Everything Everywhere All at Once: Thoughts on how ADHD ‘disrupts the fabric of time’
How it feels to live perpetually in the now
It never ceases to amaze me how profoundly subjective time is. How it flows and bends differently in each of our minds.
Your mental calendar might map the year into a distinct shape – whether it’s spiralling, linear, circular or something else entirely – that would seem alien to me. Time might stretch luxuriously for me during a moment of wonder, while for you it might collapse into an excitable blur.
Then there are those who seem to be innate timekeepers – do they have built-in, hyper-accurate stopwatches hidden somewhere? They’re inexplicably able to pinpoint the exact moment we’re in, to the fraction of a second.
For others, like me, time often feels more like a river, carrying us along its currents with little regard for clocks or calendars.
I often think of the differences with which we imagine time as constellations – each person’s unique arrangement of past experiences, mental health, and neurodivergences – forming the stars that guide their perception of reality and, therefore, time. For me, the brightest star in that constellation is ADHD.
Yet it wasn’t until I began exploring ADHD more deeply that I understood how central time is to the condition.
Sure, it’s easy to dismiss ADHD as "poor time management." But this is reductive and obscures the complexity of the lived experience. Dr. Russell Barkley, a renowned expert on ADHD, frames it with far more gravity: “One of the most devastating deficits [of ADHD] is a disruption in the fabric of time.”
Let that sink in. Time, the very scaffolding of our reality, can be disrupted.
Barkley argues that ADHD is, at its essence, a kind of time blindness. Or, more accurately, he likens it to near-sightedness: just as a person with myopia struggles to see distant objects, those with ADHD struggle to perceive and plan for the future. "You will get pulled along by the now," he explains.
At first glance, this might sound quite dreamy – a forced kind of mindfulness. But for those with ADHD, it’s anything but. To live perpetually in the now is to be ruled by urgency. Everything feels immediate, pressing, overwhelmingly real, while the future remains a faint, almost imaginary concept.
This near-sightedness to time likely explains the difficulty in forming habits, the impulsivity, the last-minute chaos.
But why does this happen? Scientists point to several possible reasons. The prefrontal cortex – the brain’s executive control centre – plays a major role in time perception. When it’s impaired, as it often is in ADHD, this could explain why our ability to plan, prioritise, and manage time often falters.
Another theory implicates dopamine, the brain's reward chemical. Dopamine not only regulates motivation but also time perception. Reduced dopamine levels, common in ADHD, may distort the brain’s internal clock, making it tricky to gauge how much time has passed or how much is needed to complete a task.
This mismatch can manifest in all kinds of ways: struggling to estimate how long something will take, losing track of time mid-task, or looking back and wondering where the hours went.
But as much as I believe those of us with ADHD – or any other condition for that matter – ought to read about others’ experiences, understand “the science” and find ways to cope, I also know it’s easy to over-intellectualise. To try to think my way out of a problem.
But that often doesn’t work when the tool I’m using to think – my brain – is the very thing I want to distance myself from and analyse. It’s an impossible sort of self-contortion.
Recently, I have simply accepted that, for me, time moves differently. Finding it fascinating rather than frightening. And something that has helped is rewatching Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film that, I imagine, resonates deeply with anyone who has ADHD.
The movie’s vibrant chaos, its simultaneous celebration and grief, its sense that all things are happening at once – all feel like an apt metaphor for the ADHD experience.
It’s no surprise, then, that one of its creators, Daniel Kwan, confirmed it’s about the ADHD experience. In an interview with Salon, he shared that he was diagnosed with ADHD during the making of the film.
When I first watched it, I connected with its themes but didn’t engage deeply. At the time, I’d had my ADHD diagnosis for a few years but was trying to suppress it, resentful of the label.
Watching it now, I see it with fresh eyes. I feel comforted by its representation of space and time.
Because living with ADHD is to experience time as both expansive and constricted, a paradoxical relationship that demands constant navigation.
For me, it means reckoning with the present’s pull, learning to tether myself to a future I can’t always see clearly, and, most importantly of all, forgiving myself for the times I fail.
I often return to this line from Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths:
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
For someone with little grasp of time, this reminds me that I can, sometimes, master it – or at least that I am inseparably connected to it. Time is not something to conquer, nor something to fear. Or at least, that’s always been my interpretation of Borges’ words.
Tell me in the comments, have you ever noticed your own distinct relationship with time – whether it’s been shaped by neurodivergence or not? Perhaps you’ve found it bending in moments of joy or vanishing altogether in the flow of creativity.
Join me in finding time – and how we think about it – deeply fascinating. Because like the stars and their constellations, time is both universal and uniquely ours to interpret.