The Unreliable Narrator: Why You Can’t Always Trust Your Own Account
You'd swear you already sent that email. You can picture writing it, picture hitting send. Then you go look, and it's sitting there unread.
You weren't lying. Your memory just never got flagged as wrong. It felt exactly like every other accurate memory you've ever had.
📖 A Literary Idea, Borrowed
In 1961, critic Wayne Booth coined the term unreliable narrator, a storyteller whose account the reader can't fully trust. Most unreliable narrators aren't liars. They believe what they're telling you. The gap is between what they report and what actually happened, and the reader's job is to notice where those two things stop matching.
It turns out that's a useful lens for ADHD, too. Several researchers, working independently of each other, have landed on the same conclusion: people with ADHD are not reliable witnesses to their own behavior. Not because of dishonesty. Because of how the information gets stored in the first place.
🌫️ Where the Story Bends
A few things quietly distort the account:
Working memory. A thought that isn't captured immediately can vanish like vapor. If it resurfaces later, it's often incidental and rarely useful.
Time blindness. How long something actually took doesn't get hard-coded. Ask the same person to recall the same task twice, and the estimate can shift both times.
Mood. A good mood surfaces the wins and downplays the rest. A low mood can block out the wins almost entirely, leaving only what went wrong. Research also shows negative feedback tends to stick about three times more easily than positive.
One study looked at ADHD adults' actual driving records against their own self-ratings. Objectively, more collisions, more citations, fewer safe driving behaviors. Self-reported: about average. Not dishonesty. A genuine gap between the record and the story.
🪞 What Actually Helps
None of this means self-awareness is pointless. It means it needs backup.
Ask people around you what they observe. This one's genuinely harder with RSD in the mix, and it's not a call to chase feedback constantly. But occasionally asking someone what they see, and being willing to sit with an answer that isn't glowing, builds a clearer picture over time than going it alone.
Capture in the moment. A quick voice memo, a one-tap log, a note the second something happens, beats trying to reconstruct your day from memory at 4pm. You don't have to do it forever. A few days is enough to learn something.
Use what's already being tracked. Calendar history, sent mail, screen time, step counts. None of it required you to notice anything. It was just there the whole time.
🔍 See, Don't Grade
One more thing worth holding onto: a log is supposed to help you see your own pattern, not grade you on it. If checking in on your week starts making you feel worse instead of clearer, that's a sign it's being used the wrong way. Reset, and go back to just noticing.
You're not a bad witness because something's wrong with you. You're working with a brain that stores the story a little differently. That's exactly why outside information, other people, captured moments, ambient data, matters as much as it does.
Thank you for your time and attention.
