I’ve been looking for my other set of summer bedclothes for weeks.
Weeks!
I have been washing the one set and putting them back on the bed. I usually switch for a little variety. But, I could not find the second set. The purple set. Bright purple.
At some point in the summer, I changed the way I stored my clothes. They used to be in clear plastic boxes stacked on top of each other. The bedclothes were also in one of the boxes.
I got rid of a lot of clothes and rearranged the way I stored them. I was only using the plastic bins for a few things that I didn’t need very often–the winter bedclothes, my sweaters, winter pajamas, etc–and I had stacked those bins in a closet.
The rest of the clothes, in-season clothes and everyday clothes, went into another piece of furniture. All the plastic bins were now gone from my bedroom floor.
A week after this, I was changing the bedclothes and couldn’t find the other summer set. Ah, well. I was probably just behind with the laundry.
The next week, still no purple set of bedclothes. I looked around. I looked in the closet in the stack of bins. I looked in other places. I could not find them.
It’s been weeks.
Weeks!
Today, I was gathering up my clothes to be washed. I wash them every week on the same day that I change the bedclothes. (It’s an ADHD thing. Routines are important.) I had to move the little table that was standing in the middle of room. It held a small table fan that I had been using during the heat wave. I hadn’t wanted to put the fan on my bedside table because it was too close to the bed, so I pulled another little table over from another part of the room to set the fan on.
As I bent over the table to move it, so that I could better reach my dirty laundry bag, I realized that the table was not, in fact, a table at all. It was a plastic bin.
A clear plastic bin.
With a set of purple bedclothes sitting in it. In full view.
In the middle of the floor of my bedroom.
It had been there for weeks.
Weeks!
One of the things ADHD does is give you an ability to think outside the box. You’ll often use one thing to do another thing. As I had used the plastic bin as a temporary table for the fan.
One of the other things ADHD does is give you the ability to see things without truly seeing them. As soon as I used the plastic bin as a table, it became a table in my mind. I no longer saw it as a plastic bin. I stepped over and around that thing a dozen times while searching for it. Those purple bedclothes were visible in the middle of my bedroom and I never saw them. Only when I bent over this morning, to push the bin out of my way, did I register what it actually was.
The heat wave is over, so it’s time to put the fan in the corner until next year. It’s time for the plastic bin to return to plastic bin status. It’s time for me to start day drinking.