Life with ADHD provides endless opportunities for self-inquiry and self-discovery. Every day I find new things that make me wonder about myself and how my brain works. For example:

What is this semi-desiccated half of a lemon doing on my kitchen counter at 11 in the morning, when the last time I used lemon for anything was while making salad dressing at dinner last night? Nothing else from the dinner-making process is still on the counter. Why did this half of a lemon, in particular, get left out? It’s not even the squeezed half. I could have put this in a container, stashed it in the fridge, and gotten another salad’s worth of dressing out of it. If there were any part of this lemon that it might make SENSE to have left on the counter, surely it would be the squeezed half. But, no. I wasted a perfectly good half of a lemon by inexplicably deciding to not put it away last night.

The really funny part is, I made breakfast this morning right next to this lemon half. I made my husband’s lunch right next to the lemon half. I stood at the counter taking my vitamins and the lemon half didn’t register. I went back to the counter an hour later to make a cup of coffee, which involves standing around waiting for the kettle to boil, which is certifiably the most boring thing ever and I had plenty of time to become aware of my surroundings in that two minutes that I stared off into space probably thinking about bears doing an interpretive dance to Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’, or some shit…and I DID NOT NOTICE THAT LEMON. The lemon did not reenter my realm of consciousness until just now when I went to the kitchen again for a handful of crackers. And why did getting some crackers trigger the realization that the lemon existed, you might ask? Good question! I have no fucking idea. The crackers were nowhere near the lemon. I could have just as easily gotten a handful of crackers and wandered right back to my desk again without ever clocking the lemon. But for some reason, some scientific mystery that will forever be unsolved because who the fuck would ever want to look that deeply into the percolating pile of rot that is my brain, 11:00 AM was apparently Counter Lemons Exist Again time.

Oh my god.

What if we really ARE all just brains in jars lined up on a shelf somewhere, and whatever entity that’s keeping the collection decided that my brain-in-a-jar needed some freshening up so it dropped a lemon into the jar? Maybe the lemon is meant to be enrichment for my enclosure. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if something as benign as half a random lemon could make a brain short-circuit and self-destruct.

I need to make some calls…

…OR DO I?