During my senior year in high school, I was at a crossroads, trying to decide if I wanted to go into a career in psychology, or keep going at the physics and astronomy that I loved so much. Obviously now, over 20 years later, my choice is apparent. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still think about that road less traveled by. In some ways, knowing what I know now about myself, how my brain works, it’s not all that surprising to me that I wanted to know as many things as I could about the mind.

Because knowing meant understanding how my particular brain ticked, and that understanding has often meant finding adaptations when I feel like I’m trying to stick my square peg into a round hole. So I present to you yet another analogy of a brain, this time, looking at our minds like they’re computers.

In the simplest terms, computers have hard drives for long-term storage, RAM to store data that we want at our fingertips, and a CPU that pulls the parcels of information that we need right now. RAM does its part to try to gather up the relevant things to the task at hand, the one the CPU is working on. Let’s say you have 20 emails you are going to need to reply to. Neurotypical brains are going to load those 20 emails into your RAM so that your CPU can get to work on them. Some folks are blessed with a generous amount of RAM, or working memory, so they can store even more relevant details in their mind for tasks at hand.

And then there are people like me. My RAM couldn’t power a TI-89 calculator, and you know what? That’s pretty common amongst people with ADHD. It means that storing relevant details to a task is not a thing we can easily do. Those 20 emails? Yeah I have space for maybe one of those and the rest are out of sight and out of mind, hidden away somewhere in the hard drive. This lack of working memory can make certain types of tasks exhausting, because I’m going to be depending on my CPU to be pulling data from the hard drive to do the task where most neurotypical people have much more readily accessible RAM. So the next time you’re interfacing with someone and they don’t seem to be able to remember left from right, ask yourself if you’re being fair, or if they’re burning CPU cycles trying to keep things straight.

Now that downside does come with a silver lining. Have you ever heard people describe those of us with ADHD as being ultra-creative? Well, that’s an adaptation that comes with our lousy RAM. Our CPU often has to go into our long term memory to grab things it needs for tasks, which means that we can often make far-fetched connections between disconnected things. It’s a remarkable upside, because it opens me up to new ideas and innovations that might be harder to make if your working memory was larger, and quite honestly, I really appreciate the creative part of me that stems from my ADHD. A powerful CPU compensates for dismal RAM, even at the cost of energy.

I’m not a psychologist. I’m an astronomer, but I want to tell my neurospicy colleagues out there that if you have trouble responding to emails, or scheduling the 381 meetings you need to do, or find every detailed edit you need to make to update your talk, stop beating yourself up. You’re not lazy, you’re built different. Not all computers have the same amount of RAM, and not all brains have the same amount of working memory, and that is not your fault. It’s probably the price you pay for your creativity, and at least for me, that price has been worth paying.