Justice for voice memos (OBSESSED #13)

My community (brave ADHD soldiers) has been silent long enough.

The iPhone voice memo has done for the attention-deficit what hearing aids did for the hearing-impaired. Any questions?

Voice memos are the only thing allowing the ADHD community (the most oppressed group on the planet, only second to the gluten-intolerant) to maintain secure relationships. In all our relationships — platonic, romantic, familial — texting is assumed to be the baseline mode of communication for all information, regardless of its seriousness. And it’s the ableist assumption that texting is easy that puts my community, with our unexplainable shin bruises and pizza sauce stains, in a position to fail.

To those with predictably functional brains, texting is appealing because messages can be sent whenever, and the receiver can respond to that message whenever. But to a brave, gorgeous member of the ADHD community, this is a doomed endeavor. 

Speaking for myself (translation: speaking for everybody), if I’m given a task for which there is no deadline, I cannot complete that task. Why? Why, because there are two thousand things in my field of vision I could be distracted by, at any given moment. Right now, I see a pillow, which is reminding me to wash my pillowcases. I also see a dresser that needs to be dusted, a pen that could be fiddled between my fingers, a sidewalk right outside my window that’s begging to be explored. Since responding to a text doesn’t have a firm deadline, asking somebody with ADHD to respond to a text message is an immensely overwhelming ask, much like asking somebody who isn’t straight and weird to co-host your Von Dutch party. 

Enter: voice memos, which allows my slay-DHD hotties to fire off a response before they even have time to get distracted by other stimuli.  

Unfortunately, I don’t feel fully accepted in my non-ADHD communities when I send voice memos. My friends, all of them ignorant to their privilege, say I “ramble” and “meander” and that “they don’t have time to listen to a four-and-a-half-minute-long voice memos about nothing.” Well, friends, I’ll say this now — when you insult my voice memos, you insult me. You erase my experience as someone who has suffered more profoundly than anybody else on the planet. You fail to see everything I ignored to send that memo — the bird outside my window, the dirty coffee cup I should probably take to the sink right now, the chipped paint on the wall that, if I kept removing, might reveal a hideous concrete wall that I could use as a backdrop for fake hostage videos. You fail to see me struggling to survive in a world that was built to support you, and destroy me.

So, the next time you receive a voice memo, check your privilege. Thank you friend for their invisible labor. And if the memo’s less than 20 minutes, consider yourself lucky.

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