Forgetfulness Is a Feature, Not a Bug

I have never studied for anything. I think I am incapable of doing so. If I don’t learn something from a teacher or instructor, I ain’t learning it. I’ve never read a textbook – I’ve skimmed them, but if I can’t pick something up from skimming, it’s never making it into my brain.

This isn’t to say that I can’t internalize things I read. I guess I just can’t internalize things I read if I’m not interested in them, so I perhaps I just was never all that interested in most things I learned at school. But that doesn’t really paint the entire picture… in most math and science classes, you learn a whole bunch of ‘how’ and ‘what’ without ever learning ‘why’.

Allow me to provide an example…

"A derivative is the rate of change of a quantity with respect to a change in a variable; the result of differentiation."

😐 WTF does that even mean? (In order to come up with this example, I had to Google ‘calculus stuff’, like I legit couldn’t remember even one thing about calculus to create an example to use. I’ve retained exactly zero of the things I learned in calculus (well, ‘learned’ is a stretch, but attempts were made). AND I GOT A MINOR IN MATH! (I shit you not 🤣.)

But wait, it gets even better… I got the definition above from an article I found titled What is a Derivative? Derivatives Definition and Meaning (Photomath). Then I found this gem in the article,

“We can talk about the “why” of derivatives until we’re blue in the face, but now it’s time to focus on the “how” and take a look at what derivatives will look like on the page.”

AND THEN I went through the entire article (well, I skimmed it and did a Cmd+F (that’s Ctrl+F for you PC losers)) and they never get to even one ‘why’… so you could talk about it until you’re blue in the face, but why bother? That’s crazy talk, apparently.

It would seem that since I found this definition on a website designed to teach people math, nothing has changed in how it’s taught since I was in school back in the 1900’s 😱, which was a problem for me because my brain shuts down until I understand the ‘why’. Without that, my brain doesn’t think it’s worth learning… or rather my brain doesn’t think it’s worth remembering.

Despite my inability to learn most things math or science related, I went to a magnet high school for science and technology. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but I am amazeballs at standardized tests… well except the English bit of the SATs – I would only skim those long-ass, boring reading-comprehension snippets and then just wing it on the questions. Thank god it was multiple choice. Write-in answers would have destroyed me. (Still, I got a 580 on the English part, which is above average, but likely not reflective of my English skills. I got a minor in English too and that one is legit. You'd never know this from reading my blog, but believe me when I say that I know how to write properly. I just chose not to. )

Given the fact that I did manage to get into a magnet HS for science and tech AND the fact that I got a degree in Aerospace, I suppose you could say that I may have an aptitude for learning math and science-y things. I just don’t have the ability to retain them. Back in high school, after I immediately grokked some concept in DiffEq (which I always thought was ‘diffy-q’ because despite the fact that I am objectively smart, sometimes I am a complete dumbass), my high school best friend Estella said to me, “You know, you are the smartest person I know, but you have no recall whatsoever.” And then by the next class, I had forgotten the concept, proving her theory… or at least the bit about me having no recall whatsoever. And now, 30(ish) years later, I remember that conversation vividly, but I couldn’t tell you what concept it was that I grokked (nor explain what DiffEq actually is).

That memory stuck with me for some reason, but I didn’t know why until I got much much older.

I got through high school and college with a straight C- (that's C minus) average in math and science, thinking I was the dumbest person on the face of the planet (well… maybe not on the face of the planet, but perhaps the dumbest person amongst people who are supposed to be smart). I was an imposter syndrome prodigy, it seems.

But then I busted out into the real world and realized that the world is full of idiots wayyyy dumber than I was – some exponentially so. And I found that if I had to learn something for work, then it was pretty easy to pick up, because for most jobs you need to learn why you’re doing something before you get to do it.

And then I got my first job in software. If there was any subject I was worse at than math, it was computer science, so the irony here is rich, but again I never learned the ‘why’ in those classes either. Here’s an excerpt from Pascal Absolute Beginners. (Yes, I learned Pascal in high school. I’m old AF.)

“Why to use Pascal?

Pascal allows the programmers to define complex structured data types and build dynamic and recursive data structures, such as lists, trees and graphs. Pascal offers features like records, enumerations, subranges, dynamically allocated variables with associated pointers and sets.

Pascal allows nested procedure definitions to any level of depth.

This truly provides a great programming environment for learning programming as a systematic discipline based on the fundamental concepts.”

Ok… I’m not sure that’s an adequate answer to ‘why’. It goes on to explain some ‘amazing implementations of Pascal’ such as Skype, but why is it so great for Skype? I couldn’t tell you, even knowing what I know today about Pascal and what Skype does (did? Did Microsoft end-of-life Skype yet or is it the new IE?).

Regardless, once I got into software, suddenly everything I learned about if-then statements came flooding back because I now realized ‘why’ they were important for building rules and workflows in my product. I also taught myself SQL because I knew the data I needed to query and why it was stored the way it was stored, so then it was a matter of learning the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, and half a day later, I was building inner and outer joins like nobody’s business.

Suddenly I realized that perhaps I wasn’t bad at math and science. I was just bad at school.

Once I got my first software job, my career started trucking along. I could power through a detailed requirements doc due on Friday (that would take a colleague weeks to complete) by starting Thursday morning and working until 3AM Friday. While all my coworkers were killing themselves working 80-hour weeks, I’d be working maybe one 18- hour day every few months, but otherwise barely working 40-hour weeks.

When I moved into leadership and strategy, the work changed, but my work-behaviors didn’t. I was a professional procrastinator, but I always got my work done on time, and I did my best work during last-minute hyper-focused cramming sessions. Whenever I’d try to work on something 1 hour here and 2 hours there over several days or weeks, the result was nothing short of craptastic.

And so, I continued to excel in my career and move up the food-chain until I found myself as a 40-something software executive and suddenly I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t deliver anything on time. I couldn’t prioritize. I started dropping balls because I forgot they existed. This then led to crippling insecurity, which led to depression, which led to me questioning whether everything I had ever accomplished in life was just a fluke. I had gotten to the point where I decided I needed to quit my job to take a timeout and go spend a few weeks in a cabin in the woods to try and re-find myself (no; not like the Unabomber… you know what I mean).

I’m not sure what triggered the thought – it was probably some social media ad, but I started researching ADHD. It seemed like I had all of the symptoms, but when I read that you didn’t just ‘develop’ ADHD in adulthood – it’s something that develops during childhood, I thought maybe my symptoms were something else. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably saying, “OF COURSE YOU HAVE ADHD – YOU’VE HAD IT YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, YOU DUMBASS!” But none of the things I’ve written about here had occurred to me yet.

And then I found some articles about why girls with ADHD were often never diagnosed. The biggest thing is the ‘H’ part in boys is what usually prompts the diagnoses, because it makes them act like fucking banshees (that’s a scientific term that you can quote me on). However, in girls, they internalize things. Their brains may be all about the ‘H’, but their body isn’t acting out. On top of that, girls learn to compensate by becoming perfectionists and overworking themselves. And for highly intelligent girls, they learn how to just ‘get by’ while the adults around them shake their heads thinking that this failure to live up to their expectations is just laziness, when it’s the exact opposite.

Undiagnosed women with ADHD often use the skills they’ve developed as girls to function, and sometimes even excel, which is what I did. So why did things stop working? Well, apparently hormonal changes from perimenopause exacerbate ADHD symptoms. All of the coping skills I had developed over a lifetime were no match for the estrogen-suck that is perimenopause. Apparently, my sudden inability to cope was a feature of being a perimenopausal woman and not a bug, but the feature sucks and somebody needs to put in a ticket to end-of-life that shit.

Regardless, now that I’m happily medicated with the same drugs they give 11-year-old boys, all is right with the world again. Part of me wonders what could have been if I was diagnosed when I was a kid. Perhaps I would have gone all Good Will Hunting on the world and become a mathematical genius 🤣😂😅.  But seriously, I actually feel like I’m where I need to be – perhaps I could have gotten here a bit sooner, but perhaps not because I realized something recently as my ADHD brain meandered through a Claude chat at 3AM. This chat started out with me posting several articles about Claude to Claude and asking it what it thought (don’t ask me why I was doing this; I have no idea). There was something in one article describing a group of Claude engineers as - a little “spectrum-y”, which got me thinking that perhaps the reason Claude and I work so well together is because its spectrum-y creators mesh with my ADHD brain.

Then the conversation meandered around and popped in and out of a bunch of rabbit holes, including why my brain is filled with the lyrics to every musical ever made before 1970, yet I can never remember where I put my keys. (Also, when I said my favorite musical of all time was West Side Story, Claude agreed that it was a solid choice.)

Eventually this led to me thinking back on the history of my ADHD and whether my ability to hyperfocus makes up for my lack of recall. But then I realized that it’s not so much that I lack the ability to remember shit. It’s that I lack the ability to retain shit I randomly learn without understanding why I should care.

Forgetfulness happens when I don’t value something enough to remember it.

So let's go back to my math minor for a second. This isn't all that impressive when you know that my major's required math classes got you to within 4 credits of a math minor (the equivalent of one semester class plus 1 additional credit), so virtually everyone with my major got the minor, and almost everyone with my major took statistics to get that minor. Statistics is actually the one math class that I got an A in... because you learn what the fuck it's used for while you are learning it (crazy concept, eh?). We actually had to read the book "How To Lie With Statistics" which was a great learning tool for someone like me, but also dangerous because it teaches a certain type of person (not me of course) how to gaslight people.

Statistics was also the one math class where I broke the curve (finally feeling like the 'Asian whiz kid' I was supposed to be, at least for a millisecond). Statistics was a mandatory class for Aviation Business Administration and Aviation Science (pilots) degrees. (You're probably thinking, 'Pilots???? Where is that a degree?'' I went to Embry-Riddle; Google that and it'll make sense.) So I took statistics with a bunch of business majors and pilots - two degrees that don't attract a wealth of math savants - but I still couldn't understand why they all seemed to have such a hard time with the class, when it was literally the first math class that made any sense to me. Anyway, let's say I didn't make any new friends in that class. I wanted to tell everyone that statistics was a fluke for me and that I was usually just as math-stupid as they were. (Secretly though, I really thought they were all idiots because I thought if my dumb ass could grok it, anyone who couldn't had to be a complete moron.)

For that last credit to get my math minor, I worked with a PhD student and a professor who were trying to calculate the resonance frequencies of the Tacoma Narrows bridge. They made cool models of the bridge and destroyed them in a wind tunnel. Unfortunately, I didn't get to have any part in the bridge building bit, nor the destroying bit. My job was to take the calculations they had come up with that were currently in Fortran and convert them to Mathcad. This sounds way more impressive than it was. I *knew* Fortran, in that I had taken the class and barely passed. I knew of Mathcad, but really had no idea what it was for. So I managed to figure out enough to attempt to convert the Fortran to Mathcad. Even though I never really understood why they wanted to do this, I DID understand what the calculations themselves were trying to do because I understood the reasons for them; I just didn't understand why getting them into Mathcad was so important. If I had Google back then it would have really helped because I just now googled 'Mathcad' and now it actually makes sense... Anyhoo, at the end of it all I realized that it wasn't possible to convert their Fortran program to Mathcad. It's possible it just wasn't possible for *me* to do it, but they looked at my work, seemed to agree and gave me an A for doing fuck all to help them. So I guess technically statistics wasn't the only math class I got an A in.

(For those who don't know about the Tacoma Narrows bridge, it's actually very cool - take some time to watch this video. It explains it better than I ever could.)