script gives you the shape of it. Something like: I have been thinking about you a lot. I let our friendship drift this year and I want to name that. If she is someone who would want to know, you can add that you have an ADHD diagnosis now and a lot more language for what was happening.
What you leave out is the defense. No account of each month. No apology that runs three paragraphs, because a long apology hands her a job: now she has to reassure you. Let her be relieved.
Before you send it, one question from the book is worth a minute: would you want this friendship back if you had known about the ADHD from the start? If the answer is yes, it is worth one text. If the answer is honestly no, you are allowed to let that ending stand.
And for the friends you still have, the book's soft-disclosure lines are worth sending before the next silence starts: Hey. I love you and I think about you often, and I am a slow texter. And: I always come back.
One thing to try this week
Pick one person. Only one.
Write the text in under a minute, on your phone, where you are right now. Five words, or five words and one line. Read it once. Send it before you reread it a second time, because the second read is where the defense starts creeping back in.
Then put the phone down and do not wait by it. She might be a slow texter too.
Maren