There’s a moment—maybe you know it—when something brilliant, or useful, or just plain needed pops into your mind… and then drifts off before you can catch it.
It’s not gone because you weren’t trying. It’s not gone because you weren’t paying attention. It’s just—gone. Like sand through an hourglass with a few too many holes. You reach out, hands wide open, desperate to hold on—but all you feel is the echo of something that might have been.
Living with an ADHD brain sometimes means accepting that your best ideas often show up when your hands are full, the pen is across the room, and your brain is already three tangents deep.
It’s maddening. There’s grief in it, honestly. The kind of grief that doesn’t get much airtime. Because how do you explain mourning a thought you never got to fully meet?
But here’s what I’m learning—slowly, messily, on the days when I can catch myself instead of the thought:
The thoughts come back. Not always the same, not always as sharp, but often with more color or softness or weird insight than before.
And maybe the point isn’t to trap every idea like a bug in a jar. Maybe the point is to notice them.
To make space.
To keep the jar open, and trust that some of that stardust will land again when you’re ready.
This isn’t a tidy metaphor. It’s a lived experience. And if your hourglass leaks, like mine does, know this: you’re not broken. You’re just holding time differently.
And that counts too.
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